Thatcher (14 page)

She did have Denis' constant company and support. But in 2003 Denis Thatcher died. They had been married for 52 years, and he had been her constant companion. By this time, she was less visible on the public stage. On 22 March 2002 she was told by her doctors to make no more public speeches on health grounds, having suffered several small strokes which left her in a very frail state and possibly affected her short-term memory. This must have come as a shock to her – she had always enjoyed remarkably good health. In June 2004 she lost her friend Ronald Reagan. Although she was able to attend the funeral her eulogy for him was pre-taped to prevent undue stress. While this is written, in 2006, she has not appeared in public for a long time, and her public statements are few and far between. She no longer lives in Dulwich, but she is still accompanied by her 24-hour bodyguard. She is 81 years old, and has lived through and been at the centre of eight decades of change in Britain and in British society.

On first leaving Downing Street though, she set herself three goals. First, she intended to travel widely and lecture, particularly in America. She wanted to continue to spread her gospel, but she also wanted to make money. Denis Thatcher was a rich man, but Margaret Thatcher had taken a reduced salary as prime minister for 11 years. Her pension was only £25,000, her MP's salary £21,000.
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She had an office allowance and an allowance for London members, but this was not enough to support a Central London home and the office staff she needed. John Major awarded all former prime ministers an allowance, and this helped. She signed on for the Washington Speakers' Bureau for a reported fee of $50,000 a lecture – second only to Reagan – and she commanded similar fees in Japan and the Far East. She would not accept payment for speaking politically instead of speaking just as herself – she wished to retain her autonomy in Britain, Russia, China, Hong Kong – anywhere she felt she could have influence.

Her second task was to write her memoirs. Initially, her son Mark took on negotiating a publishing deal. He talked about getting even as much as £20 million from the deal, but that fell through. In the end, she sold them for £3.5 million and the two volumes were completed in 1993 and 1995. While she announced that she would write every word herself, this was never a likely possibility. Even so, completing two volumes of political history was a phenomenal challenge. She saw it as a chance to state her case and defend her record. The resulting volumes are detailed chronicles of a life in politics – sometimes, like Margaret Thatcher herself, so bound up in the detail of the individual trees that the broad forest becomes obscure.

Her third project was to set up some sort of institution to preserve her name and propagate her ideas. The Thatcher Foundation was originally intended to be modelled on the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, but in 1991 the British Charity Commissioners refused to grant it charitable status because the organisation was fundamentally political. This limited the opportunities for funding, as rich benefactors were reluctant to give to an institution where they could not receive tax relief. Regardless, a prestigious office was opened near Hyde Park Corner, with an imposing room for Margaret Thatcher to meet foreign visitors. Branches were opened in Washington and Warsaw with the intention of spreading free-market ideas and western business practices. The results have been small. It has evolved into an educational trust, endowing a chair of Enterprise Studies at Cambridge and funding the creation of a CD rom archive of Margaret Thatcher's speeches to be circulated to all British university libraries. It also supports small numbers of Russian students to study business in England for short periods.

She was unable to refrain from public contact with the Conservative Party. She had supported John Major in public, but in private she became outspoken in her disappointment with his policies. For his part, he was a very different operator from his predecessor. He negotiated, quietly and patiently and without loud statements. He won the next election, in 1992, with a reasonable majority, but the party was dogged by dissent over Europe, and lost the 1997 election to Tony Blair. Major stood down, and Margaret Thatcher supported William Hague. When Hague was defeated in the election of 2001, she supported Iain Duncan Smith. But her support was often seen as a liability, and she was changing. It may have been the strokes, or it may have been simply a result of 11 years of political pressure, but her statements were becoming more and more extreme. In
Statecraft – Strategies for a Changing World
, written in 2002, her written statements are far from her beliefs during her own period of responsibility for foreign policy. Dedicated to Ronald Reagan ‘to whom the world owes so much' the book is a catalogue of free market, individualistic foreign policies, heavily slanted in support of America and heedless of international law.

The world in which she operated was also changing. In 1979, Britain was tired of strikes and hardship, three-day weeks and collective bargaining. Margaret Thatcher swept into power without having yet explained or demonstrated her particular brand of -individualistic conservatism. Her personal popularity was buoyed up by success in the Falklands, and possibly by her success in reducing strikes. She was the centre of her policies, the figurehead of change. She willingly took the personal stands that connected her to the process of change. And the changes caused great hardship among some sections of British society – hardship that was also visibly linked with the beautifully-dressed Conservative lady with no understanding of poverty. Her record shows that she did listen and change her policies, and not always for the better. The sale of council houses has arguably been the cause of more social division than any other post-war policy, and she initially opposed it. But she said that she didn't listen, she said that she wouldn't turn, she said that her way was the only way and the best way, and so she became absolutely linked with her 11 years of government, years that had seen riots, pitched battles with strikers, record numbers of bankruptcies and house repossessions, and war. She has become more and more linked with memories of disruption and pain – in Tony Blair's England, after 1997, the voters want peace. Her place in the public mind could be summed up by the story of her statue. Eight feet high and cast in white marble, its was to stand in the House of Commons. Five months after it was unveiled, an unemployed man decapitated it.

