Letters from London (34 page)

Mrs. Thatcher’s achievements were, in political terms, remarkable. She showed that you could disregard the old pieties about consensus, whether intraparty or cross-party. You could govern the United Kingdom while effectively shrinking your MP base to a purely English party. You could survive while allowing unemployment to rise to levels previously thought politically untenable. You could politicize hitherto unpolitical public bodies, and force the holy principles of the market into areas of society presumed sacrosanct. You could sharply diminish union power and increase employer power. You could weaken the independence of local government by limiting its ability to raise money, and then, if it still bugged you, you could simply abolish it: London is now the only great city in the world without an elected metropolitan authority. You could make the rich richer and the poor poorer until you had restored the gap that existed at the end of the last century. You could do all this and in the process traumatize the Opposition: the presence since 1979 of a Tory Government that has been frequently unpopular yet ineluctably reelected has driven the Labour Party steadily to the right, until it has abandoned much of what it believed in the seventies and presents itself now as the party of nice, caring capitalists, as distinct from nasty, uncaring ones. Even the unemployed have been traumatized, to the extent that at the last election (Thatcher-free but still fought around Thatcherism) they actually ended up voting in slightly higher proportion for the Tories than the previous time round.

From the start, the prime appeal of Margaret Thatcher was her granitic certainty. Her “great virtue,” Philip Larkin told an interviewer in 1979, “is saying that two and two makes four, which is as unpopular nowadays as it always has been.” Later the same year, the poet elaborated: “I adore Mrs. Thatcher. At last politics makes sense to me, which it hasn’t done since Stafford Cripps (I was very fond of him too). Recognizing that if you haven’t got the money for something you can’t have it—this is a concept that’s vanished for many years.” Politics, of course, is a matter of decimals, logarithms, and long division,
but Mrs. Thatcher, by making parts of it appear simple, not only infuriated those who knew it to be more complicated but also cemented her support among the two-plus-two brigade. Thus, she loved to explain the nation’s economic policy in terms of the domestic shopping basket. Budgetary squabbles with the EC were a matter of getting “them” to give “us” “our” money back. She loved polarizations into them and us. Also into good and evil: like Superman, the Iron Lady made the world easier to understand. She and Reagan took readings from the same moral graph. One of the few genuinely comic moments in
Margaret Thatcher. The Downing Street Years
is a color photograph taken during a banquet at No. 10. The Prime Minister is banging out a speech while the President looks up at her with an expression of goofy awe. Underneath this official souvenir he has written, “Dear Margaret—As you can see, I agree with every word you are saying. I always do. Warmest friendship. Sincerely, Ron.” During the Reagan-Thatcher years, local dreamers could imagine a reverse of the Kennedy-Macmillan era. Macmillan liked to portray the Atlantic alliance as the relationship of wise old Greece (Britain, in case you were wondering) to vigorous young Rome. For a while, at least, during Reagan’s sleepy-senior-citizen act, Thatcher could pose as the dynamic ideas merchant.

“Personally dominant, supremely self-confident, infuriatingly stub born,” Mrs. Thatcher “held a strange mixture of broad views and narrow prejudices.” This is the summing up not of some vexed Labourite but of the normally unctuous Kenneth Baker, one of her Party chairmen. (Baker was once tipped for the succession, and his oiliness provoked the comment “I have seen the future and it smirks.”) She made up her mind, kept to it, spoke it, and repeated it verbatim for as long as necessary. In
The Downing Street Years
she dismisses the hapless John Nott, Defense Minister during the Falklands War, with the neutering line “His vice was second thoughts.” None of them for Maggie. Larkin was once invited to a dinner party at the house of the historian Hugh Thomas, and recorded her combative and unself-questioning manner: “Watching her was like watching a top class tennis-player; no ‘uh-huh, well, what do other people think about that,’ just bang
back over the net.” Since the other guests included Isaiah Berlin. V. S. Naipaul, Tom Stoppard, Mario Vargas Llosa, J. H. Plumb, V. S. Pritchett, Anthony Powell, Stephen Spender, Anthony Quinton, and A. Alvarez, this was quite tony company to play tennis in. But then Mrs. Thatcher was no more snob-struck by “vain intellectuals,” as she characterizes the breed in her book, than by Tory toffs. There was an early move in her Premiership to present her as a PM who liked a workout on the ideas mat with a few top brains—the historian Paul Johnson was one such scrimmager—but it does not seem to have lasted long. Certainly none of the above names even makes it into the index of
The Dawning Street Years:
you can have “Berlin disco bomb” but not “Berlin, Isaiah.”

