"Labour is stuck because they do not want to carry on the slimming down of the state and devolution of power but nor do they really want to reverse it," said one central Tory figure. There are still some great comics doing political material, with Mark Steel and Mark Thomas flying the flag of alternative comedy, while people such as Josie Long and Chris Coltrane find the funny in activism. She was the first prime minister to be more accountable to the international market than to the British economy. It always struck me as peculiar, too, when the Spice Girls briefly championed Thatcher as an early example of girl power. November 15, 2020 9:00 AM EST. She is an anomaly; a product of the freak-onomy of her time. She famously changed the law after Bobby Sands was elected in Fermanagh and South Tyrone. The US academic Cass Sunstein was in Britain at the end of last month. But the left also needs to look beyond the turbulent events in Europe to appreciate the speed of global change and the complications this creates for welfare-laden economies: the dynamos and innovators are increasingly found in Africa, Asia and Latin America rather than France, Germany and Spain. she warned that she was not An author and a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan staked her claim to speechwriting fame as a primary writer for former U.S. President Ronald Reagan.Her notable speeches include Reagan's "Boys of Pointe du Hoc" address, given on the 40 th anniversary of D-Daythe day Allied troops invaded Normandy in World War IIas well as the former president's . Draining down those 11 years to their memorable essence, what does one light upon? Margaret Thatcher's most popular book is The Downing Street Years. It's telling that Tony Blair's domestic legacy amounts to two responses to Thatcherism: forcing Labour to accept it and then compensating for the damage the Tories had wreaked through sustained underinvestment in the public realm. Knocking up a flan for Denis or helping Carol with her algebra or Mark with his gun-running, are jarring distractions from the main narrative; woman as warrior queen. A longer version of this article appears on Gerry Adams' blog, Margaret Thatcher was good at destruction. But the sense of community evaporated. The British inflation was in 1975 up at 24, 11% [] and with the union's constant claim for higher salaries, nobody expected it to drop to a normal level. She became leader of the Conservatives the year I was born and prime minister when I was four. Only today are we facing the cost. She usually knew the limits to public tolerance, gauging how much of the spirit of '45 abided, so even if it was between gritted teeth, she forced herself to say, "The NHS is safe in our hands": she reorganised but did not privatise it. It is odd to reflect that in Thatcher's time, the British novel enjoyed a comparatively lively resurgence. speech to the House of Lords in June 1993. Ultimately, despite the despondent times of the Cold War and the waning confidence of the citizens, Margaret Thatcher delivered her eulogy speech in belief of President Ronald Reagan and used the rhetorical appeals of pathos, imagery, metaphor, and ethos to accomplish his presidency as successful. to his resignation letter on 1 November, stated She was immensely brisk. The organised working class, almost alone, had put Britain on the skids. If you behave like there's no such thing as society, in the end there isn't. Mrs T shared the same reductionism. From the valleys of Wales to the far reaches of Scotland, miners were, by and large, socialists by nature but this was tempered by strong Christian beliefs. No elderly person would be deprived of the dignity of spectacles, dentures or a hearing aid because they couldn't afford them. The leading feminist Natasha Walter called Thatcher "the great unsung heroine of British feminism". I have few recollections of Thatcher after the slowly chauffeured, weepy Downing Street cortege. Thatcher answered that question, re-energising the concept of democratic leadership. The economy had become more productive, more competitive and more profitable. There was, for example, the time in the late 1970s when, as Opposition Leader, she almost succeeded in censoring the one half-decent joke in a key campaign speech. Author: Margaret Thatcher Year: 1979 Location: London, the UK Occasion: Address to the Parliament. In the north of Ireland she had the army and the Diplock courts which reached their peak in the mid 1980s. For those miners and their families to be referred to as the "enemy within" by Thatcher was something they would never forgive and, if there is rejoicing at her death in those communities she set out to destroy, it can only be understood against this background. By 1990 it was transformed. Council house sales and advertising campaigns that encouraged the public to buy shares in privatised companies were meant to broaden the appeal of capitalism. The author Nassim Taleb traded equations on a whiteboard with Gus O'Donnell, then head of the civil service, as they debated econometrics; at another, I watched entranced as Lord Heseltine argued urban policies with Harvard's Ed Glaeser. Handbag. She had left a Britain marked by private affluence and public squalor. She forced us to decide what was truly important. They were puzzled by the Scots' antipathy, given the Falklands war and the strong militaristic history of the Highlands and elsewhere. I wouldn't say I have got myself a Kennedy-type speech-writer yet . Like John Major in her wake, Thatcher was convinced that she understood the Scots yet couldn't understand why we remained so stubbornly resistant towards the notion of understanding her. Typifying these highly dubious claims about Thatcher was this (appropriately diplomatic) statement from President Obama: "The world has lost one of the great champions of freedom and liberty, and America has lost a true friend." in his defence during the IranContra affair later that year.. Elected for a third term in June 1987, she told But on the subject