Test Century

Margaret Thatcher would have been 100 today. Last week’s Conservative Party Conference featured an exhibition of her clothes. Could the Conservatives not see how weird that was? Even if the whole thing was intended as a joke, then it was still odd. The only funny thing was that, for the first time in 28 years, Michael Heseltine was present.

Many others tried, but the only organisation that ever succeeded in getting rid of Thatcher was the Conservative Party. If it loved her in life as much as it loves in her death, then it had a very, very, very strange way of showing it. In her memoirs, the extremely bitter chapter on the Poll Tax makes it clear that she laboured under no delusion that she had been removed because of “Europe”. That was the cover story, but “Europe” had not been the reason why scores of Conservative MPs had been on course to lose their seats. The content, rather than the tone, of that policy did not change under her successor. By contrast, the Poll Tax was abolished completely, with a reversion in all but name to the previous system of domestic rates. The Conservatives then unexpectedly won the General Election of 1992, when Thatcher retired from the House of Commons. Fittingly, this evening’s dinner at the Guildhall will be addressed by Boris Johnson in the presence of Mark Thatcher and Richard Tice, but not of Kemi Badenoch, since it is being paid for by Mohamed Amersi, who is a donor to Reform UK. 

Thatcher’s humble origins are greatly exaggerated. She was the daughter of a major local businessman and politician who ran most of the committees and charities for miles around. Even the people who love her can see why the people who hate her do so; they just do not agree. But why the people who love her do so is, in their own terms, a complete mystery. She gave Britain the Single European Act, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the Exchange Rate Mechanism, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, the Children Act, the replacement of O-levels with GCSEs, the destruction of the economic basis of paternal authority in the stockades of male employment, the massive increase in benefit dependency, the rise of Political Correctness, the general moral chaos of the 1980s, the legalisation of abortion up to birth for “severe fetal abnormality” that did not have to be specified, the fight against Victoria Gillick, and that is just the start. Her only Commons defeat was when she tried to make Sunday just another shopping day. The basis of the lockdowns was the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984. Who was the Prime Minister in 1984? For having publicly set fire to the Quran, Martin Frost and Hamit Coskun were both charged under section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986. Who was the Prime Minister in 1986? Three years later, Thatcher’s supporters wanted to use that provision against those who had publicly set fire to The Satanic Verses.

The stockades of working-class male employment were destroyed, and a new ruling elite of middle-class women funded and empowered by the State was created, by the politician who proclaimed the self-made man and the self-made woman, a proclamation of which the inexorable logic is gender self-identification. Just as Thatcher emerged in the Britain of everything from Danny La Rue and Dick Emery to David Bowie and The Rocky Horror Show, so a comparable figure, emerging in the Britain of the 2020s, would be assumed to be a transwoman. Thatcher has already been played by a drag queen at least once on British television, and specifically on Channel 4, which she created, meaning that one of her most abiding legacies is that Britain has two state broadcasters, one of which nevertheless carries advertisements. Thatcherism in a nutshell, as has always been clear from the output.

Was Thatcher “the Iron Lady” when, in early 1981, her initial pit closure programme was abandoned within two days of a walkout by the miners? Was she “the Iron Lady” when she had Nicholas Ridley negotiate a transfer of sovereignty over the Falkland Islands to Argentina, to be followed by a leaseback arrangement, until the Islanders, the Labour Party and Conservative backbenchers forced her to back down? Was she “the Iron Lady” when, within a few months of election on clear commitments with regard to Rhodesia, she simply abandoned them at the Commonwealth Conference in Lusaka? Was she “the Iron Lady” when, having claimed that Britain would never give up Hong Kong, she took barely 24 hours to return to Planet Earth by effecting a complete U-turn? Was she “the Iron Lady” when she took just as little time to move from public opposition to public support of Spanish accession to the Western European Union?

In the Budget of December 1976, Denis Healey and Jim Callaghan had delighted Thatcher by blindsiding the critics of monetarism on the Conservative benches, but was she “the Iron Lady” when she gave up monetarism completely during her second term? Thatcher’s continuous contact with the IRA, universally assumed at the time, has long since been confirmed. Four of the Hunger Strikers’ Five Demands were granted on 6 October 1981, and by 1983 even the right not to do prison work had been conceded. The Lady was as Iron about that as she was about most other things, namely not at all.

Thatcher was, though, true to her assurance in 1979 and in 1983 that, although until 1985 the Ulster Unionist Party remained affiliated to the National Union of Conservative and Unionist Associations, there would be no return to office for Enoch Powell. But then, when told that Thatcher professed to have been influenced by his books on economics, Powell replied that, “She couldn’t have understood them, then.” He baffled her by telling her that he would have fought in the Second World War even if Britain had had a Communist Government. He would still have fought for his country. With no Tory roots, that was beyond her. With deep Liberal roots, she thought that wars were about “values”. That wider conversation was about what was then the recent Falklands War. While Powell had supported it on his own principles, Thatcher had seen it as an example of her dictum that, “If I send British troops abroad, it will be to defend our values.” Many years later, when asked her greatest achievement, she replied, “New Labour.” Quite. Thatcher has been named as her political heroine by Shabana Mahmood, who would issue us all with digital ID, and who would make people who had lived here for at least 10 years earn indefinite leave to remain by performing both paid and unpaid work to her satisfaction.

