English Historical Review Vol. CXXXII No. 556
© Oxford University Press 2017. All rights reserved.
Advance Access publication June 14, 2017
doi:10.1093/ehr/cex137
Review Article
The Many Lives of Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher. Edited by Tim Bale (Routledge: London, 2015;
4 vols., pp. 1,624. £900).
From the moment she stormed the Tory leadership in 1975, books
and articles on Margaret Thatcher have gushed like a torrent from the
printing press. The discerning Thatcher scholar can now choose from
more than thirty biographies, several hundred books and articles, a movie
adaptation, and numerous dramas and documentaries. The literature
on ‘Thatcher’s Britain’ is rich, sophisticated and methodologically
diverse, drawing not just on history and political science but on cultural
theory, cognitive psychology, geography, media studies, criminology,
the natural sciences and queer theory. It is an irony of history that,
more than a quarter of a century after she left office, Thatcher studies
stands as one of Britain’s last remaining heavy industries.
Keeping abreast of all this would tax even Thatcher’s legendary
stamina; yet such was the task confronting Tim Bale in assembling this
outstanding new collection. Aside from the editor’s general introduction,
the four volumes (part of a series offering Critical Evaluations of Key
Political Leaders) contain no writing that is new. Instead, they bring
together some of the best work of the last forty years, ranging from the
pages of Marxism Today to the writings of Margaret Thatcher herself. The
breadth of coverage is remarkable, and a tribute to Bale’s grasp of multiple
disciplines. With contributions by Marxists, feminists, Thatcherites,
‘Wets’, post-colonialists, hagiographers and haters, the volumes range
across topics as diverse as privatisation, terrorism, media relations,
immigration, foreign affairs and Thatcher’s unlikely appropriation as
a gay icon. The selection, Bale cheerfully acknowledges, is consciously
‘eclectic’, directed at ‘readers in a whole host of academic disciplines and
none at all’ (I. 1). Aside from Thatcher herself, no single author features
more than once, and no book or collection contributes more than one
chapter. The result is a boxed set of scholarly greatest hits (Now That’s
What I Call Thatcher ?), pairing stadium anthems by Andrew Gamble,
Stuart Hall and Shirley Robin Letwin with equally rewarding new ‘finds’.
The publication of these volumes offers both a challenge and an
opportunity. The challenge is to look ahead; to ask whether Thatcher
studies have reached critical mass, or whether scholars, like the prime
minister herself, should ‘go on and on’ until forcibly removed by their
colleagues. The opportunity is to revisit the existing literature and to
reflect on what we have learned. It would be impossible, in a single
EHR, cxxxii. 556 (June 2017)
639
article, to do justice to the full range of scholarship in these volumes, or
to the equally voluminous material beyond them. Instead, this review
follows Bale in taking the person of Margaret Thatcher as its organising
principle. The first part explores the many different ways in which
‘Thatcher’ has been understood, as someone who was simultaneously a
private individual, a media construction and a cultural representation.
Each of these was influenced by understandings of gender, a category
which is itself at once personal, cultural and representational. This forms
the subject of a second section, which reviews treatments of Thatcher
as a woman and her difficult relationship with the Women’s Liberation
Movement. The final pages explore the relationship between ‘Thatcher’
and ‘Thatcherism’, before suggesting some areas for future research.
T H E M A N Y L I V E S O F M A RG A R E T T H ATC H E R
I
The political scientist Jim Bulpitt commented in 1986 that ‘Most
interpretations of the Thatcher governments are partisan’ (I. 125).1 Even
today, most scholars of the Thatcher era lived through that turbulent
period, and some were closely engaged in its controversies. Two of the
finest writers in these volumes, Stuart Hall and Andrew Gamble, were
contributors to Marxism Today, while early biographers included her
speechwriter Patrick Cosgrave and the journalist Hugo Young. In this
respect, commentary on the Thatcher era is as much an artefact as an
analysis of its times, reproducing some of the controversies it narrates.
As a self-proclaimed scourge of consensus, Thatcher might
have enjoyed the chaotic interpretations of her reign. There is little
agreement in these volumes on the content of her politics, the character
of her mind or even the party to which she rightly belonged. Her friend
and confidant, Woodrow Wyatt, insisted that Thatcher was ‘not a
Conservative’ but a ‘radical making a revolution’, a verdict endorsed
by Peter Hennessy. Milton Friedman, the theorist of ‘monetarism’, and
Ian Gilmour, whom Thatcher sacked from the Cabinet, both thought
her ‘a nineteenth-century liberal’, though Friedman meant this as a
compliment and Gilmour did not (II. 84–85, 301).2 By contrast, Shirley
Robin Letwin, who was close to Thatcher philosophically, stressed
Thatcher’s ‘profound’ divergence from ‘laissez-faire liberalism’, locating
her Toryism in the fact that she was not ‘millennial or revolutionary’.
For Letwin, one of the distinctive features of Thatcher’s politics was
its ‘post-imperial modernity’ and ‘absence of nostalgia for empire’ (III.
1. J. Bulpitt, ‘The Discipline of the New Democracy: Mrs Thatcher’s Domestic Statecraft’,
Political Studies, xxxiv (1986), pp. 19–39. Footnotes give original publication details on first
citation; references in the text are to the Bale volumes.
2. I. Gilmour, Dancing with Dogma: Britain under Thatcherism (London, 1992); P. Hennessy,
The Prime Minister: The Office and its Holders since 1945 (London, 2000).
EHR, cxxxii. 556 (June 2017)
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640
87, 90); yet another writer in these volumes calls her ‘an instinctive
imperialist’, who gave ‘a fillip to racial violence’ (I. 121).3
Nor is there much agreement on her intellect. Her campaign
manager, Airey Neave, praised her as ‘a philosopher’ and not just ‘as
a politician’ (IV. 54), whereas Brian Harrison thought that Thatcher
‘had neither aptitude nor inclination for abstract argument’ (II. 224).
A study of her ‘cognitive style’, by Stephen Benedict Dyson, scores
her ‘significantly lower in complexity’ than the average world leader
or British prime minister (I. 305). As for her eponymous ‘ism’, Letwin
insisted that ‘Thatcherism cannot be an ideology’, because it offered no
‘theory’ of politics (III. 82); yet Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite concludes
that Thatcherism was an ‘“ideology” in the sense used by Michael
Freeden’, who defined ideologies as ‘flexible intellectual frameworks
that aggregate and prioritise a number of political concepts’ (IV. 151–2).4
Even Thatcher’s aesthetic qualities draw differing opinions. Edward du
Cann, the chairman of the 1922 Committee, thought Thatcher ‘strikingly
attractive’ and ‘a goer’ (IV. 50), whereas the playwright Jonathan Miller found
her ‘repulsive in almost every way’ (II. 214). A more measured judgement
was reached by the poet and diarist Adrian Mole, who noted that Thatcher
had ‘eyes like a psychotic killer, but a voice like a gentle person’.5
If it can seem, at times, as if they are writing about different people,
that may be because they were. As Tim Bale puts it, Thatcher was
simultaneously ‘a politician’, ‘a living, breathing person’ and ‘a cultural
phenomenon’ (I. 2). She was also a media construction (the ‘Maggie’
of the tabloid press) and ‘the prime minister’: a composite, official
personality of which civil servants, speechwriters and advisors also formed
part. These were not merely different facets of a single individual; the
‘Thatcher’ who won millions of votes at elections, who gave her name to
an ideology, who was burned in effigy and who governed for eleven years
each had its own historical reality, which shaped political behaviour and
voter responses. Tracing the many lives of Margaret Thatcher—and the
connections between them—can feel like climbing the staircases in an
Escher sketch. As these volumes make clear, unravelling the Thatcher
phenomenon is an exercise not just in biography or political history but
in cultural analysis, reception studies and group psychology.