of Europe, Thatcher became a contradictory figure. The word "free" is used to help the audience When the late Christopher Hitchens was a political reporter for the New Statesman, he corrected the prime minister on a point of fact, and she was quick to correct Hitchens in turn. I will know that we have finally broken from the kind of capitalism that she championed and which died in 2008 when we see workers elected on to company boards. From the invention of the term "sado-monetarism" through to the way her powerful ministers seemed to swoon before her, and the constant negative reiteration by her critics of her femininity, or lack of it, she exerted a glacial hold over the (male) nation's masochistic imagination. they did not want her to go on (21 November) and that night she made the The resignation was announced It led to riots that nobody needed. Reagan would challenge Gerald Ford, the sitting president, the next year. This is what we mean by the Thatcher revolution, imposing on Britain, for better or for worse, some of the liberalisation that the major continental economies know,20 years later, they still need. Mobilising society, by rule of law, against the trade union bosses was undoubtedly an achievement. It was thoroughly "wet". Margaret Thatcher's most popular book is The Downing Street Years. They are acolytes of a raw Thatcher cult they have rough-hewn and exaggerated in their own image. MT prayed on the I'd become a delinquent, living on heroin and benefit fraud. Former Tory MP Louise Mensch, with no apparent sense of irony, invoked precepts of propriety to announce: "Pygmies of the left so predictably embarrassing yourselves, know this: not a one of your leaders will ever be globally mourned like her.". There are many reasons for this. In 2009, Boris Johnson lamented that Thatcher had become "a boo-word in British politics, a shorthand for selfishness and me-first-ism, and devil-take-the-hindmost and grinding the faces of the poor.". in his defence during the IranContra affair, told Philip Larkin visited Downing Street where the prime minister quoted approvingly one of his lines to him "Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives." She gave Nigel Lawson at the Treasury his head and was genuinely alarmed when he cut income tax to 40%. Whatever else may be true of her, Thatcher engaged in incredibly consequential acts that affected millions of people around the world. The impact that Hayek's writing had on Thatcher, her advisors, and her policies is undeniable. After all, the right began to refocus only after Tony Blair's second landslide, when people began to recognise they would not drift back into power. The time was 1973. But she also provided great material. Thatcher understood the connection between the social wage and workers' wages better than most unions. Almost everything said of Thatcher's early years was untrue, partly through her own invention. "What's going on there, mate?" Take the larger view. The spell of community. Yet her understanding of Britain was alarmingly crude. In her 1982 party conference speech, Margaret Thatcher offered a prediction for the future: "How absurd it will seem in a few years' time that the state ran Pickfords removals and Gleneagles Hotel." Privatisation was the single most massive attack on democracy we have seen. When a political leader dies, it is irresponsible in the extreme to demand that only praise be permitted but not criticisms. The proportion of children living in relative poverty more than doubled during the 80s, and the damage has never been undone. Flags were flying over Port Stanley on 14 June. making her big speech the following day as scheduled. Margaret Thatcher's Speech to Congress. The credit boom both here and in the USA may have gone against her Grantham roots but was an equally inevitable result of deregulation and the temptation of easy loans for people hungry to improve living standards. Cabinet rank in 1970 without appearing on television more than a handful They're not Thatcher. When I started knocking on Highland doors in May 1983, two things struck me more than any other. Had Jim Callaghan won the 1979 election, he too would have faced the challenge of how to modernise an economy beset by high inflation, weak management and poor industrial relations. drew an important moral from the Falklands war: "We have ceased to In the three years after the shipment they killed 224 and wounded scores more. It is no coincidence the three most influential centre-right thinktanks were all conceived over the following months. A strong, so strong, leader. Asked to report on the "state of things" in our country, we could barely see past her. History will judge her, but not a country in Europe was untouched by Thatcher's example. The real comic nemeses of Thatcher were the puppets of Spitting Image. Demanding that no criticisms be voiced to counter that hagiography is to enable false history and a propagandistic whitewashing of bad acts, distortions that become quickly ossified and then endure by virtue of no opposition and the powerful emotions created by death. In 1982, the English Collective of Prostitutes occupied a church for 12 days in protest against "police illegality and racism in King's Cross" the area to which many sex workers known as "Thatcher's girls" had travelled from high unemployment areas in the Midlands and the north. John Major, the "detoxification" successor, was fated to implement many of her unattempted reforms. It is full of insights into a neglected aspect of how Thatcher came to dominate British politics." (Andrew Gamble, University of Sheffield, UK) "A fascinating insight into the world of speech writing. "Being powerful is like being a lady. Thatcher's infamous failure to recognise the existence of society was a double failure. Margaret Thatcher might seem to some like an unlikely pioneer of the need for climate action but, in the late 1980s, she made a series of remarkable speeches and interventions on the subject and . Debate continues on whether Margaret