Maggie at 30

The eyes of Caligula, said Francois Mitterrand, and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe.  The headmistress voice, the brilliant blue suits, the perfectly coiffed blond hair and the Gucci bags.  The lady, as she famously told a Conservative Party convention in 1980, was not for turning.  The daughter of a grocer from Grantham, Lincolnshire, Margaret Hilda Roberts Thatcher displayed little academic brilliance.  Gaining a scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford only after the first place winner had dropped out, no one seriously considered her as a future party leader.  Moving through a chemistry degree and then the bar -specializing in taxation - by sheer force of will and hard work.  Her father Alfred was a self made man, Victorian in birth and outlook.  A Liberal in the Gladstonian mold, he drifted reluctantly toward the Conservatives.  As an alderman he emphasized economies in finance and privatization of local services where possible.  A stern Methodist lay preacher he admonished his daughter for wanting to dance like the other girls.  Don't do things because others do them, he warned.  As a girl she won a minor school contest.  A teacher congratulated her on her luck.  The little girl replied: "I earned it."

Through out the 1950s she sought a competitive Conservative seat.  Coming close on several occasions her youth, and her position as the mother of young children, counted strongly against her.  In 1959 she contested and won Finchley.  Given a parliamentary undersecretary position, the lowest rung of cabinet, by Harold Macmillan she failed to distinguish herself.  The Profumo Scandal, Macmillan's poor health, and the weak choice of Sir Alec Douglas-Home as his successor, led to a narrow Conservative loss in 1964 to Labour under Harold Wilson.  In opposition, however, the flash of what was to become Thatcherism began to be seen.  Calling for the sale of council flats (housing project units) to their residents, and attacking wage and price controls, Thatcher quickly placed herself on the far right of the party.  

Supporting Ted Heath for the leadership, he in turn placed her in high positions in the Shadow Cabinet.  In 1970 Wilson called an election, which he was easily expected to win.  Uncertain as to a policy platform, Heath and a group of advisors met at the Selsdon Park Hotel and emerged with a radical - for the time - free market programme, including sweeping privatization.  Wilson mocked the program as antediluvian and called it the product of "Selsdon Man," a primitive creature from times long past.  The electorate, delighted by a genuine alternative to the post-war consensus, gave Heath a majority.  Faced with stiff trade union opposition Heath "U-turned" and essentially continued with his predecessors policies.  His government succeed in privatizing a pub in Carlisle.

While Secretary of State for Education in early 1970s she was quizzed by a student, on a television panel, about whether she would become Prime Minister.  The Minister demurred, it takes a lot of experience to become Prime Minister, and she had only been a minister for a short while.  When the time did come, Ted Heath's leadership being brought to review after an election defeat in 1974, she supported the monkish Sir Keith Joseph for the leadership.  Acting as his campaign manager she never seriously thought of contesting for the job herself.  Wrong class, wrong sex.  An ill-timed gaffe, he suggested that people on welfare should have fewer children, ended Joseph's leadership bid.  She immediately volunteered to replace him as flag bearer for the party's Right.  Heath is said not to have even looked up when she announced her candidacy to him.  "You'll lose," was his casual response.  In a surprise upset he lost and Thatcher won.  Chris Patton, a future minister and the last governor of Hong Kong, delivered the news.  She burst into tears. 

The public's immediate response was shock.  Thatcher was viewed as an "ice queen," more nordic than British in appearance.  Her decision as Minister to cut a free milk program for school children earned her the wrath of the British Left who naturally branded her as heartless.  An outsider, in practically every sense, she appointed old Heath loyalists to her Shadow Cabinet, only gradually weeding them out as more and more Tories converted to her free market and monetarist views.  A strong speech condemning Soviet imperialism earned her the sobriquet, from a Soviet paper, of the "Iron Lady."  She took to the new honour immediately.  Thatcher denounced trade unionism, inflation, price controls - which Heath had expanded - and high taxation.  The ideas began to sell, if not her.  Her voice and aloof manner made it difficult for her to connect to ordinary voters.  A picture of her carrying a lamb is said to have done much to humanize the Tory leader.