Biography has had a particular allure for Thatcher scholars,
generating outstanding studies by John Campbell, Charles Moore and
3. S.R. Letwin, The Anatomy of Thatcherism (London, 1992); J. Bourne, ‘“May We Bring
Harmony”? Thatcher’s Legacy on “Race”’, Race and Class, lv (2013), pp. 87–91.
4. P. Routledge, Public Servant, Secret Agent: The Elusive Life and Violent Death of Airey
Neave (London, 2003); B. Harrison, ‘Mrs Thatcher and the Intellectuals’, Twentieth Century
British History, v (1994), pp. 206–45; S.B. Dyson, ‘Cognitive Style and Foreign Policy: Margaret
Thatcher’s Black-and-White Thinking’, International Political Science Review, xxx (2009),
pp. 33–48; F. Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, ‘Neo-Liberalism and Morality in the Making of Thatcherite
Social Policy’, Historical Journal, lv (2012), pp. 497–520.
5. Sue Townsend, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ (London, 2002), p. 239 (12
Feb. 1982).
EHR, cxxxii. 556 (June 2017)
641
Hugo Young. Yet, despite her magnetic appeal for the genre, Thatcher
is by no means a straightforward subject. In the words of her official
biographer, Charles Moore, Thatcher ‘did not think autobiographically’.
She was not self-reflective by instinct, and had neither the aptitude nor
the temperament for introspection. Unlike Gladstone or Macmillan,
she viewed her diary strictly as a list of engagements; not as a private
confessional or a hotline to posterity. She cheerfully threw away old
letters and files, and only after she became leader in 1975 did the
Conservative Party begin archiving her correspondence. Even her
memoirs were written partly by others, for Thatcher ‘hardly ever sat
down to reflect upon the past’.6
Yet Thatcher understood the power of storytelling. She described
herself as ‘a teacher’, whose task was to re-educate the public in the
principles of morality and political economy; and to this end she
deployed her past as a political morality tale (III. 173).7 ‘Thatcherism’
was to be understood, not as a set of doctrines or ideological principles,
but as the lessons of an ‘ordinary’ life: ‘the things that I learned in a
small town, in a very modest home’. In this sense, her politics were
intensely autobiographical, recasting her experiences as a set of potent
political parables. In Thatcher’s telling, it was in Grantham, growing
up above her father’s grocer’s shop, that she had learned the virtues of
thrift, hard work and self-reliance. It was here, too, that she gained ‘a
sympathetic insight’ into the workings of the free market:
T H E M A N Y L I V E S O F M A RG A R E T T H ATC H E R
Whereas for my … political contemporaries it was the alleged failure of
that system in the Great Depression that convinced them that something
better had to be found, for me the reality of business in our shop and the
bustling centre of Grantham demonstrated the opposite. … what I learned
in Grantham ensured that abstract criticisms I would hear of capitalism
came up against the reality of my own experience: I was thus inoculated
against the conventional economic wisdom of post-war Britain (II. 122).8
In this passage, as so often in Thatcher’s rhetoric, false readings of
the past (the ‘alleged failure’ of the 1930s) are contrasted with what
she twice calls ‘the reality’ of her life in Grantham. This tendency to
universalise from her own experience was characteristic; she spoke
persistently of ‘our people’—‘the sort of people I grew up with’—
and was convinced throughout her career ‘that in some strange way
I was instinctively speaking and feeling in harmony with the great
majority of the population’ (I. 189).9 It was partly for this reason that
the word ‘Thatcherism’ took root, for it grounded the policies of her
6. C. Moore, Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, I: Not For Turning (London,
2013), pp. xi–xii.
7. R. Millar, A View from the Wings: West End, West Coast, Westminster (London, 1993).
8. E.H.H. Green, ‘Thatcherism: An Historical Perspective’, Transactions of the Royal Historical
Society, ix (1999), pp. 17–42.
9. P. Clarke, ‘The Rise and Fall of Thatcherism’, Historical Research, lxxii (1999), pp. 301–22.
EHR, cxxxii. 556 (June 2017)
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governments in the character and experiences of a single individual.
From this perspective, as E.H.H. Green noted, Thatcher’s politics were
fundamentally historical, rooting her prescriptions for the present in a
‘historical interpretation’ of her past (II. 122).
What Spitting Image called ‘The Grantham Anthem’ became the
soundtrack to Thatcher’s premiership, prompting complaints that
Britain was being ruled from beyond the grave by Alderman Roberts.
Yet as John Campbell, Peter Clarke and E.H.H. Green have shown,
the Grantham myth was precisely that. This is not to say that it
was false; simply that it was edited, selected and imprinted with
meanings that served her political purposes. As Peter Clarke notes, the
Grantham of Thatcher’s imagination was ‘a construct’, ‘a sepia-tinted
community’ embodying ‘the sober virtues of thrift, hard work, pride
and independence’ (I. 187). It served not only to de-class her, but to
package a controversial ideological project in comfortably domestic
terms. It also recast Britain’s most successful career woman in socially
conservative fashion, as the dutiful daughter who stood on the steps of
Number 10 and told the world that ‘I just owe almost everything to my
father’.10 As Moore puts it, the ‘small-town stories and paternal precepts’
that comprised the Grantham myth were not untrue, but they were
deployed ‘to advance her cause, not in any spirit of autobiographical
inquiry’.11
The Grantham Anthem did not, however, spring unbidden from the
prime minister’s lips. As Douglas Ponton demonstrates, it evolved in
response to questioning by journalists, who needed a ‘story’ by which to
make sense of her to their readers. The questions they chose to ask were,
in turn, shaped by cultural assumptions about gender and a patriarchal
understanding of women’s politics. As Ponton shows, the press does
not simply ‘mediate the identities of public figures’. Rather, it plays ‘an
active role in creating those identities’, establishing a web of questions
and suppositions to which the interviewee must respond. Thatcher
was by no means a passive figure in this process: she could choose to
play along with her questioners, to ignore them or to challenge them.
Yet the public identity that emerged was ‘not simply determined by
Mrs Thatcher herself ’. The Thatcher that readers encountered in their
newspapers was ‘a joint product’, a ‘social, institutional construct …
which emerges, by degrees, during discursive interaction’ (III. 332–4).12
Media relations were at the core of Thatcher’s premiership. Under
the watchful eyebrows of her devoted press secretary, Bernard Ingham,
‘media management … acquired a centrality to policy-making’
10. ‘Remarks on Becoming Prime Minister’, 4 May 1979, available at http://margaretthatcher.
org/document/104078 [all weblinks accessed 21 May 2014].
11. Moore, Not for Turning, p. xi.
12. D.M. Ponton, ‘The Female Political Leader: A Study of Gender Identity in the Case of
Margaret Thatcher’, Journal of Language and Politics, ix (2010), pp. 195–218.
