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.

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Vol. 26 No. 6 · 18 March 2004 » Ross McKibbin » Why did it end so badly? (print version)
Pages 11-12 | 2803 words

Letters

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