To Deal With The Reality

Kemi Badenoch cannot abandon Net Zero, because her heroine is Margaret Thatcher. 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.

Although 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, 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. Boris Johnson described her destruction of the British 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 predicted for many years.

This is not an aberration. In the Budget of December 1976, Denis Healey and Jim Callaghan delighted Thatcher by blindsiding the critics of monetarism on the Conservative benches, and the rest is history. 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 was charged under section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986. Who was the Prime Minister in 1986?

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 massively increased benefit dependency, the rise of Political Correctness, the general moral chaos of the 1980s, the legalisation of abortion up to birth, the fight against Victoria Gillick, and that is just the start. 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 Thatcher 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.

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 effect 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? Was she “the Iron Lady” when she gave up monetarism completely during her second term? And so on.

The middle classes were transformed from people like Thatcher’s father into people like her son. She told us that there was “no such thing as society”, in which case there could not be any such thing as the society that was the family, or the society that was the nation. No less destructively, she popularised the illiterate notion that the currency-issuing State had no money of its own and could “run out of other people’s money”. 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. She 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.

In 1980, Thatcher signed the Venice Declaration of nine European countries against Israeli settlements on the West Bank. I am very glad that she did, but what would her modern devotees say to that? In 1981, she denounced the Israeli bombing of Iraq’s Osiraq nuclear reactor, calling it illegal, which Keir Starmer has today slapped down David Lammy for calling present Israeli actions, a rebuke wholly in line with Conservative Party or Reform UK policy. In 1982, she responded to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon by imposing an arms embargo on Israel that remained in force until 1994. What does the Daily Telegraph or the Daily Mail say about people who called for an arms embargo on Israel now? When Menachem Begin wrote to ask her to reconsider, then she did not even reply. What would GB News do to anyone who treated Benjamin Netanyahu like that? She had not wanted to meet that unrepentant anti-British terrorist when he had visited London, and having done so, then she said that she wished that she had stuck to her guns. Speaking of guns, he still hated Britain enough to arm Argentina during the Falklands War. Meanwhile, the Thatcher Government’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 could have her moments, though. Her absolute ban on all government work for Andersen in view of its role in the DeLorean fraud lasted until the General Election of 1997, when the position of Secretary of State for Trade and Industry was given to Patricia Hewitt. Hewitt had secured employment from Neil Kinnock by writing him a gushing letter of support during his Leadership campaign, exactly the same as the one that she had sent simultaneously to Roy Hattersley. She went on to help found the Institute for Public Policy Research, and then, soon after Tony Blair became Leader, to become Head of Research at Andersen Consulting. That was a position for which she had no apparent qualification beyond her closeness to the Prime Minister in Waiting. In 1997, she entered Parliament, he entered Downing Street, and the Labour commitment to regulate such companies was dropped. Andersen paid just over £21 million of the £200 million that Thatcher and John Major had demanded, barely covering the Government’s legal costs. It went on to write, among other things, a report claiming that the Private Finance Initiative was good value for money. That was the only report on the subject that the Blair Government ever cited, since it was the only one to say that ridiculous thing. Hewitt and Blair tried to give auditors limited liability. It took the Conservative Opposition and the Bush Administration to see them off. What have Thatcher’s flame-keepers to say about the fact that she was a far better social democrat than Hewitt or Blair?

In 2022, there was a rare television depiction of Thatcher. In Prince Andrew: The Musical, she was played by one Baga Chipz, a drag queen. Gender self-identification is the inexorable logic of the self-made man or the self-made woman, and a figure comparable to Thatcher, emerging in the Britain of the 2020s, would be assumed to be a transwoman, just as Thatcher herself emerged in the Britain of everything from Danny La Rue and Dick Emery to David Bowie and The Rocky Horror Show. In a generation’s time, everyone will be saying out loud that Blair had always been as androgynous as Thatcher. Leo Abse wrote an eye-opening book on each of them.

Thatcher ludicrously pretended to have brought down the Soviet Union merely because she happened to be in office when that Union happened to collapse, as it would have done anyway. 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 she who issued what amounted to the open invitation to Argentina 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.