EHR, cxxxii. 556 (June 2017)
643
that no previous prime minister could match. The fiction of a onewoman government was assiduously cultivated, with Thatcher herself
marketed as a political brand (II. 303–304). What Peter Clarke called
‘the Maggification of British politics’ (I. 185) was beautifully captured
by Douglas Hurd, recalling the headlines he encountered on his way
home from Whitehall:
T H E M A N Y L I V E S O F M A RG A R E T T H ATC H E R
I constantly saw on the poster of the Evening Standard … ‘Maggie Acts!’
on something. Often in those cases she wasn’t even aware of the situation.
But the whole ethos of No. 10 was that it had to be ‘Maggie Acts!’ and
everybody, from Bernard on, everybody had to keep up with that. (II. 303)
Thatcher herself slipped in and out of character. On the one hand, she
personalised the achievements of her government to an extraordinary
degree. Her memoirs are littered with what Sir Humphrey Appleby
called ‘the perpendicular pronoun’: Gorbachev was discovered
because ‘I was talent-spotting in the Soviet leadership’; during the
EEC budget negotiations, ‘I not only managed to secure a durable
financial settlement of Britain’s Community budget imbalance …
but also launched the drive for a real Common Market’ (I. 316, II.
306). Yet Thatcher also liked to project herself as a critic of her own
administration, who acted as ‘a lone opponent of the processes and
attitudes of government’ (I. 196).
Both claims had some validity, for ‘the prime minister’ was a
corporate entity that was not coterminous with Mrs Thatcher. Things
were said, done and written in her name of which ‘the Lady’ was wholly
unaware; and as the influence of key advisors increased, it could be
hard ‘to establish where Mrs Thatcher ended and Charles Powell began’
(II. 286). Even her sayings—what she called her ‘Thatcherisms’—were
the work of many hands. Some (‘where there is discord…’, ‘the lady’s
not for turning’) were the work of Ronnie Millar; others (‘we must
have a philosophy’) are probably apocryphal; while a third category
(‘as God once said, and I think rightly’) is certainly fictitious. Thatcher
was nobody’s mouthpiece: as all her speechwriters have testified, she
was involved in the production of her speeches to an exceptional
degree (III. 173–5). Nonetheless, the ‘Thatcher’ who stepped before the
floodlights of British politics was a corporate production. Thatcher was
its dynamic force, but those who dressed, styled, scripted and spun for
her were co-authors in its creation.
It is this that makes her memoirs such a problematic source (IV. 175–
233). The Downing Street Years and The Path to Power are written in
the first person, with Thatcher’s name on the flyleaf; yet both bear the
heavy tread of ghost-writers and researchers. In such a multi-vocal work,
as Peter Clarke observes, it can be difficult to know ‘what register’ to
identify ‘as her own voice’. We might even ask whether such a concept
is meaningful at all, for someone whose voice had been modulated for
EHR, cxxxii. 556 (June 2017)
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decades through the efforts of speechwriters and secretaries. Thatcher’s
memoirs, Clarke notes, were created ‘by methods similar to those
which produced most of her public utterances’. In that respect, they
are as much (and as little) the authentic ‘Thatcher’ as anything she
said in office (I. 184–5). The problem is one not of authenticity but
of expectation, seeking the private voice of an intrinsically public
institution.
Above the person and the prime minister loomed a cultural
representation that was more difficult for Thatcher to influence. No
politician of modern times made such an impact on the pop charts,
where her death was imagined with a frequency that rivalled Kenny
from South Park. Morrissey sang of ‘Margaret on the Guillotine’, Hefner
looked forward to ‘The Day that Thatcher dies’, and Elvis Costello
promised to stand on Thatcher’s grave and ‘Tramp the Dirt Down’.
Thatcher was hanged in effigy at gay rights parades, strike meetings and
paramilitary gatherings, while the novelist Hilary Mantel published a
volume in 2014 entitled The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. This
obsession with Thatcher’s death was the more striking, given how close
the IRA came to achieving it. In 1984 she narrowly escaped death in
an IRA bomb attack at Brighton, which left five people dead and 31
injured. The ‘sorrow of the Brighton bombing’, Morrissey declared, ‘is
that Thatcher escaped unscathed’.13
In an interview with Smash Hits in 1987, Thatcher seemed wounded
to learn that so many young people disliked her, complaining that
‘I’ve not met most of them’.14 Yet they had ‘met’ her, not only in the
newspapers but through comedy, satire and pop music. This cultural
phenomenon—or ‘meta-Maggie’—appeared in thinly disguised
fashion in Doctor Who (as the despotic chieftain of ‘The Happiness
Patrol’); The Lenny Henry Show (as the cyber-woman ‘Thatchos’); and
Comic Strip Presents (as a psychotic alien with a weaponised arm). Her
puppet loomed hypnotically over the satirical TV show Spitting Image,
and she even made a cameo in the 1981 James Bond movie, For Your
Eyes Only (II. 169–70).15
Thatcher lent herself to parody, not least because, for most voters,
she was already a character on television. It was during the Thatcher
era, Harmes writes, ‘that politics became more extensively televised’,
while Jean Seaton has identified the 1980s as the decade when ‘the
politics of appearances’ took full hold on British politics (II. 163, 288).
From her entry to Downing Street in 1979 to her tearful resignation
in 1990, Thatcher’s was a premiership played out on the TV screen.
13. D. Bret, Morrissey: Scandal and Passion (London, 2004), p. 111.
14. This unlikely cultural encounter was reprinted in The Guardian on 9 April 2013: https://
www.theguardian.com/music/2013/apr/09/margaret-thatcher-smash-hits-interview.
15. M.K. Harmes, ‘A Creature Not Quite of this World: Adaptations of Margaret Thatcher on
1980s British Television’, Journal of Popular Television, i (2013), pp. 53–68.
EHR, cxxxii. 556 (June 2017)
645
The destructive impact of Geoffrey Howe’s resignation speech owed
something to the fact that it was the first such crisis to be broadcast
live from the Commons, following the introduction of TV cameras in
1989. Nothing like this had ever been seen on British television; Peter
Hennessy called it ‘the most dramatic example of televisual politics’ of
his lifetime (II. 309–10).
Thatcher thrived in this environment, because she understood
the power of performance. For Dominic Janes, the ‘extraordinary
emotive power of Margaret Thatcher’ came from her status ‘not just
as a politician but as a “star”’; a ‘diva’, ‘born out of nineteenth-century
traditions of operatic spectacle and melodramatic theatricality’ (II. 343,
347).16 With her husky voice, tempestuous mood-swings and sexual
power over the men around her, Thatcher resembled not so much the
politicians of the post-war era as the leading ladies whose films she had
devoured as a teenager. Her theatrical instincts were encouraged by her
speech-writer, the playwright Ronnie Millar. Politics, thought Millar,
was ‘a form of theatre’, and he cast Thatcher as the femme fatale of the
British state. Thatcher, he acknowledged, ‘was not a natural orator’, but
‘like all true professionals’, she learned to ‘command’ her audience by
‘taking enormous pains’ with her art. At Millar’s instruction, she hired
a voice coach from the National Theatre and worked hard on timing
and rhythm (III. 168–9, 175).
