FROM THATCH TO THATCHER: A FEW THOUGHTS

In the face of American media adulation and British vitriol, I’d like to offer a few scattered notes and a brief appreciation of Margaret Thatcher by someone uncomfortable with both.

In the first place, few people seem to want to remember how uniquely awful Britain was in the early Seventies. I’m interested in cars, and this was the decade when hidebound management and completely surrealist union practices together killed Europe’s greatest motor industry, so that today there is not one single genuine mass-market British marque left on British roads. It was a sign of the times, repeated in many areas.

Britain had emerged from the Swinging Sixties as the prime sufferer from the West’s hangover that began with the October 1973 Yom Kippur War and the resulting oil crisis. Playtime was over; gloom set in, big-time. Moreover, it had got rid of its Empire precipitately, under international pressure, and found itself with no thanks from anyone and as many complications as before, if not more.

I do not know what Margaret Thatcher was thinking, but I’ve often speculated. Here is my theory. She looked at this hung-over society, headachy from the passing of the Beatles and Carnaby Street – which had never been more than a brief buzz – and incapable of going back to the sound if boring stability that preceded them: a society that had lost its decent bearings and was incapable of finding substitutes; a society that for want of better ideas was retreating into atavistic class-war clichés and trying hard to ignore the modern world.

Now, my theory is that she then looked at Hogarth.

Contemplating  Hogarth and Rowlandson (and perhaps Fielding) made her wonder where all that raw and riotous English energy had gone. Into timid gentrification? Into imitating the playing fields of Eton in the Hampstead Garden Suburb? Into sterile class-war gestures? Into worrying about national decline?

So she tried to bring it back; or rather, to let it out again, because (she was convinced) it had never gone away. And if that meant less politeness, less courtesy, less timidity, so be it. She wanted a pre-Victorian Britain back: a Britain that made the Duke of Wellington hope the enemy was as afraid of his troops as he was; a Britain that conquered the Plains of Abraham; a Britain that ruled half the planet, fairly if possible but energetically at all times.

She recognised that in the modern world, power has primarily to do with money. So unchaining power meant unchaining money. What the French call ‘la libéralisation’ ensued: she won a merciless battle with the all-powerful trade unions, and helped create Britain as a post-industrial, financial power.

In 1981, Argentina’s war on the Falklands allowed her a morally justified military operation that did much to restore British pride in the armed forces.

Of course, her ruthless modernization did away with much that denizens and lovers of an older Britain held dear. The sense of discretion, civility, quiet common sense, and stoicism in the face of adversity that used to characterise the country went by the board; and some Frenchmen found their old ‘frenemy’ returning to earlier ways. ‘Les Anglais sont des brutes épaisses (the English are gross brutes),’ a French friend remarked to me, not unpleased at seeing his ancient prejudices reconfirmed.  And in a remark that focused  much of the difference, former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan – the product of a far more aristocratic Scottish middle class -- murmured through his moustache, ‘The lady is selling the family silver.’

She was often referred to as a grocer’s daughter, the implication being that she had no gentility, no compassion and a middle-class mercantile disposition. Her patriotism also was a little strident, more Daily Mail than the old Thunderer.

She was a rival Queen, and her relations with the real Monarch were reputedly cool. But like the first Elizabeth, she manipulated her male courtiers with considerable talent, and at least one, Ian Gow, seems to have been her Christopher Hatton, genuinely in love with her until an IRA bomb murdered him.

She was what we would now call a Eurosceptic, realising that Britain would always have three spheres of activity none of which it could or should neglect: Europe, certainly, but also the Atlantic relationship with America, and the Commonwealth. Given that outlook, she had considerable influence outside Europe, notably in her friendship with President Reagan and in her encouragement of Mikhail Gorbachev.

In fairness, it should be said that much of what lovers of the older Britain regretted and regret had already been lost when she came to power. The Sixties changed the country’s culture far more radically than she did. The Seventies were a time of ruin, morosity, wildcat strikes everywhere and loathing. She picked the country up, shook it till its teeth rattled, kicked it in the seat of its pants, and set it on a new course. Richer but more vulgar; faster and more thrusting; more successful but more brutal.

I grew up in the older Britain, which I loved. But by 1974 that had disappeared, at least in public discourse. (In private it still lives on, in small towns and villages, at least wherever cottages do not have vast shiny BMWs parked outside.) My feelings toward the new Britain (now known as the You Kay) are ambiguous. As are those toward that strong, often harsh, often charming, intelligent woman. Her last pictures show the narrow, suspicious, angry eyes of Alzheimer’s, which I’ve seen close up in real life, and which I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Someone tweeted furiously, ‘Iron Lady, Rust in Peace.’ She did not initiate but completed the change in her country. She did a mighty if controversial job. She deserves her rest.