I would just like to remember some words of Saint Francis of Assisi which I think are just particularly apt at the moment. ‘Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.

My school was in Solihull, the second safest Conservative seat in the country, and the whole place was pulsating with excitement at the Conservative election victory – all the same, I think that most of my classmates thought that the speech was pretty mad.

I remember with equal clarity where I was when it ended. I was walking down a back street near Euston station on 28 November 1990. I looked up and saw a sign that someone had placed against an office window. It said: ‘She’s gone.’ Anyone seeing it that day would have known that Margaret Thatcher had resigned as prime minister.

It is not just self-indulgence that makes me begin this book with personal reminiscence. There was something about Margaret Thatcher’s premiership that cut deeply into the personal lives of many British people. In 1985 psychiatrists produced an interesting piece of research that illustrated this. Generally, patients suffering from dementia forget things about the present whilst remembering things that are more permanent. For most of the post-war period, for example, many demented people knew that Queen Elizabeth II was the monarch but could not remember who was the prime minister. Under Thatcher things changed: ‘Mrs Thatcher has given an item of knowledge to demented patients that they would otherwise have lacked: she reaches those parts of the brain other prime ministers could not reach.’

References to Margaret Thatcher suffuse British culture. The head of drama commissioning at the BBC remarked in 2005: ‘the Eighties and Nineties are the new Victorian drama. Contemporary writers are now looking to this era and Thatcher’s influence is huge.’ Speeches delivered in her strange, unnaturally deep voice, the product of careful coaching by her advisers, are used, often incongruously juxtaxposed with the music of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, as a soundtrack to television programmes about the 1980s. Her phrases – ‘The Lady’s not for turning’ or ‘There is no such thing as Society’ – are quoted, though the first of these was coined by someone else and the second is usually quoted out of context. She features in films and plays. She has walk-on parts in novels such as Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (2004). There has even been a musical produced about her career.

This intense focus on Thatcher as a personality, or as a legend, has gone with a declining interest in what her government actually did. The most widely cited works on ‘Thatcherism’ – those by Gamble, Jacques, Jenkins (Peter), Jessop, Kavanagh, Riddell, Skidelsky and Young – were written before Thatcher’s resignation. Stuart Hall’s influential article was published whilst Thatcher was still leader of the opposition. Much was written by journalists, political scientists or left-wing activists, whose interest in Thatcherism was associated with a desire to devise strategies against it. Most of these people moved on to new interests when Thatcher fell. Even the emphasis on the extent to which Thatcherism’s legacy has endured goes, curiously, with a tendency to downplay its importance – Margaret Thatcher is often now presented as though her main historical function was to serve as John the Baptist for Tony Blair.

There has also been a persistent tension in writing about the 1980s between an interest in Thatcher and an interest in Thatcherism. Academic writers, especially those of the Left, felt uncomfortable with the personalization of analysis – uncomfortable too, perhaps, with the ways in which attention to the character of Margaret Thatcher could slide into sexism. In his article of January 1979, Stuart Hall used ‘Thatcherism’ seven times and referred to ‘Mrs Thatcher’ only once. Discussion of the Thatcher government amongst the wider population always laid a heavier emphasis on Margaret Thatcher the woman. Striking miners were said ‘universally’ to use the Rider Hagardesque term ‘she’ for the prime minister. Tory canvassers got so used to hearing the phrase ‘that bloody woman’ that functionaries in Central Office devised the acronym ‘TBW’ – until an unkind interviewer enlightened her, Mrs Thatcher herself thought that the letters stood for the name of a television station. Most of all, there was a cloyingly fake intimacy in the way in which the name ‘Maggie’ entered general circulation. Demonstrators shouted ‘Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, out, out, out.’ Long-suffering audiences at Tory conferences were induced to sing the excruciating ‘Hello Maggie’ to the tune of ‘Hello Dolly’. An excited Norwegian commentator celebrated his country’s defeat of the England football team in 1981 by shouting into the microphone: ‘Can you hear me Maggie Thatcher? Your boys took a hell of a beating tonight.’