Indeed, the subject of the arts occupies a whole two pages here, and one of those is spent describing Mrs. Thatcher’s heroic but thwarted attempt to bring the Thyssen art collection to Britain. (“It was not only a great treasure but a good investment,” she typically notes.) Where other Prime Ministers—however truly or hypocritically—like to maintain that the arts are at least a decoration, if not actually an additive, to life, with Mrs. Thatcher they do not enter the equation: if you have that sort of spare time, you aren’t doing your job as PM. She remembers Macmillan telling a group of young MPs that “prime ministers (not having a department of their own) have plenty of spare time for reading. He recommended Disraeli and Trollope. I have sometimes wondered if he was joking.” He almost certainly wasn’t, and it’s significant that John Major, who has gone back to the Macmillan “easy-listening” style of Premiership, also claims Trollope as his favorite writer—indeed, is a member of the Trollope Society. (The fact that the novelist was scathing about politicians, and especially about Tories, doesn’t seem to bother modern Conservatives.) Mrs. Thatcher, by contrast, cites as her favorite reading “thrillers by Frederick Forsyth and John le Carré.” This is probably just as well. The sight of Mrs. Thatcher pretending to like art would not be for the squeamish.

Far better is her unfeigned response on the occasion when Kingsley Amis presented her at No. 10 with an autographed copy of his
novel
Russian Hide-and-Seek
. “What’s it about?” she asked him. “Well,” he explained, “in a way it’s about a future Britain under Russian occupation.” “Huh!” she cried. “Can’t you do any better than that? Get yourself another crystal ball!” This put-down (“unfair as well as unanswerable,” Amis noted) failed to decrease the novelist’s devotion to the Prime Minister. In his memoirs he calls her “one of the best-looking women I had ever met” and adds this recherché compliment to her allure: “This quality is so extreme that, allied to her well-known photogenic quality, it can trap me for split seconds into thinking I am looking at a science-fiction illustration of some time ago showing the beautiful girl who has become President of the Solar Federation in the year 2220.” More routinely, Amis admits that Mrs. Thatcher has replaced the Queen as the woman he dreams about most; once, she even drew him close and murmured lovingly, “You’ve got such an
interesting
face.” Well, she may make his dreams, but, no, he doesn’t make her index, either. Nor, for that matter, does the name of a British subject sentenced to death by a foreign power during her Premiership. You would think this might have caused some offense to the notions of British sovereignty, honor, and independence that bray out like trumpet cadenzas from these pages. Bad luck, Citizen Rushdie.

Those high concepts are, by contrast, regularly involved when it comes to one of the central events of Mrs. Thatcher’s Premiership: the Falklands War of 1982. Her account of it has a novel clarity: history with little nuance or complication, whether political or moral. The Argentine invasion of the islands was completely unforeseeable (she set up a royal commission afterward which confirmed it, so that’s that); the British were defending “our honour as a nation;” while our wider duty was to ensure that Aggression did not Succeed, and that international law be not flouted. But the war also sprang from—and celebrated—Mrs. Thatcher’s nature, and her resolution. When the Argentine fleet set off to invade the Falklands, the second-thoughting Defense Minister gave her the feeble official view that, once seized, the islands could not be retaken. “This was terrible, and totally unacceptable. I could not believe it: these were our people, our
islands. I said instantly: ‘if they are invaded, we have got to get them back.’” What was the alternative? “That a common or garden dictator should rule over the Queen’s subjects and prevail by fraud and violence? Not while I was Prime Minister.” She has to kick a few peaceniks into line, including her Foreign Secretary, Francis Pym, who shows wobbliness and a disproportionate interest in diplomatic solutions; and she is willing to threaten resignation to get her way with the War Cabinet. Staunch support comes from Caspar Weinberger, Laurens van der Post, and François Mitterrand (who had, of course, his own postcolonial aggravations); but it is, essentially, Maggie versus the Argies. At one point, she is down on her knees at Chequers measuring territorial waters on naval charts with the Attorney General. Eventually, “the freedom, justice and democracy which the Falkland Islanders had enjoyed for so long” are returned to them. “I do not think I have ever lived so tensely or intensely as during the whole of that time,” she writes.