A half forgotten piece of Shakespeare entered the political discourse in 1978.  Gloucester's opening soliloquy in Richard III, "Now is the winter of our discontent," became current.  The notorious Duke had dreamed of power.  The British public took the phrase more literally.  Inflation and wage controls, combined with powerful unions, had produced waves of strikes that crippled the British economy.  Gravediggers, coal miners, the printing staff of the venerable Times of London, all went on the picketline.  Garbage began to form mountains in Trafalgar Square, Lord Nelson looking on, when the trash pickers stopped working.  Inflation and unemployment headed into and then past the double digits.  Britain, which had narrowly averted the necessity of an IMF loan in 1976, now began looking again for aid.  From global power to a byword for incompetence and decline, Britain, educated opinion believed was now "Airstrip One."

One word explained it all to Margaret Thatcher:  socialism.  Since 1945 huge swaths of the British economy were under direct state control.  As recently as the mid-1970s the car industry was taken over, merged into British Leyland.  A culture of entitlement, of working class militancy, of passive drift in the face of crisis, grew.  Losing a vote of confidence in the early spring of 1979, the Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan faced the voters.  They gave Mrs Thatcher a 44 seat majority. Callaghan, a working class trade unionist, who was the first person to hold all four Great Offices of State (Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Office, Foreign Office, Prime Minister), mused philosophically that it was one of those great sea changes that happens every thirty years or so in public life.  The pendulum was swinging back.

"There is no alternative" was the constant declaration from No. 10.  The narrative here becomes more familiar.  A tight monetary policy introduced by Geofrey Howe as Chancellor - the Bank of England was not fully independent at this point - provoked a severe recession.  Inflation was beaten out of the system.  By 1983 the economy rebounded strongly, the victory of the Falklands was fresh, and the opposition in comic disarray.  One Labourite described the party's 1983 election manifesto as the "longest suicide note in history."  Calling for a reversal of all of Thatcher's policies, and unilateral disarmament, Labour was handed its worst election defeat since the 1930s.  Privatization of British Airways, British Rail, British Telecom, and scores of nationalized firms proceeded a pace.  

A massive strike by coal miners lasted a year.  Thatcher declared the miners to be the enemy, greater than the Argentinians had been in the South Atlantic.  The pits were uneconomical, the British taxpayer had poured fortunes into mines that cost far more to run than the value of the coal being brought up.  The unions surrendered.  25 pits were closed in 1985, nearly a hundred by the time Thatcher left office.  A slightly reduced majority in 1987 secured an unprecedented hat trick for the Prime Minister.  Not since Lord Liverpool, in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, had the British electorate given a Prime Minister three consecutive mandates.

Through her friendship with Ronald Reagan the Soviets were confronted, until Gorbachev's emergence in 1985 led to a period of detente.  Overstretched and bankrupt, the Soviet Union collapsed with credit paid to Reagan and Thatcher.  The Iron Lady wept again when she visited Poland, under the escort of the Solidarity leaders, at a church service.  The revolution continued at home.  A Spitting Image skit showed the PM at dinner with her cabinet.  "What will you be having?" asks the waitress.  "Steak," replies Thatcher.  "What about the vegetables?" asks the waitress.  "They'll have steak as well."  Her authoritarian style, the modus of a revolutionary, won her enemies.  Micheal Heseltine, a leading member of cabinet, resigned over her decision to block the purchase of a UK defense company by an Italian firm, she preferring - along with the management - sale to an American firm.  The real reason was more likely personal pique. 

Thatcher was never loved by her party, or the electorate.  They backed her because they thought she was correct in her basic vision, and a strong enough figure to rule a nation in crisis and decline.  It would be over policy that she fell.  In the country at large it was the Poll Tax, a flat head tax levied on all adults, provoked a furious backlash.  The Poll Tax was associated for centuries in Britain with tyrannical government.  Since it was the same flat amount regardless of income, it was also seen as regressive.  Thatcher liked it because it would be less distortionary than conventional taxes.  In the party Europe caught her.  Howe, the loyal Chancellor of the early years, resigned in the fall of 1990.  Thatcher was afraid that Brussels was planning a European federation, not a free trade deal in the spirit of the Treaty of Rome.  The British pound would be submerged in a new European currency.  No, No, No said Thatcher.  It was too late.  The party and country abandoned her.  A leadership contest was forced, with Thatcher failing to win on the first ballot.  She resigned.

Thirty years later we are confronted, in James Callaghan's words, with another "sea change" in the political life not only of Britain but of the West.  It is a reversal of what Thatcherism stood for in the 1980s.  Banks have been nationalized, the national debt is approach historic levels, the pound is devaluing on international markets.  It seems difficult to imagine having to re-learn the lessons of the post-war consensus, to repeat the tragic public policy mistakes that led to the Winter of Discontent.  As Kipling noted, "And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire..."