The focus of my own book is on Thatcherism as a project rather than Thatcher as a person. My feeling is that John Campbell’s biography of Margaret Thatcher has probably taken us as close to understanding the woman as we are ever likely to get – perhaps closer than she (a person with little taste for introspection) ever got herself. Having said this, I think that the word ‘Thatcherism’ itself became the centre of a debate that sometimes obscured more than it revealed. Many scholars, and at least one of Thatcher’s own ministers, assume that the term was invented by the sociologist Stuart Hall in January 1979. However, as time went on, many writers became uncomfortable with the word and, as was often the case with debates of the 1980s, the two sides of the political spectrum expressed themselves in remarkably similar ways. On the Right, T. E. Utley wrote that ‘Thatcherism’ was a ‘monstrous invention’ that made the government seem more original than it really was. On the Left, Bob Jessop complained that his fellow Marxists had created a ‘monstrous monolith’ by presenting Thatcherism as a coherent phenomenon, overemphasizing the importance of ideology and downplaying the role of division, conjuncture and disagreement.

In fact, the word ‘Thatcherism’ was quite widely used before January 1979 – Thatcher used it, in a flippant aside, in March 1975. The mere fact that the term came into general use suggests a recognition that Margaret Thatcher was associated with something novel and distinctive. However, using the word ‘Thatcherism’ did not imply some platonic absolute of ideological purity that marked a complete break with everything that had gone before it. One should not assume that displays of pragmatism reveal Thatcherism to be somehow ‘false’ because it had failed to live up to abstract ideas that existed in the pamphlets of the Institute of Economic Affairs or the mind of Alfred Sherman. Thatcherism was always about power, and it is the nature of power to adjust to circumstances.

The aims of my account are modest ones. I am aware that, as this book goes to press, I will for the first time be teaching students who were born after Margaret Thatcher resigned. I think there is a need for an account of this period that is designed for people who have no personal memories of it. I have tried to explain who the dramatis personae were, what they stood for, and to answer the simplest of questions: what happened next?

My account is more événementiel than most books on the Thatcher government. When Margaret Thatcher was still leader of the opposition, one of her advisers talked of the need to develop ‘event-led communication’. It seems to me that events such as the 1981 budget, the Falklands War or the miners’ strike probably did more to communicate Thatcherism than the speeches of Sir Keith Joseph. I have stressed the difference between the Conservative Party in opposition from 1975 to 1979 and the party in government – as well as the differences between its various governments. Even my thematic chapters (notably that on Europe) are designed largely to show how thinking on particular issues evolved over time.

I have tried to strike a middle way between the very personalized biographical approaches that revolve around anecdotal details of ‘Maggie’ and the bloodlessly theoretical approaches that revolve around concepts such as ‘relative autonomy of the state’ or ‘hegemony’. I have tried to give attention to the characters of people other than Thatcher and, in particular, to restore her ministers to the story. Thatcher’s flamboyant style sometimes overshadowed that of her colleagues – one writer talked of ‘a tyrant surrounded by pygmies’. A number of Thatcher’s personal advisers or backbench supporters – Gardiner, Sherman and Mount – have also implied that the serious decisions were taken around Thatcher’s kitchen table rather than in formal meetings of the cabinet. My own feeling is that Thatcherism makes more sense if it is examined in large measure through ministers. Studied in purely abstract terms, it is sometimes hard to pin down what Thatcherism was. It is, however, relatively easy to identify who, on the Conservative front bench, were Thatcherites. Few would, I think, deny this title to Howe, Lawson, Nott, Ridley and Tebbit. Ministers are crucial figures when it comes to seeing how the ideas dreamt up in think tanks here converted into policy.

There is one character in this story who was not a minister under Thatcher and never, indeed, a member of the Conservative Party during her leadership of it. I have given considerable attention to Enoch Powell. I should stress that the most important part of the chapter title ‘Thatcherism before Thatcher?’ is the question mark, and that my own answer to the question would be ‘no’. Having said that, Powell does seem to me to be a uniquely important figure in the history of British Conservatism. He thought about many of the matters that concerned Thatcherites and he expressed his conclusions with a degree of clarity and force that they rarely achieved. He also thought about issues – ‘Englishness’, the end of Empire, Ulster – about which most Thatcherites were revealingly silent. Tory ministers regarded him with a mixture of admiration, exasperation and fear. If Thatcherism is to be understood in terms of intellectual history, Powell is vastly more important than any number of Austrian philosophers, American economists or earnest young men at the Adam Smith Institute. Powell is also important because he was a practising politician even if not, judged in conventional terms, a successful one. He understood the realities of power and, for this reason, was often the most eloquent commentator on the differences between Thatcherism and his own ‘purer’ vision of politics.