Much of this is comic-strip simplification. The Falklands, with its depressed company-store economy, tiny population, and militarily insufficient runway, held no interest for the British except perhaps among philatelists. We had been trying to unload the islands for decades, efforts which culminated in Nicholas Ridley’s “leaseback” proposal of 1980. This was thrown out by the House of Commons; but still, in classic schoolyard fashion, we did not really want, or think about wanting, the islands until someone else did. Hence the war sweetly characterized by Borges—a “vain intellectual” living under a “common or garden dictatorias “two bald men fighting over a comb.” Nor was Mrs. Thatcher at all in the valiant isolation she now chooses to describe. The House of Commons fell immediately and noisily behind the Prime Minister, not least after a key intervention she fails to acknowledge: that of Michael Foot, old-socialist leader of the Labour Party and, in his own words, an “inveterate peacemonger,” who came out for war. So did most of the nation: the British are still a bellicose race, and they rather like fighting, preferably by themselves and in a good-versus-evil struggle as sketched by the Prime Minister. For once, something was happening
out there, the TV pictures were good, and xenophobia could be indulged.

Mrs. Thatcher, with her shopping-basket view of the world, likes to assure us that she does her sums. But it’s odd that she doesn’t mention the basic statistic of the war. One thousand eight hundred islanders were liberated from the Argentines (who brought not torture and death but color TV sets to cheer the crofters’ firesides), at a cost of just over 1,000 deaths, 255 of them British, plus countless modern maimings. Try doing the sum on a different war: imagine that the reinvasion of France in 1944 had cost 23 million lives, 6 million of them Allied. Would we rejoice so much and praise our leaders? Freedom is indivisible, politicians like to say, but of course it isn’t; on the contrary, it falls into strict categories. It was lucky for the islanders that they were white, just as it was lucky for the Kuwaitis that they exported oil rather than Turkish delight. Nor was the aftermath of liberation much like Paris in 1944. The British soldiers who reoccupied the islands were unimpressed by the Falklanders, whom they nicknamed “Bennies,” after a notoriously dim character in a TV soap. An official order had to be put out instructing the troops not to use this insulting term. Shortly afterward, they took to referring to the locals as “Stills.” A mystified officer asked a soldier to explain this new sobriquet. “Because they’re still Bennies, sir,” came the magnificent reply. Today, the Falkland Islanders are no nearer the hearts of the British than before; a political solution has been endlessly deferred; and the enlarged airstrip, which we once couldn’t afford, has now been built, to the ultimate benefit of the Argentines. Were the islands worth a single death, or even the money the expedition cost? Before hostilities began, Macmillan advised Mrs. Thatcher to keep the Treasury out of things (ironic counsel, since it was Macmillan as Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time of Suez who helped pull the plug on that campaign). So this was to be a No Expense Spared War. And what did it cost? All we find in
The Downing Street Years
is bland mumblings: “It was a remarkable testament to the soundness of public finances by this stage that we managed to pay for the Falklands War out of the Contingency Reserve without a penny of extra taxation
and with barely a tremor in the financial markets.” Another example of good housekeeping, then. In fact, the cost of the campaign, plus that of securing the Falklands to the end of the eighties, was upwards of
£2
million per islander. High price for a comb.

All this, though, is politically irrelevant. However impressive the feat of arms, its true and lasting significance for the British was as a domestic metaphor. Politics has a presiding rhetoric of “fighting and winning,” which we citizens are rarely able to compute when it comes to matters of trade balance and interest rates. And when we can compute it—as with “the battle against unemployment” or “the fight against crime”—we always seem to be losing. So a clear and televised success in war (especially when for years your soldiers have not been getting a result in Northern Ireland) encourages the belief that other problems are equally soluble, other victories assured, and that Mrs. Thatcher is “a winner.” Hence subsequent chapters
of The Downing Street Years
are called “Disarming the Left” and “Mr Scargil’s Insurrection.” (Mr. Scargill was not a guerrilla leader in the Yorkshire Dales but a trade-union leader.) And hence the explicit linkage Mrs. Thatcher made immediately after the war in a speech in Cheltenham: “We have ceased to be a nation in retreat. We have instead a newfound confidence—born in the economic battles at home and tested and found true 8000 miles away.” In her view, “without any prompting from us, people saw the connection between the resolution we had shown in economic policy and that demonstrated in the handling of the Falklands crisis.” “People,” here, as elsewhere in the book, is not a generic term referring to the British but a specific term denoting those who supported Mrs. Thatcher. Her vision is ruthlessly monocular.