There is No Alternative (6 page)

It
was
said of her, remarkably often, that she was pretty. If you have seen unflattering photos of her in late middle-age you may find yourself puzzled by this. But the young Margaret Thatcher was in fact blonde, clear-skinned, pleasantly round, and, of course, young. This was all the more striking because Britons of the postwar era generally looked awful. The stereotype of the Englishman with bad teeth does not come from nowhere. Wartime and postwar rationing had taken a nutritional toll; health care, while provided by the state, was also rationed by the state, and cosmetic dentistry was not the state's priority. If it is now quite common for women in London to spend a hundred pounds to have their hair colored, at that time only women married to very wealthy men, as Thatcher was, could afford the luxury of good grooming. Her grooming was always immaculate.

By the end of the 1960s, unemployment was steadily rising, and so was the tempo of trade union disputes. During the 1970 general election campaign, the Conservatives, led by Edward Heath, proposed a healing elixir of free-market economics, trade union re-form,
tax cuts, and spending restraints. They won. Heath named Thatcher secretary of state for education and science, and it was in this position that she first gained national notoriety. She abolished a program to provide free milk to schoolchildren, earning the nickname “Thatcher the Milk-Snatcher.” The slogan “Ditch the Bitch” also became common currency and remained so until she resigned from the leadership of the Conservative Party in 1991.

When unemployment passed the million-man mark in 1972, Heath retreated from the Party's platform in what has infamously been termed a series of U-turns. He poured money from the taxpayer coffers into flagging British industries and retreated from confrontation with the unions. This served only to embolden them. In 1973, directly after the announcement of the Arab oil embargo, Britain's electricity and coal workers declared an overtime ban. It is only slightly hyperbolic to imagine this analogy:

Heath's government declared a state of emergency, imposing a three-day industrial work-week to save energy. A two-day week was in prospect. Power cuts became the norm. In 1974, faced with the threat of an all-out miners' strike, Heath called a general election. His campaign slogan was
Who governs Britain?
The voters answered.
You sure as hell don't.

The Labour Party took power under Harold Wilson, and from this defeat, Thatcherism was born.

The Conservative politician Keith Joseph was the intellectual force behind Thatcherism. Joseph was Thatcher's mentor; he in
turn was strongly influenced by Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman. In 1974, Joseph delivered a speech at Upminster that may be taken as the first public expression of full-throated Thatcherism. The title itself—“This Is Not the Time to Be Mealy-Mouthed: Intervention Is Destroying Us”—embodied what would come to be Thatcher's thematic signature: aggression, a sense of emergency, a contemptuous rejection of conciliatory language, the association of government intervention with such words as “destroy.” Intervention in this semantic landscape is not “unhelpful” or “doing more harm than good”; it is
destroying
us. And it is destroying
us,
mind you, the British people: Never was nationalism far from the surface.

Joseph delivered this speech in response to plans unveiled by the Labour government's industry secretary, Tony Benn, to extend public control over the most profitable areas of British industry. “It is not enough just to stave off Benn's preposterous proposals,” Joseph intoned:

The biblical allusion is particularly significant; not only does it suggest the origins of Joseph's nickname—the Mad Monk—but it foreshadows Thatcher's preoccupation with socialism as
sin.
Indeed, in a 1978 speech concerning Christianity and politics, she specifically described the core of socialism not merely as a folly, but a heresy:

Her fluent command of both the Old and the New Testaments was a notable aspect of her political personality. She held, she said, a “personal belief in the relevance of Christianity to public policy.”
¹⁵
Not only was she intimately familiar with the prophets of yore, she was prepared to associate herself among their ranks. “The Old Testament prophets,” she remarked in a campaign speech,

It is said that she once began a speech with the words “As God once said, and I think rightly,” but the story is, alas, apocryphal. That these words are so often attributed to her nonetheless suggests the nature of the woman.

Although widely considered Thatcher's intellectual superior, the Mad Monk was a political incompetent who destroyed his own chances of becoming prime minister by delivering an ill-considered
speech, in 1974, urging poor British women to take more care with their contraception. To many this sounded suspiciously like a call to solve Britain's economic problems with eugenics. Thus did Thatcher inherit his legacy, and thus did his legacy come to be given her name.

In the early 1970s, Joseph and Thatcher founded the Centre for Policy Studies, a think tank devoted to promoting Joseph's distinct form of conservatism, now termed Thatcherism. What Thatcherism is, precisely, is a matter of some debate, even if Bernard Ingham finds it a simple concept:

The words “common sense” featured largely in her campaign literature and speeches. They were on the first page of her 1979 election manifesto: “This manifesto points the way . . . it sets out a broad framework for the recovery of our country, based not on dogma, but on reason, on common sense.”
¹⁷

Obviously the phrase “common sense” was a crowd-pleaser, but beyond suggesting something about her populist appeal, it doesn't tell us much about the specifics. Alone among British prime ministers, Thatcher's name has become synonymous with an ideology—there is no Churchillism, there is no Attleeism. Thatcherism admits of no easy definition, but certain core principles are clear: She believed in free markets, popular capitalism, property ownership, privatization, monetarism, firm control over public expenditure, low taxation, and
individualism. She was an ardent patriot and nationalist. She deplored socialism and considered welfare spending and collective bargaining to be forms of it. She particularly despised powerful trade unions. She was leery of international organizations. She saw nothing to admire in the Soviet Union and much to admire in America.

But there is a distinctly emotional component to Thatcherism as well, one expressed quite well by Ingham's table-thumping animadversions:

Thatcher had been convinced by Joseph that the Conservatives had lost the last election because they had failed to stand their ground. She was equally convinced that she was the only one left in her party who would defend that ground. She stood against Heath for the party leadership in 1975. When she went to Heath's office to tell him her decision, he did not bother to look up. “You'll lose,” he said. “Good day to you.”
¹⁸

To his astonishment, and to the even greater astonishment of the nation, she won.