In 1981, Thatcher did impose an absolute ban on all government work for Andersen in view of its role in the DeLorean fraud, a ban that lasted until the General Election of 1997, when Patricia Hewitt was made Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, having only just entered Parliament from her position as Head of Research at Andersen Consulting. And in 1988, Thatcher and Nigel Lawson did correct the taxation of wealth at a lower rate than earnings until, in 1998, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown put the clock back to the Chancellor of the Exchequer who had gone on, as First Lord of the Treasury, to introduce monetarism to Britain and vice versa. But if those moves made Thatcher a better social democrat than New Labour, then their reversal made New Labour better Thatcherites than Thatcher or even Lawson.

The middle classes were transformed from people like Thatcher’s father into people like her son. She told us, and she really did, that “there is no such thing as society”, in which case there cannot be any such thing as the society that is the family, or the society that is the nation. Even more damagingly, and that is quite a feat, she endorsed the vugar illiteracy that the currency-issuing State had no money of its own, and could therefore “run out of other people’s money”. All in all, she turned Britain into the country that Marxists had always said that it was, even though before her, it never had been. Specifically, Thatcher sold off national assets at obscenely undervalued prices, while subjecting the rest of the public sector, fully 40 per cent of the British economy, to an unprecedented level of central dirigisme.

Thatcher continued public subsidies to private schools, to agriculture, to nuclear power, and to mortgage-holders. Without those public subsidies, the fourth would hardly have existed, and the other three, then as now, would not have existed at all. So much for “You can’t buck the market”. You can now, as you could then, and as she did then. The issue is not whether private schools, agriculture, nuclear power, or mortgage-holding is a good or a bad thing in itself. The issue is whether “Thatcherism” was compatible with their continuation by means of “market-bucking” public subsidies. It simply was not, and is not.

Thatcher’s assault on council housing created the Housing Benefit racket, and it used the gigantic gifting of capital assets by the State to enable the beneficiaries to enter the property market ahead of private tenants, or of people still living at home, who in either case had saved for their deposits. What, exactly, was or is conservative or Tory about that? Or about moving in the characters from Shameless either alongside, or even in place of, the respectable working class?

It is thanks to Thatcher that the Conservatives have been the party of Net Zero for 40 years. Svante Arrhenius first theorised about anthropogenic global warming in 1896, and Thatcher was briefed about it by Sir Crispin Tickell, the then Deputy Under-Secretary of State for Economic Affairs at the Foreign Office. Thatcher always credited Tickell with having convinced her, leading to her speech on the subject to the Royal Society in 27 September 1988, the point at which the agenda of his 1977 Climatic Change and World Affairs entered the political mainstream. Tickell’s briefing of Thatcher was in 1984, tellingly the year that the Miners’ Strike began.

Thatcher began to blather on about environmentalism as a means of Socialist control once she had the dementia that also turned her into a born again Eurosceptic, but she was very Green indeed as Prime Minister, shocking first the Royal Society, and then the United Nations General Assembly, with her passion on the subject. By the time of her speech to the UN on 8 November 1989, she had made Tickell the British Ambassador to it, and the United Kingdom’s Permanent Representative on its Security Council. Johnson described Thatcher’s destruction of the coal industry as “a big early start” towards Net Zero. Her milk-snatching is now held up as a pioneering strike against the wicked dairy industry, as I had been predicting for many years.

In 1979, Thatcher had not initially wanted to meet Menachem Begin in London, since her generation remembered what he was, and afterwards she expressed her regret at not having stuck to her guns. In 1980, she signed the Venice Declaration of nine European countries against Israeli settlements on the West Bank. In 1981, she denounced the Israeli bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, calling it illegal. In 1982, she responded to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon by imposing an arms embargo on Israel that remained in force until 1994; when Begin wrote to ask her to reconsider, then she did not even reply. In 1988, she expelled two Israeli diplomats and closed the London Mossad station when one of its double agents had been convicted of terrorism in Britain and when that station had been caught for a second time forging British passports, a practice that was to resurface, with similar but notably less severe consequences, in 2010; no Israeli diplomat had ever before been deported from a friendly state.

While all of that was to her credit, that would not be the view of her flamekeepers today, any more than they would approve of her attitude when visiting Kiev in June 1990, when she said that Britain would no more open an embassy in Ukraine than in California or Quebec. When the Soviet Union did collapse anyway, then she ludicrously pretended to have brought it down merely because she had happened to be in office at the time. But she did make a difference internationally where it was possible to do so, by providing aid and succour to Pinochet’s Chile and to apartheid South Africa, and by refusing to recognize either the Muzorewa-Smith Government or Joshua Nkomo, thereby paving the way for Robert Mugabe. Known as “the Peking Plotter”, she never saw a Maoist whom she did not like, from Mugabe, to Nicolae Ceaușescu, to Pol Pot. She even sent the SAS to train the Khmer Rouge.

And it was Thatcher who issued what amounted to the open invitation to Argentina, armed by Begin’s Israel, to invade the Falkland Islands, followed by the starved Royal Navy’s having to behave as if the hopelessly out-of-her-depth Prime Minister did not exist, a sort of coup without which those Islands would be Argentine to this day. Until the eve of the invasion, Thatcher had been about to sell the ships that then had to be deployed. At a bargain basement price. To Argentina.