Ross McKibbin is a fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, and the author of Classes and Cultures: England 1918-51 and The Evolution of the Labour Party: 1910-24. Parties and People: England 1914-51 will be published next spring.
MORE BY THIS CONTRIBUTOR
RELATED ARTICLES
3 July 2008
Modern Irish History
7 February 2002
Eagleton’s Rise
19 October 2006
Richard Rogers
20 May 2004
A literary dragnet
3 January 2002
On Seamus Heaney
13 December 2001
On Alice Munro
29 November 2001
On Barry Hannah
RELATED CATEGORIES
Biography and memoirs, Biography, 1900-1999, 1946-1999, 1970-1979, 1900-1999, 1946-1999, 1980-1989, 1900-1999, 1946-1999, 1990-1999, Thatcher, Margaret, Politics, Conservatism
Vol. 26 No. 6 · 18 March 2004
pages 11-12 | 2803 words
Why did it end so badly?
Ross McKibbin
- Margaret Thatcher, Vol. II: The Iron Lady by John Campbell
Cape, 913 pp, £25.00, October 2003, ISBN 0 224 06156 9
Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. Even those, John Campbell suggests, who have little or no memory of Margaret Thatcher, live in a world she created; and from which there is no going back. More than any other British prime minister, even Gladstone, she conforms to Max Weber’s type of the modern demagogic politician: the leader who appeals directly to the electorate over the heads of the party machine; and who subordinates the machine to his or her political personality. In the end, the machine overthrew her; but there is no escaping that personality. Even her foolishness was larger than life.
You are not Logged In
- If you have already registered login here
- If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
- If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
- If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
- If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions
This article is also available for purchase from the London Review Bookshop. Contact us for rights and issues enquiries.
- print this article
Letters
Vol. 26 No. 7 · 1 April 2004
From William McCarthy
I disagree with Ross McKibbin (LRB, 18 March): Thatcher was not on the side of history. She had no political philosophy worthy of the name. It was convenient for her to voice Keith Joseph's half-baked economic liberalism, itself taken from a boiled down version of Hayek. But a close study of Thatcher's speeches reveals that she never really understood it. Her driving force, after the miracle of the Argentinian victory, was the belief that if you cut public expenditure enough and distributed what you had saved to the electorate in the right way, you would be returned for ever. This worked, till New Labour promised to do likewise. By this time she had stumbled into the Poll Tax, and Tory sleaze was reaching a point where the electorate wanted a change of government.
The long-term tragedy is that by this time there was a need to spend far more on public services than New Labour could bear to contemplate. Then the government made its own disastrous gamble on war without regard for the cost. Thatcherite ignorance and opportunism may well have denied us the chance to save what is left of Old Labour's inheritance. In what sense can this be what history had in mind?
William McCarthy
House of Lords