It is tempting to view the media management, cultural representation
and mythologisation of the Thatcher era as a distortion: something that
conceals the ‘real’ Margaret Thatcher. Yet for millions of voters, who
never met her in person, it was precisely this cultural, political and
journalistic phenomenon that constituted the lived reality of ‘Thatcher’.
Like the Dark Knight, whose approach to law and order she might have
commended, Thatcher was not simply a private individual in a mask.
Her power and her importance came from the strange chemistry of her
own talents, the efforts of a close-knit support team and the dreams and
nightmares of her own political Gotham.
T H E M A N Y L I V E S O F M A RG A R E T T H ATC H E R
II
Nowhere is this blend of biography, media construction and cultural
appropriation more apposite than in the discussion of gender, the
subject of some of the best writing in these volumes. If Thatcher had
been a man—had it been ‘Martin’, not ‘Margaret’ Roberts who stepped
briskly from the womb in 1925—her life experiences would of course
have been different. She would almost certainly have done military
service, and would probably have fought in the Second World War.
16. D. Janes, ‘“One of Us”: The Queer Afterlife of Margaret Thatcher as a Gay Icon’,
International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, viii (2012), pp. 211–228.
EHR, cxxxii. 556 (June 2017)
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646
As a student, she could have debated with her contemporaries at the
Oxford Union, and she would have been spared the grisly attentions
of men whose hands wandered as freely as their attention spans.17 Yet
gender, self-evidently, is not a personal characteristic: it is a negotiation,
a production and a performance, framed within a wider set of cultural
expectations. Nor is it a discrete category, operating autonomously from
other forces; rather, it acts like a lens or a filter, colouring perceptions
of leadership, character and political morality. How Thatcher navigated
these pressures is a theme that runs through these volumes, with notable
contributions including Beatrix Campbell’s interrogation of Thatcher
and femininity, Marcus Harmes’s study of ‘the monstrous feminine’
and Douglas Ponton’s analysis of the media. In an extract from her
memoirs, Thatcher herself reflects on her experiences of marriage and
motherhood, while Dominic Janes explores Thatcher’s afterlife in queer
culture.
Thatcher disliked being pigeon-holed as a ‘female’ politician. When
invited to deliver the annual Conservative Political Centre lecture in
1968, she ignored suggestions that she speak on ‘women in politics’ and
instead delivered a wide-ranging address on ‘What’s wrong with politics’.
(Women, she noted dryly, had ‘been around since Eve’).18 At her first
press conference as leader, she dismissed suggestions that her election
was ‘a victory for women’, claiming it instead as ‘a victory for someone
in politics’; and when asked, on becoming prime minister, for some
thoughts on Mrs Pankhurst, she ignored the question and spoke instead
about her father (III. 348). Yet Thatcher’s public image, her relationship
with her colleagues and her hold on the popular imagination were all
explicitly gendered. Profiles acclaimed her ‘femininity’ and ‘sex appeal’;
interviewers struggled with the protocol of interrupting a lady; while
colleagues paid gushing tribute to her femininity. ‘I … admire you as
a Woman!’ wrote John Nott in 1983; ‘your instinctive approach to so
many issues, so very unmasculine, is the secret of your success’.19 Even
her nicknames were gendered. To admirers, she was ‘the Lady’, ‘the
blessed Margaret’ or (more disturbingly) ‘Mother’; to critics, she was
‘the Leaderene’, ‘That Bloody Woman’ or ‘She Who Must Be Obeyed’.
All this said less about Thatcher than about the cultural assumptions
of her time. Thatcher was a difficult figure to categorise, as she fitted
none of the conventional models of masculine leadership. She was
neither an officer nor a gentleman, and she did not look or sound like any
previous party leader. Stripped of their usual referents, commentators
deployed instead a gallery of feminine archetypes, ranging from the
bossy headmistress and the sultry temptress to the prudent housewife
17. See, for example, S. Williams, Climbing the Bookshelves (London, 2009), pp. 151–2.
18. Moore, Not for Turning, p. 192.
19. J. Nott, Here Today, Gone Tomorrow: Recollections of an Errant Politician (London, 2002),
pp. 319–20.
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647
and the dominatrix. As Marcus Harmes has shown, even the most
‘edgy’ and ‘alternative’ satire turned instinctively to ‘stereotypical visions
of gender’, confining Thatcher ‘to realms of behaviour and cultural
patterns that asserted her womanhood and femininity’ (II. 162, 171).
Models and reference points for female authority were as likely to be
found in popular culture as in the Palace of Westminster: whether the
bossy but good-hearted Margo Leadbetter, played by Penelope Keith in
The Good Life, or ‘the strong, sexually confident Servalan’ from Blake’s
7 (III. 340–41).
In private, Thatcher railed against the indignities of her sex. Searching
for a constituency in the 1950s, she ran up repeatedly against what she
called the ‘what a pity such a charming girl … such an unnatural life,
should have stayed at home’ mentality. Even at Finchley, which was
to become her seat for thirty-five years, she predicted that ‘the usual
prejudice against women will prevail’. On a visit to the United States in
1969, she insisted on being listed as ‘Mrs Margaret Thatcher’, not ‘Mrs
D. Thatcher’—‘although’, as a baffled official reported, ‘she is not a
widow’.20 ‘Women’, she told an event to mark the fiftieth anniversary of
equal suffrage, ‘are tired of being patronised and condescended to. We
are bored by being considered as a curious and endangered species’.21
In 1979, the year that Thatcher became prime minister, she was one
of just nineteen female MPs out of a total of 635. As a woman in an
overwhelmingly masculine environment, Thatcher had to fashion new
models of political leadership, a task she performed with remarkable
skill. As Harmes comments, Thatcher was ‘a politician who consistently
drew attention to her gender’ (II. 165). She enjoyed playing with the
gender expectations of her audiences, simultaneously confirming and
confounding feminine stereotypes. (‘I stand before you tonight in my
Red Star chiffon evening gown, my face softly made up and my fair hair
gently waved, the Iron Lady of the Western world’).22 Like an actress
inhabiting a variety of characters, she learned to use and exploit the
identities in which others cast her. As the occasion required, she could
be a flirt, a scold, a headmistress or a housewife; a statesman, a scientist
or a streetfighter; vulnerable in one breath and indomitable in another.
Her speechwriter, Ronnie Millar, encouraged her ‘to be as feminine as
possible’, and she took care to be photographed cooking the dinner,
washing dishes and fussing over her husband’s meals (III. 169).
In some respects, the masculine culture of Westminster played to
her strengths, for Thatcher rarely shone in female company. At her allfemale college in Oxford, she was remembered as ‘rather a brown girl’,
T H E M A N Y L I V E S O F M A RG A R E T T H ATC H E R
20. Moore, Not for Turning, pp. 79, 134, 192, 201.
21. Speech celebrating 50th anniversary of equal female suffrage, 3 July 1978, available at http://
margaretthatcher.org/document/103725.
22. Speech to Finchley Conservatives, 31 Jan. 1976, available at http://www.margaretthatcher.
org/document/102947.
