Margaret Thatcher: The Path to Power. - book reviews

National Review, August 28, 1995 by Digby Anderson

MARGARET Thatcher's father kept a grocer's shop in Grantham, a market and railway-junction town in the Midlands. Alfred Roberts was ``a specialist grocer'' selling sugar, coffee, biscuits, spices kept in ``three rows of splendid mahogany spice drawers,'' and smoked hams ``in a cool back room.'' The family lived above the shop, and Lady Thatcher remembers the aromas of coffee and bacon wafting upstairs.

The childhood she recounts was, in her instructive phrase, ``a provincial childhood.''The values she learned were those of English provincialism, but more than that. Mr. Roberts had known hard times, and his family valued hard work and thrift: ``Nothing in our house was wasted and we always lived within our means. The worst you could say about another family was that they 'lived up to the hilt.''' Mr. Roberts was a Methodist lay preacher and a Rotarian, who valued both self-reliance and service to others. He was a Conservative and a patriot. These were the habits of mind and practice learned by the young Margaret Roberts.I was recently reminding myself of the vocabulary of Left Hate. Over the long years in which progressive and especially Marxist ideas held almost total sway among intellectuals worldwide, a long list of pejoratives grew up to denounce their opponents and the many more folk who ignored them. The enemy overall were ``capitalists'' and ``imperialists.'' There were traitors to class interests such as ``scabs'' and ``blacklegs.'' Apologists for unprogressive causes were ``reactionary'' and ``elitist.'' But one of the all-time and almost-any-purpose favorites was the sneer ``middle class.'' Especially in France for a century and elsewhere in the Thirties and Sixties, many Marxists were also rationalists, immoralists, and partisans of unfettered self-expression. ``Middle class'' had the advantage of denouncing their moral and their political opponents all in one word. For the more sophisticated English sneerer with a devotion to internationalism and a desire to class himself with the super-sneering French artistic Marxist class, ``bourgeois'' was the word. Only one term was better. In a paradoxically elitist way, these would-be saviors of the lowest social orders reserved their most bitter bile for the ``lower middle class'' or ``petit bourgeois.'' To English ears this last had the further advantage of suggesting pettiness; people obsessed with their narrow little lives, unquestioningly obeying some repressive religion, serving the class that exploits them, their gaze on their dull daily task, oblivious to the historic opportunities of struggle, solidarity, liberation, and promiscuity.On any scale of ``petit bourgeois'' the Roberts family must have banged the bell off the machine. Not only did Margaret Roberts remain wedded to those values at school, at Oxford University, in her industrial employment, and in politics; she did something far worse. She remained wedded to them unapologetically, indeed proudly. The Path to Power thus explains why she was so hated by the progressive elite. In her rise to the leadership of the Conservative Party and the prime-ministership she took with her virtually unchanged the values clever people had consigned to history.It is, however, a long way from values to policies. Lady Thatcher makes clear, for instance, that the corporatist policies followed by the Heath government (of which she was a member) from 1972 to 1974 at least initially enjoyed her support: It is important to remember that the policies Ted pursued between the spring of 1972 and February 1974 were urged on him by most important commentators. . . . There were brave and far-sighted critics who were proved right. But they were an embattled, isolated group. Although my reservations steadily grew, I was not at this stage among them. . . . Some of us (though never Ted, I fear) learned from these mistakes. When she and a few others had recognized the mistakes as such, they were ready for new ideas -- or for old ones that had been neglected. It is Keith Joseph who eventually finds and brokers the new ideas through his Center for Policy Studies under Alfred Sherman and his association with the free marketeers at the Institute of Economic Affairs. Again it is noteworthy that these were not tenured academics in established universities. They were intellectual buccaneers, mere outsiders. None of this is to say that the new ideas are not arguably rooted in an economic and political philosophy that can properly be called both conservative and Conservative: there's not much that Burke could have objected to in the Thatcherite project. It is simply to say that the Thatcherite revolution was not made by the Conservative Party. Indeed most establishment Conservatives were and still are hostile to it. ``Hostile'' is too mild. They were horrified by it.The revolutionary process involved three things: the admission of mistakes, the possession of core values of liberty and personal responsibility, and the acquisition of ``new'' intellectual projects and policies. In trying to understand the fury that Thatcherism aroused, especially among intellectuals but also among bureaucrats and politicians, there are -- apart from threats to personal interest such as loss of job, income, or power -- three explanations. Some people, such as Edward Heath, could not admit mistakes, especially their own. Many more disliked the ``new'' ideas. Others were horrified by the values.My own view is that this last explains not the number of her enemies but the intensity of their hatred. Mrs. Thatcher's decent and respectable petit-bourgeois values were a reproach to everything with which a decadent class had indulged itself. Her origins were scorned; her everyday moralistic language was mocked; her ordinariness was derided; her outsider status was ridiculed. This fury has all the marks of a corrupt class exposed to fresh air, moreover a fresh air it had thought forever to have confined to the provinces.The Path to Power shows just how opposed the Conservative Party and the establishment were to such values and thus the courage and tenacity Mrs. Thatcher displayed in taking them to the height of political power. And it was the values that the socialists and Communists despised as Victorian that eventually defeated them. Mrs. Thatcher did what the establishment had conspicuously failed to do. She tamed the extremist unions. And how fitting that Soviet Communism and its oppression should have been buried by an ``out-of-work actor'' and the arch-representative of the petit-bourgeois culture it so scorned.The Path will be painful reading for some Englishmen. I had forgotten just how craven the Conservative Party had become before Mrs. Thatcher's election. For a long time even then, it had been practicing consensus, competing with the socialists in running a bloated welfare state and Keynesian economic policy. But under Edward Heath it finally sank to its knees. The story is all here and told dispassionately, with no point-scoring. There is no need to score points: they make themselves. What other word than ``craven'' can one find to describe that candlelit Britain, its electricity turned off, its working people kept on ``Three Day Working Weeks,'' the bailouts of unsuccessful companies, the U-turns, a loose-money policy planting the seeds of inflation, the state policies on wages and prices, the threats of rationing, the government's pathetic attempts to do deals with blackmailing trade unions, and the ludicrous attempts to cobble together a government with the Liberal Party?The story of how Mr. Heath was finally turned out and how Mrs. Thatcher won the leadership and then the general election of 1979 are also in these pages. Again, what is clear is how little credit can go to the established Conservative Party. Mrs. Thatcher was still an outsider. Her best friends were outsiders. Her values and her policies were those of the Grantham shop.For slightly over a decade, respectable, decent Britons had a prime minister whose moral instincts were theirs. She took the things they value, dull daily virtues, and put them in charge of the nation's policies. They are not in charge any longer. The establishment is back. But that is of secondary importance. For those ten years were enough to show what these values can still do. She has given them credibility again.