Thatcher (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Thatcher Rodney Barker Thatcher. By E.H.H. Green. London: Hodder Arnold. 2006. x, 244 pp. £12.99 (paperback). ISBN 0340759771. Green's account begins after 1979 with an economy and a party in decline, and a prime minister with the worst public rating since polls began. It ends with a world where Thatcher has already moved to the lecture circuit, and the audience primed by her being given a play both continuous and distinct by another charismatic politician, Tony Blair. In between, from the fillip provided by the FalklandsWar to the downfall over Europe and the poll tax, Green charts the slow rise and growing and ultimately destructive confidence of the most successful British prime minister and party leader of the twentieth century, who presided over an economic and political revolution, and set the environment for those who followed her. Tony Blair's brief dalliance with 'communitarianism' had as much in common with Thatcher's 'our people' as it did with any of his socialist predecessors. Green charts the shifts in Margaret Thatcher's reputation, and of that reputation's creation and presentation, the public face and its private construction. It is a compelling account, from the spin put on her younger life by the aspirant politician, to the early hesitations over how to respond to grass roots Conservative hostility to organized labour. With success in office Thatcher developed not only her confidence but her perspective. When she first came to power she was neither familiar with nor greatly interested in the rest of the world. This changed, as she slowly realised it was there but that she did not much care for most of it. The performance on stage is interpreted by an extensive use of statements, speeches, and the (relatively sparse) writings, the preparation behind the proscenium and in the dressing room by a meticulous use of archives and private papers. The book is a relaxed and authoritative use of an impressive foundation of evidence and research which, like its protagonist, conceals the substance of the construction in the elegant precision of the presentation. In telling this story, Green has an often deliciously neat turn of phrase. He comments on the consequences of Thatcher's privatisations and the concentration [End Page 273] of shares in a few corporate hands that when it came to shareholders' meetings ' "capitalist democracy" faced the same bloc vote issue as had so often been the basis of Thatcherite criticism of the TUC'. He observes that when forming her cabinets she had thought it 'essential to have "six good men and true", which indicated to some that she felt Jesus Christ had been overmanned'. Just as Green is good on the cultivation of reputation, so he is on the role of myth, the first being the Selsdon myth, where a meeting in a Croydon hotel came to represent a range of hopes, particularly of the liberal economic right, which would not have been justified by what was actually agreed at Selsdon Park. But it was the reputation, the myth, that mattered. Green sees Thatcher as if not the assassin, then at least the undertaker, of Conservatism, undermining and eroding organic, traditional conceptions and values, and dismissing conciliation and moderation in favour of liberal economics. But there was a strand of tory paternalism in Thatcher, although it had become strident and intolerant, and this organic element lay in a feature of her political persona that Green presents with great skill. She was a populist, but for a precisely located people: not the people, but our people. Where socialists had had the working class, Thatcher had the middle class, and all those who aspired to be part of it. This provided plenty of aversions and aspirations which had little to do with market individualism and did indeed conflict with it. New Age travellers were definitely not free individuals who could be left to pursue their own goals without the paternal hand of the state, any more than were trade unionists, whilst immigrants with alien customs were people who might 'swamp' the world inhabited by ordinary folk. To talk of 'enemies' within is to depart some way from any kind of liberalism. But Thatcher...