Norman Stone - The Atlantic and Its Enemies

The same question occurs about Great Britain. Margaret Thatcher in 1979 had a very difficult hand to play, and though she was a very different figure from Reagan, she ran into similar opposition: famously, almost all of the grand names in British economics denounced her to The Times in 1981, just as England was becoming, once again, an interesting country. But it was not just the economists. No Prime Minister can have met such sheer hatred since David Lloyd George, whom the Right had loathed because he had fought, in his way, for the class-eroding England that had ended up under trade union rule in the 1970s. Writers, actors, philosophers: off they rode, and a meeting of the PEN club in Lisbon, where various well-known writers of the world were expecting to protest about the fate, generally under Communism, of their peers, had to listen, in utter bewilderment, as the English contingent went on, and on, and on about Margaret Thatcher, whom most continental Europeans vaguely respected, as a woman fighting her corner in a man’s world. A high point of such criticism occurred when Dame Mary Warnock, a porphyrogenita of the long-bottomed-knicker progressive Edwardian world, mother of five, philosopher called to any committee requiring pronouncements as to public morality, headmistress of a famous school but also wife of the Oxford Vice-Chancellor, was interviewed about Mrs Thatcher. She did not have much to contribute as to privatization or the money supply, and the high point came with a strangled ‘that voice … those hats. ’ In such circles Mrs Thatcher was regarded as utterly without culture, but there again was a mistake. She had grown up in a provincial world where application to schoolwork was very important, where you read the national classics. There was a revealing occasion in 1989 when François Mitterrand staged the Bicentenary of the French Revolution. He had made quite an effort, and had a shiny Paris on show. Mrs Thatcher arrived by the new Channel Tunnel and gave an interview to Le Monde as to what she thought of 1789; and her remarks were in favour of the English way of doing things, what with individual rights rather than Rights of Man. Her reward was to be placed in an obscure place in the official photographs. She had her revenge. The official party was taken to a performance of a revolution opera, André Chenier. It was a hot night, and the opera lasted for four hours. The party was then taken to the new Impressionist museum, a brilliantly converted railway station at the Quai d’Orsay. Protocol had forgotten an essential: that after four hours’ exposure to second-rate opera, the guests might need to visit the lavatory. Upon arrival at the museum, they found only one, down a flight of steps, which Margaret Thatcher naturally had the right to use first. She took her time, emerging from the steps to find a small platoon of African heads of state, in their tribal finery, squirming. She was then taken, alone, round the museum by its director, Françoise Cachin (granddaughter, as it happens, of a Comintern stalwart), who later said that, of all the politicians she had taken round, Margaret Thatcher was the one who showed the greatest interest and asked the best questions.

Oxford, also famously, rejected her candidacy for an honorary degree in 1985. That was unworthy behaviour because she was, after all, an Oxford graduate, and had become the first woman Prime Minister, a considerable achievement in itself (and when she finally fell, in 1991, she was given an extraordinarily respectful and indeed moving send-off by the high druidess of feminism, Germaine Greer, at a time when her friends were all shouting for glee). Once upon a time, these honorary degrees had meant something: in giving them to Tchaikovsky and Verlaine in the days when Oscar Wilde had been given two years’ hard labour for homosexuality (Verlaine had served two years in Mons, in Belgium, but for shooting Rimbaud in the thumb, having missed) Oxford had shown decency. Then the things became an excuse for a party, as humble academics could for a moment shine in the spotlight turned on someone else, and picturesquely garbed worthies, having been told in a solemn address that the truth was in the middle, could process through the Cornmarket, past Burger King, W. H. Smith’s, three clothing chain-stores proclaiming sales and the overweight Liverpudlian seller of the Big Issue .

Besides, she was engaged upon a course of action for universities which, however misguided in tactics, was sensible enough in strategy. Inflation was the worst enemy of educational institutions, wrecking scholarship funds, libraries, laboratories. It meant leaking roofs, moonlighting academics and generally the end of serious universities. If Oxford existed at all, it was to give out scholarships to young men and women who could not otherwise have been there — Margaret Thatcher’s case. These scholarships had become small change, the university sent round its ablative absolutes in used envelopes, and then launched an appeal for funds that put the needs of the Bodleian Library — the only major university library in the world where you could not go round the stacks — sixteenth equal with crèches for laboratory assistants. Mrs Thatcher did at least have a programme to deal with this. Both she and Ronald Reagan had in the first instance to deal with this financial operation which, underneath, was a political contest. It amounted to a June Days, of a sort, and England — though not America — did produce, in one Arthur Scargill, a barricade artist whom a great many people would have liked to shoot down, Misérables -fashion, with respect. The crucial date was 6 October 1979, when an American measure was decisive in much the same way as 15 August 1971 had been. The Federal Reserve put up interest rates to almost 20 per cent, at which level credit would become very expensive, and businesses would crash. At the same time, exchange control was abolished in London. Pounds went abroad, especially to the United States, and business also crashed in Great Britain. This, after a very difficult period, worked. No two decades could have been more different. England came back onto the world stage, and Margaret Thatcher became a figure of worldwide significance. But she had a very hard fight in the first two years, much harder than did Ronald Reagan.

Margaret Thatcher came in on 3 May with a larger swing than any other politician since Clement Attlee, and the right size of majority — forty-three, enough to survive, not enough to encourage greedy zealots. There was one gambit that was essential for her. The Anglo-American crisis brought wise heads together. In Heath’s time, the American connection had been weakened, Heath showing his usual ineptness when it came to intuition of reality. But there was an Atlantic strand in the Tory party, and it had powerful consequences, especially through NATO and the international financial institutions. As soon as Margaret Thatcher was elected, she made it her business to travel to the USA. There, she established herself rapidly. She also guessed at the importance of Ronald Reagan — at the time, thought to be of such little account that, except for Margaret Thatcher, even as late as 1977 he was given only polite, cursory treatment when he came to London. But there was a very bright and energetic group of younger people in Republican circles who were thinking hard about what had gone wrong, and what had to be done. Margaret Thatcher became quite widely known in the USA, and in 1979 Carter gave her forty-five minutes in the White House, more than he had given Mitterrand. He complained that she had done all the talking; but she had something to say, and England, not in good condition, provided the perfect rather crumbling sounding-board. What had been common-sense saloon bar grumbling was well-orchestrated and now became a swelling chorus, with some challenging thinking behind it.