Thatcher saved or destroyed British industry, but there is one industry that she practically created. One of the few direct hits scored in the modern era was when Alex Ross and James Herring remixed Nick Clegg's bizarre "I'm sorry" speech and turned it into a hilarious R&B tune. Each was characterised by her attention to detail. of times. On the day Thatcher died, the Daily Mail ran a piece claiming that Coco Chanel "was a feminist before the word existed". They are a more energetic and impressive group than their predecessors, often with experience outside politics that makes them impatient and independent-minded. She pointed out that she was only 10 years old when she ceased to be prime minister. Action. The core ideas that underpinned her government endured through 13 years of Labour and are being extended by the coalition. The great contradiction in her politics was that someone who yearned for the certainties of small-town shopkeeper economics helped create the amoral yuppiedom of 80s excess and an explosion of cultural resistance that is still an ironic positive legacy of her time in power. at The Hague in May 1992. In the pantheon of this comedian's attacks on Thatcher, it was a retort that probably won't be treasured longer than the best lines from The Young Ones. press to rejoice at the capture of South Georgia on 25 April 1982, announced that White Whatever Tory historians like to claim, this was the critical turning point. It was perfectly justified to note that, particularly as the Guardian also explained that "to the millions who revered him a third of the country, according to some polls a messiah has fallen, and their grief will be visceral." performance at a Press Conference afterwards, the Second was the particular hostility towards Margaret Thatcher and her local ministerial spear-carrier, energy minister and incumbent MP of 13 years' standing, Hamish Gray. A senior civil servant said, "It worked because we all knew exactly what she wanted.". Rishi Sunak 20 July 2022 9:30pm. Sharp definition, hard edges, no effort at fuzzy contours (David Cameron, take note). This is not the Highland way. After material needs have been met, research has repeatedly shown that further rises in material standards contribute less and less to wellbeing. Out! Copyright Margaret Thatcher Foundation 2023. Britain's record on innovation and investment have been extremely poor, while the hollowing out of manufacturing left the economy over-dependent on the de-regulated City. She was the daughter of a prosperous civic leader who merely began life as a "grocer". Ronald Reagan, the former 40th president of the United States died on June 5th of 2004. The state retained control of some nationalised industries the railways, for example but BT, British Airways, British Steel, British Gas and the British Airports Authority were among the big companies sold off. The most important thing Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did for British politics was to understand the significance of Thatcherism and to decide not to reverse it, indeed to carry it forward. Until then Thatcher had shown the strength of her weakness: a dislike of consensus and aversion to debate, leading to decisive action. At an international conference in Lisbon in the late 80s, the British faction, among whom were Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Malcolm Bradbury and myself, referred back to Thatcher constantly in our presentations. Capitalism flourishes on debt, but she insisted that economics were best understood as Mr Micawber's formula in which happiness and misery were separated by a shilling. But the choice captures her perfectly. For a start, she had a superb memory for a brief, and she would have had no problem memorising quickly any number of lines. On the other hand, growth has been depressed because weak trade unions can no longer ensure wage increases keep pace with inflation. She was lucky in surviving the IRA's bomb. Back when we called her Maggie, when it seemed she would have her wish and "go on and on" in ruling the country, her opponents would lament some new step towards social ruin with the withering, two-word verdict: "Thatcher's Britain.". On the crucial morning in November 1990, her colleagues marched individually into her room and each told her to go. It never was. The Crown Season 4 brings with it a whole lot of change for Queen Elizabeth II's family and, more importantly, the United Kingdom. And, of course, Nelson provided the intelligence. Her gender led her into government and the shadow cabinet, despite Edward Heath's aversion to her. The place was her office at the Department of Education, then in Curzon Street. Since 1990 a selection of statements is listed. Thatcher is gone, but Thatcherism has infected and discredited all mainstream parties, depriving us of a chance to turn it down. Thatcher was suspicious of democracy. bowling at the Lord Mayor's Banquet (12 November) and gave Margaret Thatcher. Yet, at that last encounter, her tone was different. I will be the heir to Margaret Thatcher. This is an especially pertinent problem given its heartfelt desire for redistribution of wealth. Sir Bernard died after a short illness, his family said. "She had been offered the chance to get on and effectively she then refused to offer it to otherpeople. I am reminded of this every time the debate comes up about whether more female bylines would reduce sexism in the media. Another head of government died recently who, like Thatcher, was called divisive. This unit recruited agents who were then used to kill citizens. And for all the tributes being paid by ministers this week, the issues at the topof the government's agenda are all to do with clearing up the mess she created. But she became a very effective one. For some, the only consequence of that shift, still visible today, will be a changed brand name or higher bills. Died: 24 February 2023, aged 90 Sir Bernard Ingham was Margaret Thatcher writ large. Government will respond to clear leadership if it knows what