I think that I differ most sharply from other recent historians in terms of the historical context in which I seek to place Thatcher. David Cannadine, Peter Clark and Ewen Green14 – came to look at Thatcherism after having worked on earlier periods of British history. Not surprisingly, they were very exercised by the occasional references of Thatcherites to the nineteenth century or to ‘Victorian values’, one of them even believed that he had invented this phrase. I am sceptical about all this. I do not believe that Thatcherism seriously sought to make itself the heir to nineteenth-century liberalism, and I think that the occasional references by Thatcherite ministers to Gladstonianism probably had more to do with electoral strategy at a time when the Liberal/Social Democrat alliance was doing well in the polls than with serious thought about the nineteenth century.

I am also sceptical about interpretations that lay much emphasis on thinking in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War or in rejection of the ‘post-war consensus’. In many ways, I see Thatcher as the defender of the post-war consensus (especially in the form in which it was expressed during the 1950s) against the ‘progressive consensus’ of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Thatcher herself, and some of her ministers, made much of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (first published in 1945), which had sought to defend the free market against ‘socialists of all parties’. It is not, however, clear that Thatcher herself read this book until quite late in her career. I suspect that this work merely provided a convenient philosophical polish on things that Thatcherites wanted to do for reasons that had little to do with Hayek’s thinking. When Norman Tebbit was interviewed in 1986, he referred to the writings of ‘Fred what’s his name’; only when an official from Central Office stepped in did it became clear that he was referring to Hayek. Green presents Richard Law, the Conservative MP whose Return from Utopia (1951) defended free-market Conservatism against the encroaching state, as a kind of proto Thatcherite, but I doubt whether many people, other than historians who are concerned with Thatcherism’s intellectual ancestry, have ever paid much attention to his book. It is unclear whether any minister in the Thatcher government had heard of Law at the time they held power.

I see Thatcherism as rooted in a specific time – it emerged out of debates on national decline, trade union power and economic modernization during the 1970s and it ceased to be relevant when those issues became less pressing. If I was forced to give precise dates for a ‘Thatcher era’, then I would suggest 1968-88. The period stretched from Thatcher’s ‘What’s wrong with Politics?’ speech, which can be seen, though only in retrospect, as the first sign that Thatcher represented a distinctive political vision, until her Bruges speech of 1988, which can be seen as the first sign that Thatcherism was beginning to break up.

There are writers, of whom the most prominent is Simon Jenkins, who see Thatcherism as having a life beyond Thatcher’s resignation in 1990 and who, in particular, are interested in the way that Thatcher laid the foundations of New Labour. Obviously, Thatcher changed Britain in ways that mean that we all now live with her legacy. However, Thatcherism cannot be understood unless we recognize the remoteness of the recent past. Thatcher came to power less than twenty five years after the end of the Second World War. Almost half the members of her first cabinet had fought in that war – three of them had been wounded; four had been decorated for gallantry.  This compares to Margaret Thatcher’s immediate successor as prime minister, who had grown up since the Second World War, or to his two successors, both men born after 1945. Tony Blair’s first government in 1997 did not contain a single minister who had ever worn military uniform. Thatcher’s world was dominated by the Cold War. For the whole of her premiership, there really were weapons of mass destruction pointed at London. This coloured not just her attitude to the Soviet Union but her attitude to Europe (especially West Germany), the United States, trade unions in Britain and Britain’s status in the world. The political map changed almost beyond recognition as the Soviet Union reformed during the late 1980s; I think that inability to adjust to these changes partly explains why Thatcherism became less successful during this period. The economy in the early 1980s was different from the economy of the early twenty-first century in ways that cannot be captured with mere statistics. As I lectured on Thatcherism in 2008, I looked at the rows of tiny, garishly coloured mobile phones that my students had laid out on the desks in front of them and I recalled how, when I myself was a student, the Spectator had run a series of articles devoted to the difficulty of getting the nationalized Post Office to install a new phone line in the magazine’s offices.