Nor has she hidden away – in 1998, she made a highly-publicised and controversial visit to the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet during the time he was under house arrest in London facing charges of torture, conspiracy to torture and conspiracy to murder, and expressed her support and friendship for him. She has made several high-profile visits to America, and was an outspoken critic of government policy in the Balkans. She spoke all around the world, and during the Conservative election campaign in 2001. She remains involved with various Thatcherite groups, including being President of the Conservative Way Forward group (who held a dinner at the Savoy Hotel in honour of the 25th Anniversary of her election). She is honorary president of the Bruges Group, which takes its name from the 1988 speech at Bruges where she was first voice her hostility to developments in the European Union.

Her immediate legacy to John Major was a mixed gift. Britain was engaged in the Gulf War abroad, and enmeshed in the Poll Tax at home. The Gulf war ended in February 1991. It could be argued that if she had still been at the helm she could have influenced America more. As it is, in 2006 Britain is occupying Iraq. Michael Heseltine, who had resigned from the Cabinet before the Poll Tax was introduced, was put in charge of creating a new system. The result was a compromise between using national and local authority taxation to fund local services, a compromise that will not have pleased Margaret Thatcher. Her European legacy was almost as difficult. The European Union has been, and still is, the most divisive issue within the Conservative Party. Margaret Thatcher held one pole of the argument – that the EU's function was as a free trade area, and that any closer links between nations in social policy or human rights were an infringement of British sovereignty. The opposing view was that European Union was an absolute advantage to Britain, and that harmonisation of policies could only be of benefit to the British. John Major attempted to steer a middle path. He placed Britain at the heart of Europe, but did not allow that to mean harmonisation. There were ‘opt-out' clauses to minimum wage clauses and to the social chapter – both of which will have pleased Margaret Thatcher.

She herself named six ‘lessons' that she regarded as the most important of this century, and on which she claimed success.
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The first lesson was the ‘power of ideas', and here her influence on current politics and social life is enormous. She set out, consciously and intentionally, to wean British society away from the principles of equality and collectivism that formed the post-war consensus. In this she changed the political agenda of both the Conservative Party and the Labour Party. In a memorial lecture for Keith Joseph she said:
Creativity is necessarily a quality which pertains to individuals. Indeed, perhaps the one immutable law of anthropology is that we are all different. Now, of course, individuals can't fulfill their potential without a society in which to do so. And to set the record straight – once again – I have never minimised the importance of society, only contested the assumption that society means the State rather than other people
.
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Fundamental to her ideology, before even monetarism or beating inflation – was the belief that individual people should have control over their own finances, their own lives, their own future. People should have the ability to fail in order to have the incentive to work – and the role of the government was to create space for individual choices. This is a moral statement – in her view a healthy society was made up of healthy individuals taking care of their own needs. The post-war consensus, Labour as well as Conservative, believed that a healthy society was made up of individuals rendered free from the fear of want and unemployment, and so free to support each other and their government. Margaret Thatcher saw the shift in the agenda herself:
The sharp divide between the forces of freedom represented by the Conservative Party and the West on the one hand, and the forces of collectivism represented by the Labour Party and the Soviet bloc on the other, is a thing of the past. The extent of the success we achieved in the 1980s has, in this sense, caught up with us
.
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Certainly, it has caught up with the modern political agenda. It is, of course, a judgment about human nature – which world would people rather live in – a collectivist or an individualistic one? – believing, as Margaret Thatcher and Nye Bevan both believed, that ideology would affect individual behaviour.

Margaret Thatcher's crusade to win hearts and minds was carried out with an unprecedented personal publicity campaign. Perhaps without her influence it would have been harder for Tony Blair to appear on
Parkinson
in 2006. She made the message personal – during her second term, it could be said that the message was so personal it could not be separated from her. Much has been made of her comment when Mark Thatcher provided her with a grandson –
We have become a grandmother of a grandson called Michael
¹⁰
– with its overtones of royalty. Certainly she saw herself as on a mission, and as a true evangelical, saving the British people from the forces of evil. She stood out and stood up for her beliefs, and earned votes and admiration for her stand. She joked about this:
I was just reminded of a cartoon when I came back from the last, uh, summit meeting in Rome. It was a cartoon of eleven men going one way round an athletics track. And me going the other. What the cartoonist didn't know was that he had got the eleven going the
wrong way
round and me going the right way
.
¹¹
That individualism supported by electoral success marks Margaret Thatcher out from other politicians and personalises her legacy. Today I hear students say ‘I love Margaret Thatcher' without considering her policies or the practical legacy of those policies.

The legacy of her policies shapes the experience of living in Britain today. There is a growing gap between rich and poor, with unemployment highest (15 per cent) among people of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin. This does not give a picture of local differences. In London, the borough of Newham has the highest unemployment rate in the country at 38.6 per cent: Bromley has the lowest in London, at 16.7 per cent. The North-East, home of closed steel and coal works, has 25 per cent unemployment.
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Benefit cuts designed to remove single people of working age and young people from entitlement to unemployment benefit have never been reversed – current policy, to increase the numbers of young people over 17 in higher education hides some of the numbers affected. Sale of council houses has put pressure on any other form of social housing. House prices are high. The result of all this – all measures traceable to Thatcher's budgets – is to make it difficult to escape from poverty. This was not the intention – the intention was that people would develop the entrepreneurial skills to change their situation. But the intention was forged in the middle-class suburbs of a country town, where social mobility was really only gained by a small group of people. The intention was that growing prosperity would result in the prosperous supporting the needy. This has not been the case in any significant way.