a leader wants. The family silver was squandered on bribing voters rather than modernising the economy. It still does. The romantic image of the lady in the tank spurs them on. "Thatcher as mother" seemed, to my tiddly mind, anathema. Yet I wrote columns of pretty unremitting hostility to most of what she did. That speech was a rare instance of a politician saying something tangible. In November 1978, Hannaford and I organized a European fact-finding tour for Reagan, and the first stop was London. Its strategies included the shallow and ineffectual 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement which was about creating a political alliance involving the Dublin establishment, the SDLP and the British to defeat Irish republicanism. All of the Tory edicts that bludgeoned our nation, as my generation squirmed through ghoulish puberty, were confusing. But she exploited her luck. She was 87. The first time I met Margaret Thatcher, I swear she was wearing gloves. Over the years, and through much re-telling, the story had it that Thatcher told Hitchens to bend over, and that she spanked him with her order papers. After the Dublin European Council in November 1979 she began a long battle still being scolded for the remark.You can read here exactly what she said, Any such objections would have been invalid. Margaret Thatcher was Britain's most significant leader since Churchill. He was a political and historical figure and the need to accurately portray his legacy and prevent misleading hagiography easily outweighed precepts of death etiquette that prevail when a private person dies. Tim Bale, author of The Conservative Party: from Thatcher to Cameron, says it was conviction. one Thatcher's opposition to a positive role for the state in industrial policy caused her grief even during her time in office, but a cross-party consensus newly shaped by Michael Heseltine's report has given him the last word. making her big speech the following day as scheduled. Every quality had its obverse, but she had a myth-making charisma to capture the world's imagination. make the case for intervention to protect Bosnia when Serb concentration Certainly, in 1983, it did not occur to me to criticise Harold Macmillan or Alec Douglas-Home on the doorstep as a sure-fire vote turner. ROBIN HARRIS worked for the Conservative Party from 1978, and increasingly closely with Margaret Thatcher herself from 1985, writing her speeches and advising on policy. In a break with tradition and protocol, Reagan decided he'd also attend the "return dinner" at the British Embassy the next evening. The poll-tax rioters. Now she would more likely have been beaten to the Tory leadership by one of the Etonians in cabinet. But every prime minister since has bowed to her legacy, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown eager to be snapped with her on their doorstep. Margaret Thatcher's speech writer will miss funeral but 'shed a tear' When the mourners gather for Baroness Thatcher's funeral tomorrow, one important figure from her political past will be . They had a point, but they had no idea how fascinating she was so powerful, successful, popular, omniscient, irritating and, in our view, wrong. What was different in Britain was that she assumed no responsibility to minimise social disruption or to create new jobs and industries. Modern comedians complain that they don't have personalities, they don't really stand for anything. Look at the cars on the road, none made by the old, nationally-owned British Leyland and only few by the British marques that once dominated but which went the way of much of British industry unable to survive the chill wind of "market forces", another phrase which filled the air back then. For those of us who were dismayed by her brisk distaste for that cosy state-dominated world, it was never enough to dislike her. No one noticed, but she was Blair's first guest at Downing Street in 1997. Here, for instance, was what the Guardian reported upon the death last month of Hugo Chavez: "To the millions who detested him as a thug and charlatan, it will be occasion to bid, vocally or discreetly, good riddance.". On her return to London, she sent me a warm and complimentary letter, a prize in my personal archives. Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013), who in 1979 would become Great Britain's first female Prime Minister, traveled to the United States and Canada in September 1975, seven months after becoming the leader of Britain's Conservative Party, then out of power. The passing of Chvez is mourned by the many millions who loved him in Latin America and everywhere. If you want anything done, ask a woman.". This, too, we still live with. A special licence was granted exclusively to the Radio Times. Original, independent voices such as BBC director general Alasdair Milne were brutally silenced. The first three speeches were by Winston Churchill. They looked after their old and young as well as those who were ill or infirm. At the October 1980 Conservative Conference, in the midst of economic recession, As working families in poverty now account for more than half of those below the poverty line, a government committed to "making work pay" should surely encourage this trend and raise the minimum wage. But she regarded rightwing causes as an intellectual hobby. But can he shake off the shackles of the past and prove there is an alternative? a new dominance from Brussels". with the European Community when she Government policy during the 1980s was little more than a war policy, aimed at defeating or isolating republicanism. We still live in the land Margaret built. It made her virtually unsackable as education secretary. in a statement the following morning (22 November), hours before she Or perhaps it was just because I was a little kid and more interested in them Weetabix skinheads, Roland Rat and Knight Rider. Thatcher is often credited with showing that you could get to the top whatever your background.
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