Staying in power

Geoffrey Hawthorn

• Mrs Thatcher’s Revolution: The Ending of the Socialist Era by Peter Jenkins
  Cape, 411 pp, £12.95, November 1988, ISBN 0 224 02516 3
• De-Industrialisation and Foreign Trade by R.E. Rowthorn and J.R. Wells
  Cambridge, 422 pp, £40.00, November 1988, ISBN 0 521 26360 3

In November, Norman Tebbit spoke to the Financial Times of a ‘long revolution’, lasting perhaps twenty years. Nevertheless, he said, ‘when you’ve run through health and education, and had another hard look at the structure of welfare benefits, then it’s difficult to see where the revolution could go on from there.’ Indeed, the Conservatives could then perhaps ‘go back to being the party of saying everything is going reasonably well.’ Some of his colleagues are already saying it. Looking almost smooth – the Prime Minister, Peter Jenkins reports, has had occasion to tell him to ‘get a haircut’ – Nigel Lawson reassured his audience at the Mansion House in the autumn that revenues were high and the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement could soon be reduced to about a billion a year. Ten billion, he announced, can now be put aside for future ‘contingencies’.