David Cannadine dedicates his biography of Margaret Thatcher: “In memory of Mrs T.” But that Mrs T is not, as one might suppose, Mrs. Thatcher, the longest-serving prime minister of Great Britain in the 20th century. Instead, the preface informs us, it is a Mrs. Thurman, the headmistress of Cannadine’s primary school—an “unforgettable, intimidating, charismatic, and inspirational” figure, who, unlike many of her profession, was a “staunch Conservative,” a “committed Christian,” and a “vehement anti-Communist.” Cannadine concludes the tribute to his Mrs. T, the admirable headmistress, by hoping she would have recognized herself in his portrait of the more eminent Mrs. T, the prime minister.
This brief biography is a welcome addition to the considerable literature about Margaret Thatcher, all the more welcome because it captures the “Life and Legacy” of the subtitle so succinctly. It may be a short book, but it is one of the longest entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, from which it has been reprinted. Cannadine is eminently qualified to be Thatcher’s biographer: A distinguished historian, author of many books, and recipient of many awards, he is almost Anglo-American in his life and career, having studied and taught in both countries (he is now a professor at Princeton). As something of a public intellectual, a commentator on TV, radio, and the press, he also had occasion to meet and converse with her frequently.
The reader may well see Cannadine’s headmistress in “the Iron Lady,” as she is now known, but not in “the Grocer’s Daughter,” as she was more familiarly called. Born in 1925 to a hardworking grocer and wife in the provincial town of Grantham, Lincolnshire, Margaret Roberts gave no intimation, in her childhood or youth, of her later eminence. After attending a local school, she ventured to seek a scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford. Failing that, she was admitted the following year as a regular student at a painful cost to her family. A good, conscientious, but undistinguished chemistry student, she graduated in 1947 with a second-class honors degree and went on to work as a researcher in a chemical firm. Her initiation into politics came in her final year at Oxford with her election as president of the Conservative Association—a break with her father, who, like most Methodists at the time, was Liberal. Three years later she stood, predictably unsuccessfully, as a Conservative candidate for a safe Labour seat.
Her marriage in 1951 to Denis Thatcher was another break, this time in economic and social status. He was 10 years older, divorced, a businessman, not rich but comfortably off, not particularly interested in politics but tolerant of her views and indulgent in her activities. The birth of twins two years later was no hindrance, or even distraction: As was often the custom, they were sent off to school for much of their childhood and then found their way to distant parts—her daughter to Australia and her son, whom she favored, to Texas.
“The home,” she once said, “should be the center but not the boundary of a woman’s life.” It was not the center of hers. Politics was her center, her passion.
That passion was satisfied, in 1959, with the victory of the Conservatives in the general election and her victory in Finchley, a middle-class London suburb with a sizable Jewish population. After a series of lowly ministerial positions, with her party in power and out, in 1970 she became secretary of state for education under Edward Heath. One of her most controversial acts was the abolition of free milk for schoolchildren between the ages of 7 and 11, which earned her the epithet “Mrs. Thatcher, the milk-snatcher.” Similar cuts in later years in funding universities earned her the bitter and enduring hostility of the entire education establishment, symbolized by the refusal to bestow upon her the honorary degree from Oxford that had been the tradition for all earlier prime ministers.
This was symptomatic of much of Thatcher’s career. Even when her policies—cost-cutting and government retrenchment, denationalizing industries and privatizing council housing—had the positive effect of stimulating the economy by reducing inflation, unemployment, and the public debt, they alienated many in the public, as well as in her own party. Her personal popularity was low even at the best of times, and there were constant predictions of defeat.
Yet she continued to be reelected by increasing majorities. What may account for this anomaly—the disjunction between political power and personal popularity—was the vigor and determination she brought to her agenda, which gave her an aura of authority that seemed to empower her and legitimize her policies.
Challenging Heath as leader of the Conservatives, she was elected to that position in 1975, the first woman leader of any party. Heath’s former deputy, who had sought the leadership position himself, derided her as “governessy”—first cousin, perhaps, of Cannadine’s “headmistress.” More memorable is another label she acquired at the time—”Iron Lady”—from a Russian newspaper protesting her criticisms of the Soviet Union. That label was promptly picked up, for good and bad, in England and abroad, and remained with her throughout her lifetime—and promises to be perpetuated by biographers and historians.
It was this Mrs. Thatcher, the Iron Lady, who presided over Britain as prime minister from 1979 to 1990. In domestic as in foreign affairs, she exhibited the same iron will. At home, it was evident in her persistent attempts to undo the welfare state and establish something like the free market advocated by Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek (whom she had read at Oxford). Towards the end of her first term in Downing Street, she prided herself on having done more “to roll back the frontiers of socialism than any previous Conservative government.”