EHR, cxxxii. 556 (June 2017)
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not just in dress but ‘somehow in personality’ (II. 186–7). When she
began looking for a constituency, it was the women on the selection
committees from whom she detected most hostility (IV. 228); and it
was no coincidence that her most uncomfortable moment on television
came at the hands of a female caller. In a legendary encounter on BBC
Nationwide, Thatcher found herself under fire from Mrs Diana Gould,
during a phone-in on the sinking of the Belgrano. As a scholarship
girl from the provinces, who went from grammar school to Cambridge
before working as a meteorological officer and teacher, Gould’s profile
closely matched Thatcher’s own. The discomfort Thatcher experienced
was partly because of confidential information that she was not able
to disclose; but it was also because her interview technique, honed
in encounters with somewhat courtly men who thought it rude to
interrupt a woman, simply bounced off the redoubtable Mrs Gould.
During their exchanges, Thatcher ran through her full repertoire of
stage voices: angry, breathy, Churchillian, pleading and volcanic, none
of which made the slightest impression.23
One of Thatcher’s most striking achievements was the co-option of
conservative models of femininity to justify an unprecedented public
role. She cast herself as Britain’s housewife-in-chief, conducting a
twenty-year adult education course on ‘what every woman knows’, and
framed her politics as those of a wife, mother and daughter. Delivering a
lecture in honour of Dame Margaret Ashby, a liberal suffragist who had
contested Neville Chamberlain’s seat in Birmingham, she angered some
in her audience by stressing women’s ‘special talents and experiences’
and their vocation to ‘bear children and create and run the home’.
Those, like Ashby, who enjoyed ‘the inestimable privilege of being
wives and mothers’ should neglect ‘no detail’ of their domestic lives.
For ‘when children are young, however busy we may be with practical
duties inside or outside the home, the most important thing of all is to
devote enough time and care to their problems’ (I. 149).
Thatcher never concealed her contempt for organised feminism,
mocking the ‘strident tones we hear from some Women’s Libbers’. The
‘battle for women’s rights’, she declared, had ‘largely been won’, adding
that ‘some of us were making it long before women’s lib was even thought
of’ (I. 150).24 She blamed feminism for the decline of chivalry in public life,
looking back wistfully to a time when even riots would stop in deference
to a woman’s presence (IV. 213). Feminists struck back by accusing her
of propagating a lie about the rights and opportunities available to
women. As Beatrix Campbell complained, Thatcher ‘presents herself
as an ordinary housewife and yet she never was an ordinary housewife’.
23. BBC1 Nationwide, 24 May 1983. The transcript is available at http://margaretthatcher.org/
document/105147, but for tone it is best to watch the recorded footage, which is widely accessible
on YouTube. For an obituary of Diana Gould, see Daily Telegraph, 8 Dec. 2011.
24. B. Campbell, The Iron Ladies: Why do Women Vote Tory? (London, 1987).
EHR, cxxxii. 556 (June 2017)
649
Thanks to Denis’s money, she could employ a nanny to look after the
twins and see to the business of household management (I. 151–2).
She sent in her forms for the Bar Exam just days after giving birth, and
had no intention of letting motherhood interfere with her political
ambitions. In an unusually reflective passage in her memoirs, Thatcher
acknowledged that ‘the very depth of the relief and happiness at having
brought Mark and Carol into the world made me uneasy’:
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Of course, to be a mother and a housewife is a vocation of a very high kind.
But I simply felt that it was not the whole of my vocation. I knew that I also
wanted a career. … Indeed, I needed a career because, quite simply, that was
the sort of person I was. And not just any career. I wanted one which would
keep me mentally active and prepare me for the political future for which
I believed I was well suited (IV. 219–221).25
Strikingly, Thatcher did not, on this occasion, generalise from her
own experience to that of other women. Her ‘need’ for a career was
represented as a character trait specific to ‘the sort of person I was’, and
she does not seem to have reflected on how it might have been satisfied
without her husband’s wealth. While acknowledging the importance of
Denis’s ‘income’ (she rarely commented on its size), she always credited
her success to her own hard work: ‘I had found it possible to be a
professional woman and a mother by organizing my time properly’
(IV. 228). In consequence, as Campbell puts it, ‘she rebelled in practice
though never in theory against the dominant ideology of her own
party’ (I. 152).
Thatcher’s understanding of her own experiences—as someone who
had reconciled, by her own efforts, her vocation as a mother with her
‘need’ for a career—strengthened her contempt for the idea that there
were structural and cultural obstacles confronting women that required
collective responses. She opposed tax allowances for child care, on the
principle that ‘working wives’ should not be ‘subsidized by the taxes
paid by couples where the woman looked after the children at home’
(IV. 220). For Thatcher, whether a woman worked or stayed at home
was a matter of personal choice; as Campbell icily noted, ‘exploitation
is not in her vocabulary’ (I. 150). She offered her own experience as
proof that it was possible to ‘combine being a good mother with being
an effective professional woman’, so long as one ‘organized everything
intelligently’ (IV. 219). This, for Campbell, was Thatcher’s central
crime: she had ‘offered feminine endorsement to patriarchal power’,
by embodying a comfortable lie about the opportunities for women
within the existing gender order (I. 157).
In consequence, feminist commentators quickly became disillusioned
with Britain’s first female prime minister. Some even questioned whether
25. M. Thatcher, The Path to Power (London, 1995).
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650
Thatcher was a woman at all. The novelist Hilary Mantel called her
‘a psychological transvestite’, who ‘imitated masculine qualities’ to an
extent that effectively de-sexed her.26 Spitting Image portrayed Thatcher
in a suit and tie, standing at the urinals in the gents’ toilet and sporting
a luxuriously hairy chest. Even Barbara Castle, cheering Thatcher on
during the leadership contest in 1975, thought that she was ‘clearly
the best man among them’.27 All this culminated in an extraordinary
outburst by the Labour MP and actress, Glenda Jackson, on Thatcher’s
death in 2013. Invoking the women who had run the home front during
the Second World War, Jackson claimed that ‘they would not have
recognised their definition of womanliness’ in the figure of the Iron
Lady. Thatcher, she conceded, may have been ‘the first prime minister
denoted by female gender’. ‘But a woman? Not on my terms’.28
For some commentators, there was ‘something queer’ in the way
that Thatcher moved ‘across gender identities, troubling the binaries of
sexual difference’. That status as ‘an expert “gender-bender”’ gave her an
unlikely afterlife as a gay pin-up (II. 338, 341). A woman who had been
hanged in effigy at gay pride marches, who had thundered at socialists
for teaching children ‘that they have an inalienable right to be gay’, and
whose governments had banned ‘the promotion of homosexuality’ as ‘a
pretended family relationship’ now took her place alongside Doris Day
in an exhibition of ‘Icons of the Gay Community’. The same sexual
ambiguity that was mocked by Spitting Image was reappropriated to
challenge binary norms about male and female sexuality. In this sense,
‘Thatcher’ had not only outlived her physical host; she was developing
new roles and identities that would have astonished her original.
III
Thatcherism is another phenomenon that has outlived its namesake,
and one that shows little sign of fading from contemporary politics.
The field was set early in Thatcher’s premiership in classic works by
Andrew Gamble, Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques, and has subsequently
drawn the attention of writers such as Peter Clarke, E.H.H. Green and
Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite. Yet for all the ink spilt on ‘Thatcherism’,
no one has ever been able to agree on what it was or who believed
in it. A quarter of a century after Thatcher’s resignation, there is no
consensus on either the character of her beliefs or their status as an
intellectual system.
