The Unfinished Revolution

Abstract

‘Mrs Margaret Thatcher is the first outsider to reach 10 Downing Street since Bonar Law’, Jock Bruce-Gardyne was later to observe admiringly: Several others — Ramsay MacDonald, Ted Heath, Jim Callaghan — may have started from the wrong side of the tracks. But long before they reached the pinnacle of the political system all of them had been welcomed to the Club. Not so Mrs Thatcher … No matter how long she remains at Downing Street, she will never be absorbed by the Establishment.1 It does seem true to say of twentieth-century British Prime Ministers, only the exotic Lloyd George, the short-lived Bonar Law, and Mrs Thatcher did not become creatures of the Establishment. By this was meant the established institutions of the British State and the social arrangements that surround them — the Monarchy and the various estates of the Realm, the Church of England, the learned professions, Oxford and Cambridge, the Public Schools, the Foreign Office, the Higher Civil Service generally, and, in former days, The Times newspaper. What Bruce-Gardyne’s analysis neglected was that there was another Establishment, the Establishment of ideas, what it would be reasonable to call the ‘liberal’ Establishment. These ideas had penetrated the social Establishment, and had seemed even to overwhelm a once serious institution like the BBC.KeywordsPrime MinisterPublic ExpenditureConservative PartyEconomic LiberalismPolitical ClassThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.