She was equally resolute in foreign affairs, resisting the expansionist ambitions of the Soviet Union, vigorously pursuing the Falklands War, strengthening Britain’s nuclear facilities, and opposing the establishment of a European Community. As she was earlier pleased to have rolled back socialism at home, so she later declared, at a meeting in Bruges:
“Iron Lady”—a feminist might bridle at the word “lady” as archaic, elitist, sexist. But she would have more reason to quarrel with Thatcher on other grounds, for not being a woman in the proper feminist spirit. Margaret Thatcher was well-dressed and properly coiffed, womanly in attire and appearance, but “manly” (as Cannadine says) in other respects, exhibiting “the assertive, domineering, and aggressive attributes commonly associated with alpha males.” Rejecting the very idea of “women’s lib,” she did not associate herself with “women’s causes,” made no effort to accommodate demands for female representation in the government (there was never a woman in her Cabinet), and did not seek election for herself (as one candidate recently did in America) as a woman and because she was a woman.
On one occasion, she seemed to forget that she was a woman, let alone a lady. At a dinner celebrating the Falklands victory, wives were invited to the reception after dinner. Thatcher concluded the dinner: “Gentlemen, shall we join the ladies?”—”we,” herself a gentleman among the gentlemen. (There had been other woman prime ministers, Golda Meir in Israel and Indira Gandhi in India, the former praised as the “Iron Lady of Israeli politics.” David Ben-Gurion’s tribute to Meir as “the best man in the government” could as well be applied to the Iron Lady of British politics.)
If Thatcher is notable as the first woman prime minister in Britain, she was also notable as a conspicuous example of social mobility in a political system that was still class-ridden. “From the Grantham’s grocer’s shop to St. Paul’s Cathedral”—it was a long climb up the social ladder that Cannadine describes, longer than Disraeli’s, who prided himself on having “climbed to the top of the greasy pole” but who started that climb from the London home of an affluent man-about-town and man-of-letters (a Jew, to be sure, but one accepted in the best clubs and in most social circles). Her climb was more notable still because it resulted, as Disraeli’s did not, in an “ism” attached to her name.
“Thatcherism” was coined in the first year of her premiership and has endured throughout her lifetime and beyond. It is still something of a puzzle. No other prime minister, not even Winston Churchill, has enjoyed the distinction of an “ism.” More puzzling is the definition of Thatcherism. It does not, Cannadine insists, imply a coherent philosophy or even ideology; at best, it describes a “political phenomenon” or, more simply, an “attitude.” Yet those terms do not convey the ambitiousness of Thatcher’s goals: economic liberty in defiance of the militant trade unionists (the coal miners, most notably) and national greatness in spite of the movement towards globalization. Nor do they account for the assertiveness and aggressiveness with which she pursued them.
Nor, and this may be even more decisive, do they do justice to the compelling ethic that inspired her, the Methodist ethic of her father—better known as the Puritan ethic or, perhaps, the Victorian ethic. In my obituary of Margaret Thatcher in these pages (“The Victorian Lady,” April 22, 2013), I recalled my meeting with her at the British embassy in Washington shortly after her retirement. I was introduced to her as someone who had recently delivered the inaugural Margaret Thatcher Lecture at Tel Aviv University on the subject of “Victorian Values.”
“But of course,” she replied, “I know Gertrude, we’ve met before. What a great subject, Victorian values. Let me tell you about Victorian values”—which she proceeded to do at some length, and with great enthusiasm.
A few years earlier, during an election campaign, she told an interviewer who observed, rather derisively, that she seemed to be approving of Victorian values: “Oh, exactly. Very much so. Those were the values when our country became great.” On another occasion she informed another critic that she was pleased to have been brought up by a Victorian grandmother who taught her those values—hard work, self-reliance, self-respect, helping one’s neighbor, and pride in one’s country: “All of these things are values. They are also perennial values.”
David Cannadine hopes that his headmistress would have recognized herself in the Iron Lady of his portrait. She might also have recognized herself in the Victorian Lady lurking behind that formidable figure. What is more challenging, perhaps, than Margaret Thatcher herself is the Thatcherism she bequeathed to us, which is as controversial today as it was in her day. Is Thatcherism more than an exercise in nostalgia? That question will occupy another generation of biographers and historians, who will continue to be fascinated by her life but disarmed by her legacy—what to make of it and what remains of it.
Gertrude Himmelfarb is the author of the forthcoming book Past and Present: The Challenges of Modernity, from the Pre-Victorians to the Postmodernists.