As students of Marxism could testify, it is not unusual for scholars
to offer divergent readings of ideology. What distinguishes the debate
26. ‘Hilary Mantel on Margaret Thatcher’, The Guardian, 19 Sept. 2014, https://www.theguardian.
com/books/2014/sep/19/hilary-mantel-interview-short-story-assassination-margaret-thatcher.
27. B. Castle, The Castle Diaries, 1974–76 (London, 1980), p. 309 (11 Feb. 1975).
28. Hansard, The Official Report, House of Commons, 10 Apr. 2013, dlx, col. 1650.
EHR, cxxxii. 556 (June 2017)
651
about ‘Thatcherism’ is the failure to agree even on the character of the
phenomenon under investigation. Different authors have viewed it as
a policy programme, a style of government, a set of personal attributes
or a body of ideals. Some question whether it was an ideology at all,
suggesting that it is better understood as an outlook, a temperament
or a political ‘brand’. The confusion arises, in part, from the peculiar
genesis of the word. ‘Thatcherism’ was coined by the Labour Party as
a term of abuse, in order to mark out the Tory leader as a dangerous
ideologue. It was then theorised in the pages of Marxism Today,
which located it within ‘an exceptional form of the capitalist state’
(II. 147). Thatcher spent much of her leadership denying that such a
thing existed, dismissing the term in 1977 as an ‘ogre’ invented by her
opponents. ‘Is it not ridiculous?’ The label can hardly be abandoned,
for it was central to how politics was experienced and understood in
the 1980s; yet it defies conventional analysis. Like ‘virtue’ or ‘morality’,
‘Thatcherism’ is a vessel into which different meanings can be poured,
rather than something to be defined by its programmatic content.29
Unlike Keith Joseph or Alfred Sherman, Thatcher never claimed to
be an ‘intellectual’. As Brian Harrison put it, Thatcher ‘was a consumer
of ideas produced by others, and far less energetic than Joseph in seeking
them out’ (II. 200). Oliver Letwin, who worked for the prime minister
at Number 10, concluded that she had ‘absolutely no interest in ideas
for their own sake’ (II. 210). Her priority, as Charles Moore comments,
was ‘action’; politics was ‘something to be done, not something to be
debated’ (III. 193).
Nonetheless, Thatcher never doubted the importance of ideas
in driving action. This owed something to a cast of mind that was
essentially pugilistic: Airey Neave thought her ‘essentially a fighter’ (IV.
54), while Julian Critchley famously observed that ‘She cannot see an
institution without hitting it with her handbag’ (II. 283). For Thatcher,
politics was an arena of moral struggle, in which ideas and values
fought for supremacy. ‘I came into politics’, she once said, ‘because of
the conflict between good and evil’. She talked of ‘the ideological battle
against Socialism’ and insisted on ‘the moral and intellectual superiority
of the Conservative creed’.30 Her rhetoric drew instinctively on the
battlefield: during her first election campaign in 1950, she proclaimed
that ‘we are going into one of the biggest battles this country has ever
known—a battle between two ways of life, one which leads inevitably
to slavery and the other to freedom’. It was a striking claim to make
after six years of actual warfare, but Thatcher was never shy of co-opting
T H E M A N Y L I V E S O F M A RG A R E T T H ATC H E R
29. S. Hall, ‘The Great Moving Right Show’, in S. Hall and M. Jacques, eds., The Politics of
Thatcherism (London, 1983), pp. 19–39; R. Saunders, ‘Crisis? What Crisis? Thatcherism and the
Seventies’, in B. Jackson and R. Saunders, eds., Making Thatcher’s Britain (Cambridge, 2012),
pp. 25–42.
30. Saunders, ‘Crisis? What Crisis?’, pp. 27–8.
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the war years to her vision of politics. ‘In 1940’, she proclaimed, ‘it was
not the cry of nationalization that made this country rise up and fight
totalitarianism. It was the cry for freedom and liberty’ (IV. 213–14).
That pugilism made Thatcher a focal point for the ideological
struggles of the 1970s; but historians have tended to view her rather as a
vessel than as a vanguard for the ideas that gathered around her name.
Stuart Hall acknowledged the ‘personal stamp’ imposed by the prime
minister, but insisted that ‘the deeper movement which finds in her
its personification has … a much longer trajectory’ (II. 144). For Hall,
Thatcher’s ‘authoritarian populism’ was born in the backlash against
the revolutionary ferment of 1968. Like a gathering tide, it surged in the
‘bold, populist bid’ of Enoch Powell, began to roar in the short-lived
phenomenon of ‘Selsdon Man’, before bursting the banks of British
politics during the economic crisis of the 1970s (II. 148, 153). Green,
likewise, saw Thatcher as more ‘the occasion’ than ‘the cause of the
“Thatcherite Revolution”’. Thatcher’s moral authoritarianism, antisocialism and distaste for the big state, he argued, had long been the
conventional wisdom of party activists. What they found in Margaret
Thatcher was ‘a leader in tune with their long-held aspirations’, at a
moment when the crisis of Keynesianism ‘gave “Thatcherite” political
economy an opportunity to flourish’ (II. 138).
Of the constellation of ideas that became associated with
‘Thatcherism’, none was distinctive to Thatcher or even to the
Conservative Party. Its canonical texts were published by Austrian and
American writers in the two decades after World War Two: notably
The Road to Serfdom (1944) and The Constitution of Liberty (1960)
by Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom
(1960) and ‘The Role of Monetary Policy’ (1968). Enoch Powell, who
supplied monetary rigour and cultural authoritarianism, had left the
Conservative Party by the time Thatcher became leader, spending the
rest of his parliamentary career as an Ulster Unionist. Hayek published
an essay on ‘Why I am not a Conservative’, Friedman called himself
a liberal, while Alfred Sherman, Hugh Thomas and Bernard Ingham
were all (in different ways) refugees from the left.
For most historians, what brought these ideas to prominence—
and united this unlikely collection of thinkers—was the social and
economic dislocation of the 1970s. Rising inflation, deteriorating
employment prospects, the increased strain on government finances
and the perceived crisis of Keynesian economics opened up a space for
new, more radical political ideas. As Stuart Hall put it, Thatcherism
did not have to ‘conjur[e] demons out of the deep’; it could operate
‘directly on the real and manifestly contradictory experience of the
popular classes’ (II. 148, 153). That did not mean, as Thatcherites often
suggested, that their remedies were historically necessary; simply that
they resonated with voters in a way that had not been possible two
decades earlier.
EHR, cxxxii. 556 (June 2017)
653
That cocktail of economic dislocation, political ferment and moral
rearmament provided the conditions in which a new creed could be
incubated, with Thatcher as its high priest and prophet. The Tory
leader flung herself into the ideological battles of that decade, attending
meetings of the Conservative Philosophy Group and dutifully reading
the works of Hayek, Friedman and others. As Harrison suggests, the
importance of these authors to Thatcher was not that they gave her a
radically new view of the world, but that they ‘articulated and provided
a framework of action for sentiments that arose from personal instincts
and practical solutions’ (II. 205). They gave her answers to questions
that she wished to address: how to bring down inflation without formal
economic controls; how to roll back what she saw as an over-extended
state; how to drive back trade union power; and how to reverse the
decline—moral and economic—that she detected in British society.
