There is No Alternative (12 page)

Something
terrible
had got to be done. The battle would be bloody, and they would be hated. Hoskyns knew it, Sherman knew it, Joseph knew it, Thatcher knew it. So did everyone who managed her ascent to power. Even the wringing-wet Chris Patten, then director of the Conservative Party's research department, uneasily sensed it. He drafted a paper titled “Implementing Our Strategy” in 1977, outlining the themes to be stressed in the coming election campaign.

Nigel Lawson, who was later to become the most famous member of Thatcher's cabinet as her chancellor, reviewed this memo and heartily concurred with this sentiment, writing in response that “
A well thought-out scare campaign is a must
.”
⁴²
The words are underlined in Thatcher's hand, I believe.

Lawson appended to this note an earlier memo he had written titled “Thoughts on the Coming Battle”:

The minutes of a 1977 meeting of Thatcher's Strategy and Tactics Committee emphasized, again, the semantic linking of socialism, guilt, and sin:

Shortly afterwards, Alan Howarth, a member of the inner sanctum of the Conservative Research Department, wrote a paper for Thatcher's benefit titled “Some Suggestions for Strategic Themes.” He hoped, he wrote to her, that it might serve as “raw material” for “the philosophical case that you have been contemplating making.”
⁴⁵
The paper is much in the same vein, and I suspect that it did indeed provide raw material—or at least rhetorical inspiration—for Thatcher's case.

An interesting aside: In 1993, Howarth defected to the Labour Party. It seems he changed his mind.

This culminates in Thatcher's own voice, rallying her troops in 1976. The speech anticipates and embodies all of these themes:

The last line is from Shakespeare, whose achievements, as she points out, were not the product of restraint. The words are spoken by Henry V on the eve of the victorious Battle of Agincourt.

Shakespeare, the Crusades, great and brave things, the fruits of victory and common sense—all of this, she claimed, was her rightful inheritance. They were Britain's rightful inheritance. But the Marxists were scheming to cut her children out of the will.

They would not succeed.

It is all like this, in the archives.
Guilt, shame, decay, decline, immorality, wickedness, a once-great nation brought to its knees, double-doses of socialism.
These words are counterpoised against descriptions of Thatcher as a woman of old-fashioned virtue and common sense who will do what is
proud, patriotic, self-respecting, honorable, and right.

Do you find the language of these documents shocking? I confess that I do. I completely agree that socialism is corrupting. I hate communism, too—I loathe it. But to see these overwrought sentiments emerging from a people famed for their reserve, irony, and understatement leads me to suspect that Bernard Ingham was on to something when he remarked that “the British pride themselves on being a wonderfully even-tempered and decent people, but once they embrace a doctrine, they can become quite, quite extreme.”

It is all very well to hate communists, but self-righteousness and rage are not politically appealing qualities in and of themselves. Thatcher had charisma, too—feminine charisma—and this is what made her message effective.

If history is any guide, it is exceptionally hard to make femininity work to advantage in a political career. Several strategies are available to those who try. Hillary Clinton, for example, intimates that whereas she may have no obvious feminine qualities to speak of, a vote for her is a vote for feminism itself, a principled stand in favor of sexual equality. Some, like the French politician Ségolène Royal—or the woman she so resembles, Eva Perón—play the role of the mystical hysteric. Some exploit their status as wives or daughters of prominent politicians—Hillary Clinton and Eva Perón, again, or Indira Gandhi, Nehru's daughter. It helps considerably if
the husband or father has been martyred. Sonia Gandhi followed her martyred husband. Benazir Bhutto followed her martyred father—and followed him, sadly, all the way to martyrdom.

In her success in capitalizing upon her femininity, Margaret Thatcher had no equal. Yet she adopted none of these strategies. She had no use for feminism and no use for women, either—only one served in her cabinet, and only very briefly. By my count she inhabited, shiftingly and at will, at least seven distinctly female roles:

These roles deserve a close inspection. They were the tools she used to make her revolution happen.

I am visiting Charles Powell, Thatcher's foreign and defense advisor from 1983 to 1990, at his tastefully appointed Georgian mansion on Queen Anne's Gate, overlooking St. James's Park. Powell descends from one of the knights who carried out Henry II's orders to assassinate Thomas Becket. Like his ancestor, Powell is a knight. His full title is the Baron Powell of Bayswater of Canterbury in the County of Kent. He is a member of the House of Lords. Some people in Britain take these titles very seriously; some don't; some make an ostentatious point of pretending not to. I am not sure which category he falls under, so when I introduce myself, I hesitate.