HISTORY: Always with us
12 years of hurt
Twelve years ago today Mrs Thatcher won the 1st ballot of the 1990 Tory leadership election. Four days later, on the morning of Thursday 24th November, we learned that she wasn’t after all going to ‘fight on, and fight to win’. And how wrong it seemed — and if not wrong, then unnatural, or at any rate, how supremely implausible it was that soon someone other than Mrs Thatcher was going to do all those things Mrs Thatcher did. Who was going to wear the Gloriana ballgowns to the Mansion House? Or the natty hats in Russia? Or tell the rest of the Commonwealth, ‘when it’s fifty against one, the one can be right’? Who, for heaven’s sake, was going to preside over those Chequers Christmas lunches where we all watched the placement like Kremlinologists to see which favourites were up and which were out? The world had stopped making sense, and for an entire generation of Conservative men, it’s hasn’t been sensible ever since.
Of course, if you weren’t that taken with Mrs Thatcher, your feelings weren’t quite those outlined above, but your sheer surprise is liable to have been the same. If not greater: many Thatcher haters had either given up hope, or, alternatively, had become psychologically dependent on having her round to blame for everything. They, in time, got over it, found themselves jobs presenting jubilee concerts at Buckingham Palace, and generally reintegrated themselves into society. Not so Thatcher’s children — and revealingly they were aged from nine to ninety — for whom the world has been out of kilter ever since. The man this is worst news for is whoever today is failing to fill her shoes as Tory leader. He, consumed almost certainly by these same urges himself, faces a party where her fall has legitimised every subsequent spitting at authority, and every act of defiance against every leadership. For what authority, what legitimacy can her successors hope to have?
It began as it has continued ever since, with stupefaction among her most determined supporters. I guarantee that if you do your sociological selection carefully enough, and end up with the appropriate sort of right wing male (key hints: currently moth-balled chalk stripes, a propensity for knitted ties, and a black, furled umbrella topped off with a gold band, straight out of the ‘how to dress like Neville Chamberlain’ picture book) it’ll be second nature to him to recite the sacred litany. To recall the slumber of Peter Morrison, to invoke the No Turning Back brigade turned away from the Prime Minister at midnight, to become confused and angry on thinking on Catherine Place (for younger readers, it should be noted that this is a street, not a person, and was then home to Tristan Garel-Jones, another character from myth and legend).
This then is the secret mental life of the men, engaged or otherwise, who make up what should be the most dynamic part of the Tory family today. Yet from the blue chip merchant bankers, but then student leaders, who can’t sleep at night because ‘she fell on my watch’, to the then Oxford Union sewers, but now thrusting, picture-by-lined hacks tongue tied and guilty still when brought into her presence, closure is some way off.
How many still wake up each morning thinking on that crisp, bright winter day twelve years ago? Thinking on people ripping Standard posters down as quickly as they appeared, or the stupefied air at, to chose one example at random, the IEA. All across Tory London a spontaneous public holiday occurred, and it wasn’t a day of mourning for all either — more than a few smiling TRG types were lucky to survive the night. And that terrible evening, with the unexpected manly tears pouring out from Westminster Palace Gardens, and all other points west.
Worse still, there’s no sign that time is going to do its work and heal this wound — far from everyone in the tribe unconsciously agreeing to forget, every new Tory born into the world seems to come fully formed with a view on the subject. Try meeting bright eyed late teens and early twenty-somethings. You might well assume that ‘Lady Thatcher’ would have for them merely the curio value, oh, Madame Chiang Kai-shek has for anyone who’s had a hangover in the 1980s, but I for one was unprepared for the living commitment these newly minted disciples were evidently prepared to give. That awful, boring book, The Downing St Years invariably looms larger than the bible in a puritan household, and more than that — they’ll consume anything which touches on the holy stuff. You’d come upon nineteen year old interns tracking down Bruce Anderson’s John Major on Ebay because, ‘my mate’s older brother at Hull told me it’s got the best first hand account of, you know’.
The only notable difference between book-based Thatcherites, and those who were there, is that yoof can handle it that bit more matter of factly. Though all mystically ardent patriots, the defenestration is just an historical wrong for them — like being a roundhead or losing Calais, one needs to have a view on it, but one can’t, realistically, start weeping at the thought of it. Not so the lifeguard Mrs Thatcher has found herself encumbered by. Any sudden recollection, for example, of ‘the final debate’ in the recently televised House of Commons (“I may very well do that” — how fresh it seems, the answer to Dennis Skinner’s catcall that she was off to run the ECB) perhaps won’t cause him to well up the same way, say, archive footage of Hermes returning home after the Falklands to cheering, early 80s crowd scenes will, but it’s all mixed up in the same witch’s brew of memory. The thing that he’s staying loyal to is, obviously, his own belief that he too, in his own, microscopic fashion, shared in her righteousness on all those battles fought and won, the miners, the Europeans, the Soviets, and on and on it goes, forever right, forever triumphant.
Beyond group-psychobiography, there are plenty of solid, contemporary reasons for the persistence of this cult. The achievements haven’t gone away, so there seems little practical purpose in abstaining from the devotion. It’s all around in the fact that Mrs Thatcher still has iconic status, and still demands interest and attention. That this isn’t entirely circular reasoning is shown by the conduct of the present Prime Minister. Mr Blair both was drawn himself into a weird relationship with Lady Thatcher — the relentless wooing before the 1997 election, and the subsequent trips she made back to Downing St when he was Prime Minister and in need of ‘advice’ on foreign affairs and war-making — and lacks himself anything like the cult she so rapidly acquired. Say what you like about Tony Blair, Blairism and Blairites, it’s children dressing up compared to the intensity of Thatcherism and Thatcherites.
As Mr Blair weighs up whether the Fire Brigades will give him his ‘Scargill moment’ the real test he faces is one of his own nerve — never mind the rights or wrongs of the dispute, he knows what the template is he’s going to be measured against. Whether black-hearted capitalist or socialist firebrand all will judge his response to this strike by comparing what he does to what ‘she’ would have done. That they ‘know’ what she would have done, if still in office, says it all about the persistence of Thatcherism in the national psyche.
At some point, Lady Thatcher’s cheery reminder to a troubled Iain Duncan Smith that ‘we all die’ will take on a wider relevance. All about little landmarks fall away — even her Smith Square party office, the very building it was in, has been disposed of by the party. Until the moment comes, the legend will go on burnishing itself. We’ll keep hearing those stories about poor Mr Duncan Smith at the US Ambassador’s diner table, being instructed from the other side, ‘speak up Iain, we can’t hear you’. She’ll keep on being the standard which her heirs fail to meet, but the interesting thing is, who her heirs truly are. Predictably enough, it’s the Marxists who were right all along.
For all Mrs Thatcher’s self-conscious appeal to new Britain, and the new Britons, where she struck her deepest chord was with beleaguered old Britain. Socialist thinkers like Andrew Gamble had it spot on when they said, at the time, that Thatcherism was at root a reactionary project, standing to benefit rentiers economically, and the status quo constitutionally. To borrow the title of his book, it was a case of the free economy and the strong state. You have only to look at how the constitutional settlement she pickled has been torn up by this government to see how she, and almost certainly, she alone, stood in the way of profound constitutional change. This was a reactionary project, not a ‘radical’ one. Her victims were the old right’s traditional enemies, her beneficiaries, were, above all else, the children of the ancien regime. With manners and gratitude appropriate to their station, they love her for it still.
John Rugby, November 20, 2002 11:09 PM