Thatcher was not, however, a passive receptacle for the ideas of
others. She had an extraordinary capacity to domesticate complex
intellectual systems, repackaging abstract economic programmes in the
language of good household management. As Hall put it,
T H E M A N Y L I V E S O F M A RG A R E T T H ATC H E R
Thatcherism discovered a powerful means of translating economic doctrine
into the language of experience, moral imperative and common sense, thus
providing a ‘philosophy’ in the broader sense—an alternative ethic to that of
the ‘caring society’. This translation of a theoretical ideology into a populist
idiom was a major political achievement: and the conversion of hard-faced
economics into the language of compulsive moralism was, in many ways,
the centrepiece of this transformation (II. 151).
Clarke agreed: Thatcher’s contribution, he suggested, was ‘not new ideas,
nor even old ideas, but an ability to locate and mobilize a constituency
behind them’ (I. 193). Not since Gladstone, thought The Independent,
had there been a Prime Minister so ‘able to infuse with moral passion
subjects that many others regarded as exclusively technical’ (II. 211).
That alliance between old ideas, a new political context and
Thatcher’s own moralising impulse was best illustrated by ‘monetarism’,
the idea that became the defining principle of Thatcher’s first term. As
Jim Bulpitt has noted, the core principle of monetarism—that there is
‘a systematic relationship between the supply of money and the price
level’—was not new in the 1970s. What gave it such prominence in the
Thatcher era was, first, the re-emergence of inflation, which displaced
unemployment as the main priority of economic policymaking; and
second, a set of political dilemmas to which monetarism promised a
solution.
For Bulpitt, monetarism was best understood, not as an economic
doctrine, but as a form of ‘statecraft’. Throughout the century, he
argued, Conservatives had been drawn to the principle of ‘automatism’:
the construction of rules-based systems that allowed governments to
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disentangle themselves from the economy. For most of the post-war
era, Keynesianism was the preferred model, for it allowed governments
to maintain high levels of employment without the use of formal
economic controls. Rather than running the economy themselves,
ministers could restrict themselves to the management of aggregate
demand, setting a framework ‘within which others could engage in the
dreary business of economic production’ (I. 131–3).
The collapse of that system posed significant problems for the
Conservatives. From the late 1960s, the deterioration of the economy
encouraged governments to prime the pump, fuelling inflation and
reducing competitiveness. Political competition drew governments
deeper into the market, intervening directly in prices and wages in a
fashion that required constant deal-making with business and organised
labour. Monetarism taught that the management of inflation was
best achieved, not through wage bargaining or ‘social contracts’ with
industry, but through the regulation of the money supply. As such, it
promised a way of reducing inflation that did not involve either formal
controls over the economy or deal-making with organised labour (I.
136). By limiting themselves to the regulation of the money supply,
governments could once again extract themselves from responsibility
for wages, working conditions or the level of unemployment. From a
‘statecraft’ perspective, the rise of monetarism was less ‘a radical break
with the past’ than ‘an attempt to reconstruct it’, in which governments
‘rediscovered the benefits of automatic rules or pilots’ (I. 137).
It was this that piqued Thatcher’s interest. Thatcher combined
a deep moral loathing of inflation with a horror of the sort of wage
bargaining and state intervention by which Labour sought to address
it. Monetarism offered her a solution to both problems. In return,
she charged with moral energy what might otherwise have been a dry
economic debate, helping to domesticate complex economic ideas as
the common sense of the prudent housewife. Throughout the 1970s
and ’80s, she rarely used words like ‘monetarism’ and almost never
spoke publicly of Hayek or Friedman. She preferred to talk of ‘sound’
or ‘honest’ money; ‘artificial labels like monetarism’ were dismissed as
‘jargon’, intended to make ‘simple propositions’ sound ‘much cleverer
than they are’. ‘These are not the panaceas of political theorists’, she
claimed in 1977. ‘They are ideas that have worked’.31
The moral and political underpinnings of these policies helps
explain both their resilience and the ease with which they were later
dropped. As Jim Tomlinson argues, in a critique of Thatcher’s economic
‘adventurism’, ministers had not predicted the economic tsunami that
broke during the first term—whether surging levels of unemployment,
the spike in the exchange rate or the massive level of industrial failures
31. Saunders, ‘Crisis? What Crisis?’, p. 29.
EHR, cxxxii. 556 (June 2017)
655
that followed (IV. 235–6). Yet for Thatcher, the goal was not a shortterm boost to GDP; it was the crushing of inflation and the extraction
of the state from the economy. ‘Our aim’, she declared in 1975, ‘is to
build a flourishing society—not an economic system’.32 That goal
would not be sacrificed in the face of short-term economic pain; but if
it could be achieved in other ways, there was no dogmatic attachment
to a single economic toolkit.33
T H E M A N Y L I V E S O F M A RG A R E T T H ATC H E R
IV
The publication of this collection reminds us just how impressive a body
of work there is on Thatcher and Thatcherism. Scholars of this period
stand on the shoulders of giants; but they should use that vantage-point
to look forwards, as well as back. Under the thirty-year rule, thousands
of documents from the 1980s are only now becoming available. Coming
releases will cover some of the biggest controversies of the Thatcher era,
including the poll tax, the release of Nelson Mandela, the fall of the
Berlin Wall and Thatcher’s resignation. Other ministerial papers will
also begin to open, such as the Geoffrey Howe archive in the Bodleian
Library.
With the growth of online resources, notably the outstanding
website of the Margaret Thatcher Foundation, it is an exciting time to
be writing on Thatcher. Yet so much is already in the public domain
that the impact of new releases may be limited. The task for historians
is not simply to find out more and more about Thatcher, but to connect
what we already know to the wider history of her times. This may, in
some cases, involve decentring Thatcher herself; but it will also enable
us to locate her more firmly within a specific historical context.
Three areas look particularly fertile. First, we need to know more
about Thatcher’s enemies. Such is the fascination with Thatcher
herself that we risk overlooking the strength and vitality of protest and
dissent—or, at least, of viewing it solely from a Thatcherite perspective.
We need new histories of the anti-apartheid movement, women’s
liberation, Black organisations, CND, the peace camps at Greenham
Common, the resurgence of Scottish and Welsh nationalism,
campaigns against acid rain and third world poverty, political pop,
gay activism, the oppositional politics of the Greater London Council
and the metropolitan authorities, advocacy groups for single parents
and the increased political activism of the churches. Too often, such
movements feature in the historiography as little more than ‘noises off ’,
or as the dust beneath Thatcher’s chariot wheels. Yet the transformation
32. Speech to Conservative Central Council, 15 March 1975, available at http://margaretthatcher.
org/document/102655.
33. J. Tomlinson, ‘Mrs Thatcher’s Macro-Economic Adventurism, 1979–1981, and its Political
Consequences’, British Politics, ii (2007), pp. 3–19.
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in attitudes towards homosexuality, race, marriage, apartheid and
the Union since the 1970s has been at least as revolutionary as the
privatisation of industry or the recasting of the tax system—and should
be no less central to the historiography.
