There is No Alternative (14 page)

Fade to black.

She did not rehearse this speech; there was no speechwriter or teleprompter; it was live and impromptu. The performance is a miracle of menace, rhythm, dramatic timing. It is impossible to watch without thinking that you would not trade places with the miserable Mr. Frost for all the world.

I now take the train from London to Oxford, where I have an appointment to speak with the Master of Balliol College, Andrew Graham, about his memories of Margaret Thatcher. The Master is a man of the Left. From 1966 to 1969, he was an influential economic advisor to Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson; he worked again for Wilson between 1974 and 1976 at the policy unit attached to 10 Downing Street. In the early 1990s, he advised the leader of the Labour Party, John Smith. After Smith's death, he fell out spectacularly with the New Labourites:
You
may all be Thatcherites now, he told them, but count
me
out.

I am seeing him because I want the other side of the story. I have met a series of Thatcher's cabinet ministers and her most ardent defenders. Now I want to hear the best and most serious case
against
Thatcher's economic policies (which we will not get from New Labour, because they are all Thatcherites now). He will not disappoint, but we will come back to that later.

I am early for my appointment, so I stroll slowly through the streets of Oxford. Oxford is two cities, sharply divided. The poets ignore the outskirts of the city—the menacing townie pubs with their tattooed patrons, places students know better than to enter, the seedy bedsits over the Cowley Road where the stairwells smell of urine and turmeric, the rows of kebab vans, all named
Ali's
, parked outside those stairwells and reeking of ancient mutton. The poets write about the city center—a rook-racked, river-rounded city of dreaming spires, they call it, and they are right.

The Master of Balliol was my economics tutor when I was an undergraduate, many years ago. I had last seen him when I was in my early twenties. I was very fond of him—he was warm, lively, unstuffy, a wonderful teacher. I had feared as I walked to our meeting that I would find him much older and that this would remind me that I too am much older, but to my delight he is unchanged.

He's running a few minutes late. He darts through the sitting room in the Master's lodge, spots me, beams broadly in welcome, then dashes up the staircase. “I'll just be another minute, Claire. I'm sitting for my portrait!” How lively and spry he looks, I think! Could it be that in the portrait he is stooped and wrinkled?

When he returns he escorts me to his office, with its high ceilings and heavy brocaded curtains framing a picture window overlooking Broad Street. Haphazard stacks of papers cover the floor, the tables, the chairs. We chat for a while about economics, then we turn to the subject of Thatcher's political presence. We are trying to put our finger on what it was about her that kept the electorate coming back for more and more and more, despite—in his view, of course—her disastrously misguided policies. What was the source of her charisma, I wonder aloud?

“Well,” he says, “I didn't think this, I never felt it, but—quite a lot of people, some men—found her quite—
sexy
!”

“Mmmm,” I say. “I've heard this. Who was it, Mitterrand, who called her Brigitte Bardot with Caligula's eyes?”

“Exactly! And I think some of it was the sex that goes with power, and I, you know, I just can't get on that wavelength. I won't say I don't find power interesting, I do, but I just can't get there with Mrs. Thatcher
at all
, I can't even get to square one! But I've heard it from people I was surprised by.”

“Perhaps you'd care to say who?”

He won't name names. “I mean, a colleague of mine in Balliol, who is now dead, was a professor of physics, went along to a seminar in All Souls, incredibly impressed by her, just sort of swept off his feet by how articulate and how clear she was, and by her general demeanor um—this, she had—
I
wouldn't say, because
I
never
felt it—she had, somewhere in there—there is something more interesting than just a domineering personality. There is a degree of magnetism that somehow all big leaders have. I didn't see it, couldn't
remotely
—”

 

I get it, I get it. He wasn't attracted to Margaret Thatcher, no how, no way. I do note that it wasn't
me
who suggested he might be. “
I've
seen it,” I say. “And I'm still trying to figure out how to describe what it was that I see—I mean, sex appeal is one aspect of it, but it's not just that, it's—it is an
utter
confidence which is unbelievably rare in women.”

“Yeah, I mean, going back to what—I mean—I'm not a pacifist, I think war is sometimes essential, but I wasn't—you know, most people in the UK were sort of gung-ho about the Falklands War, I thought it was absolutely unnecessary, but I think she deserves enormous credit for that. I mean, one Exocet on one of those destroyers and the whole thing would have been a completely different story. Just a completely different story.”

In fact, the HMS
Sheffield
did take a direct hit from an Exocet missile. It was blasted apart. This did not for a moment cool the prime minister's ardor. But I agree with the point he is expressing. I have thought of it often, what it must have felt like to be her at that moment, of the enormous risks she took. The outcome was not at all guaranteed. “So,” the Master wonders aloud, “is that foolhardiness or is it courage?”

“In terms of psychological typing,” I say, “probably it would be described as a touch of narcissism—”

“Yeah, yeah,” he agrees, nodding.

“And perhaps a bit of hypomania, as well—”

“Yeah, but—” He pauses. “It's also a kind of guts.”

Armchair diagnosis can be taken only so far, but the words “narcissism” and “hypomania”—and “guts,” for that matter—do fit her uncannily well. Take the Mayo Clinic's description of the narcissistic personality style, for example:

Check, check, check. And hypomania? Without a doubt:

As for “guts,” I trust no definition is needed.

“I do think,” I say to the Master, “that men tend to be more certain in their convictions. This tends to be a male trait. Which is one reason why Thatcher is so unique.”

He nods. “Ah, she's interesting, yes.”

“I mean, you keep seeing comparisons of, say, Ségolène Royal with Thatcher, and that's absurd, they've got nothing at all in common, they're a completely different species. And the comparisons between Hillary Clinton and Thatcher seem to me not only from a policy point of view, but a personality point of view, completely ridiculous. Hillary conveys none of that absolute, rock-solid
authority
, which I think was the source of Thatcher's charisma—”

“Yeah. Yeah.”

“Thatcher's wasn't a Bill Clinton kind of charisma at all.” I met Bill Clinton once at a reception held for him at Oxford—his alma mater—during the first years of his presidency. His charisma was just as it is always described. He shook my hand and did that thing for which he's famous: one hand holding mine, the other on my elbow, looking deeply into my eyes, and for one moment, just that moment, the clicking cameras stopped, the crowds faded to a blur, and I
knew
that the leader of the Free World was more interested in me, more interested in what I thought and felt, than anyone—including my own mother—had ever been before. His eyes told me clearly that if only this annoying Secret Service detail would stop hurrying him along, we would just talk and talk and talk, he and I; I would tell him about my thoughts about health care, and Social Security, and . . .

“No. Not remotely,” agrees the Master.

“It's the charisma of someone who is absolutely certain she is right—”

“And with some of us, drives us completely
bonkers
, because we think she's so wrong!”

“I think that's the source of the passionate emotions about her,” I agree. Bernard Ingham attributes it to the sheer viciousness
of the Left, but the Master of Balliol is anything but a vicious man. Thatcher's brand of certainty was fascinating and maddening in equal measure, and if you happened to think her wrong, it was enough to make you
bonkers
. “So there's that utter certainty in herself,” I continue, “and there was something sexy about her, in a traditional way, especially as a young woman—she was not a raving beauty, but she was attractive—”

“Yes, yes.”

“But also a maternal archetype—she reminded people of their mothers or their schoolteachers—”

“Yeah, but, you know, I've never had that, you know, doesn't remotely work at all for me, not at all, so you'd have to find—but you know, some people find that very—
attractive
!”