This book is designed to be dispassionate. I was very much opposed to the Thatcher government when it was in power (or, at least, I often said I was – it is sobering to realize how hard I find it to recapture my own real feelings), and I have never been seriously tempted to vote Conservative. However, I have often felt exasperated by the partisan nature of writing on this subject and particularly by the sneering tone many authors adopt with regard to Margaret Thatcher herself.

Many French historians have managed to write interesting and sympathetic books about de Gaulle and his regime, even when they themselves had opposed him during his life. I feel that it is time British historians attempt to do the same for Margaret Thatcher. I have tried to avoid posing the Sellar and Yeatmanish question of whether or not Thatcher was a ‘good thing’. However, it does seem to me that a little humility on this matter is in order from those of us who denounced Thatcher when she was in power. Many of us claimed repeatedly that the government’s policies were so obviously wrong-headed that they were bound to bring some signal disaster. We should now have the grace to recognize that the signal disaster never arrived and that, at least in its own terms, the government was often – though not always – successful.

Perhaps I should finish the introduction by marking out the limits of this book. This is very largely about what Maurice Cowling, a historian sometimes seen as having been involved in the transformation of Conservative thought during the 1970s, labelled as ‘high politics’. I have made three quite long excursions outside the high politics of the Tory party. One of these involves the Labour Party and the Social Democratic Party in the early 1980s, one of them involves the Falklands War and one of them involves the miners’ strike of 1984-5. I think that all three were particularly important for the Thatcher government. I also think that analysts of Thatcherism have sometimes been too prone to treat all three as though they were acts of God. The electoral collapse of the Labour Party, British victory in the South Atlantic and the poor tactics of Arthur Scargill are invoked as evidence that Margaret Thatcher was ‘lucky’. Thatcher clearly was lucky (no one would survive as prime minister for ten years unless they had some spectacular good fortune). But there was more to it than luck. Sometimes, the failure of Thatcher’s enemies had deeper causes, often related to the social changes that had brought Thatcher to power in the first place; sometimes, it was due, to a greater extent than the government’s critics have cared to concede, to skilful management by Thatcher and her colleagues.

Having said all this, I have not tried to write a social history of Britain in the 1980s. I have not, for example, attempted any serious research on whether British people during this decade were increasingly likely to define themselves in terms of consumption rather than work. I have discussed questions such as ‘why did many British coal miners return to work before their union authorized them to do so during the strike of 1984-5?’; ‘why did people buy their council houses?’ or, for that matter, ‘why did they vote Conservative?’ on the basis of information that is already in the public domain.

Equally, this is not a history of the world from 1975 to 1990. Thatcher existed in an international context. Her positions on many issues, not just those directly relating to the Soviet Union, were born of the Cold War. Her political demise was in many ways, associated with the fact that reform in the Soviet Union shot away the foundations of her political world. It would be possible to write a different kind of history that presented Thatcherism as one element in a global transition and which attempted to discern the extent to which changes in Britain were effects or causes of a change that brought down Soviet Communism and strengthened capitalism in most of the world. On the whole, my interests have been confined to looking at the extent to which British politics were influenced by events in the wider world. I have not attempted to say how far British policy influenced those wider events or, for that matter, to say very much about the extent to which Thatcherism might have been part of a wider pattern. I do think that looking at the international context can be useful on one very simple level: it cuts Britain down to size. Thatcher led the British Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. During these years, China saw all the extraordinary upheaval that lay between the death of Chairman Mao and the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre. The year Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party was also the year Vaclav Havel wrote his open letter to the president of Czechoslovakia – a brave and, as it seemed at the time, hopeless gesture of defiance against authoritarianism. In 1990 Havel, himself now president of the Czechoslovkia, dined in Downing Street. Between 1975 and 1990, Chile went from the worst years of state-sponsored murder to being, more or less, a democracy. All this reminds us that the Anglocentric obsession with Thatcherism as a ‘revolution’ needs to be judged against countries where politics really could be a matter of life and death.

© Richard Vinen 2009

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