The history of these movements is important in its own right, but it
will also enhance our understanding of Thatcherism. Thatcher liked to
see herself as a war leader: she spoke of ‘the enemy within’, and defined
herself in opposition to moral, political and economic forces that she
thought destructive of British values. Political identities, like those of
nations, are forged and reforged in dialogue with the ‘other’; so a better
understanding of Thatcher’s enemies will shed a keener light on her
own political project. Work in this field has already begun, and there
are tremendous opportunities to create a new historical literature that
carries us beyond the memoirs and witness statements of those who
were personally involved.34
Second, and on similar principles, we need better understandings of
the web of cultural associations and expectations within which Thatcher
operated. If we are to comprehend either the character of Thatcher’s
leadership, her reception among the public or the construction of
her public identity, we need to know more about cultures of gender
and power in the late-twentieth century; about models of leadership,
fears of crime and disorder, and the forms through which politics is
mediated—including not just the media in its traditional sense, but
satire, comedy, pop music and protest. Scholars of Thatcherism need
a deeper understanding of race, class and nation in the 1980s, a task
which may take them out of the National Archives and into resources
such as the Black Cultural Archives, Mass Observation and the George
Padmore Institute.
Finally, we need to situate the Thatcher era within longer trends
in economic and foreign policy. On the economy, in particular, both
Thatcher and her critics promoted a disruptive model of the 1980s:
Thatcher, in her claim to be reversing years of socialism and decline;
her critics, in the allegation that she was single-handedly destroying
British industry. The result was to detach the period from a story of
deindustrialisation that stretched across the century, impoverishing our
understanding of some of the iconic moments of the Thatcher era.35
34. For valuable recent contributions to this literature, see J. Fazakarley, ‘Muslim Communities
in England, 1962–92: Multiculturalism and Political Identity’ (Univ. of Oxford D.Phil. thesis,
2014); E. Filby, God and Mrs Thatcher: The Battle for Britain’s Soul (London, 2015); D. Kelliher,
‘Solidarity and Sexuality: Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners 1984–5’, History Workshop
Journal, lxxvii (2014), pp. 240–62; L. Robinson, ‘“Sometimes I like to Stay in and Watch TV
…”: Kinnock’s Labour Party and Media Culture’, Twentieth Century British History, xxii (2011),
pp. 354–90; L. Robinson, ‘Putting the Charity Back into Charity Singles: Charity Singles in
Britain, 1984–1995’, Contemporary British History, xxvi (2012), pp. 405–25; N. Thomlinson, Race,
Ethnicity and the Women’s Movement in England, 1968–1993 (Basingstoke, 2016).
35. J. Tomlinson, ‘De-industrialization Not Decline: A New Meta-Narrative for Post-War
British History’, Twentieth Century British History, xxvii (2016), pp. 76–99.
EHR, cxxxii. 556 (June 2017)
657
Inner-city riots, for example, took place against a long backdrop of
urban transformation, rooted in changes in production, new patterns
of migration, the long collapse of the dockyards and shifting attitudes
to social housing. The miners’ strike of 1984–5 followed six decades
of contraction in the mining industry, with almost a million jobs lost
since the 1920s, and took place under the shadow of alternative energy
sources from oil, gas and the nuclear industry. None of this deprives
either the Thatcher governments or their opponents of agency; nor
does it validate the decisions made on either side. Yet the actions of
government and the fierce determination with which miners fought to
save their industry make little sense if reduced to the personality clash
between two determined and inflexible individuals.
The same is true of foreign policy and its influence upon the
domestic arena. Thatcher’s premiership was framed and punctuated
by the Cold War, that great ideological struggle that shaped so much
of British politics after 1945. She became leader of the Conservative
Party just weeks before the fall of Saigon, at a time when Communism
was in the ascendant in South Asia; her first Christmas as prime
minister was dominated by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which
finally closed the coffin lid on the politics of détente. Her fall in 1990
came amidst the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reunification
of Germany. (In a curious twist of fate, the leadership challenge that
ended her premiership took place during an international summit at
Paris, intended to set the framework for a post-Cold War world.) It was
a Soviet newspaper that labelled Thatcher ‘the Iron Lady’, and it was
their shared hostility to Communism that underpinned her alliance
with Ronald Reagan. Thatcher became an icon to the Solidarity
movement, forged an unlikely friendship with Mikhail Gorbachev, and
viewed everything from the Northern Ireland conflict and the antiapartheid movement to the rise of the Labour left through the prism of
the struggle between East and West.
When that paradigm collapsed at the end of the 1980s, Thatcher—and
the Conservative Party more generally—struggled to adapt. The fall of
the Berlin Wall, which might have been her apotheosis, disoriented and
alarmed her, with destructive consequences for her party, her European
policy and her relationship with Washington. Thatcherism, then, needs
to be integrated within a wider history of the Cold War, understood
not simply as a problem to which governments had to respond, but as
a set of political and intellectual dynamics that shaped the thinking,
purchase and viability of Conservative politics.
The Cold War intersected with a further issue, which pulsed like
an electric charge through Thatcher’s time in office. This was the
relationship between Britain and Europe, a subject on which Thatcher’s
own opinions changed radically. Thatcher made her maiden speech as
party leader on the EEC Referendum Bill in 1975, and the campaign
that followed provided the first serious test of her leadership. At a time
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T H E M A N Y L I V E S O F M A RG A R E T T H ATC H E R
658
when Labour was increasingly Eurosceptic, her early governments
promised a more positive engagement with the Continent, and the
passage of the Single European Act in 1986 was hailed by ministers as
‘Thatcherism on a European scale’.36 The prime minister herself spoke
of the single market in almost chiliastic terms:
[W]hat a prospect that is. A single market without barriers—visible or
invisible—giving you direct and unhindered access to the purchasing power
of over 300 million of the world’s wealthiest and most prosperous people.
Bigger than Japan. Bigger than the United States. On your doorstep. And
with the Channel Tunnel to give you direct access to it.37
Yet it was Thatcher’s growing hostility to European integration that
would trigger her demise, sparking the resignations first of Nigel
Lawson and then of Geoffrey Howe. Thatcher’s transformation from an
advocate of membership, who bestrode the country in a ‘Yes to Europe’
jumper, to a bitter critic who co-ordinated opposition to the Maastricht
Treaty, was not simply a personal conversion. It mapped wider shifts
in both British and European politics, as Labour accommodated itself
to membership while the Conservative Party became increasingly
disaffected. From the Labour schisms of the 1970s to ‘Brexit’ in 2016,
the European question has rewired party allegiances and recast the
direction of British politics. Charting its working in the Thatcher era
will be one of the most intriguing tasks of the new scholarship on
Britain and Europe.
Tim Bale’s splendid collection stands as a tribute to a remarkable
body of scholarship; but it should also act as an inspiration to open up
new fields and approaches. For Thatcher scholars, there is a rich harvest
still to be gathered, though it may carry them into unfamiliar fields. As
one of her great heroes might have put it, Bale’s collection is not the
end for Thatcher studies. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it
may, perhaps, mark the end of the beginning.
Queen Mary University of London
ROBERT SAUNDERS
36. G. Howe, Conflict of Loyalty (London, 1994), p. 456.
37. Speech at Lancaster House, 18 April 1988, available at http://www.margaretthatcher.org/
document/107219. Twenty-nine years later, Theresa May would announce Britain’s withdrawal
from the single market at the same location.
EHR, cxxxii. 556 (June 2017)