Ordinary Gweilo

This week we are mainly…celebrating the 25th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher becoming British Prime Minister.

No-one could dispute that her time in office changed Britain: tax rates are lower, trade unions have lost most of their power, and privatisation has shifted the balance from public to private sector – and there is no prospect of any of those changes being reversed in the forseeable future. Also, Britain has moved closer to having what amounts to a presidential system, individual MPs are now controlled to a much greater extent by the party machines, and ‘spin’ has become a fact of life, three trends that were set in motion by Margaret Thatcher.

Britain was in a fairly poor way in 1979, and whilst it is possible to imagine other scenarios in which things could have improved significantly, there is no denying that the British success story of the last 25 years can be traced back to the changes that were made by the Thatcher government – and the way that Tony Blair has built on that legacy rather than trying to change very much. Gordon Brown’s first major decision as chancellor was to handover control of interest rates to the Bank of England, something that you would have expected a Tory chancellor to do. Thatcher’s legacy still lives on today.

One of the intriguing things about Margaret Thatcher is that it is easy to imagine circumstances in which she could have failed to become leader in 1975, or having become leader could have a lost a General Election in 1978 and lost the leadership, or having become Prime Minister could have lost in 1983 before introducing the radical policies for which she is now famous.

Starting in 1975, and the curious business of the Tory leadership election. Edward Heath felt he could win and remain as leader, but after losing two elections the previous year he could only have survived if he was popular with the Parliamentary party, but in fact he was deeply unpopular and seemed to make little effort to change this. Had he stood down it is likely that Willie Whitelaw would have won the ensuing leadership election, but Thatcher might well have performed respectably enough to earn a cabinet place and could well have become leader a few years later. However, Heath did stand in the election and was beaten by Thatcher in the first round and she had gained sufficient momentum to win in the second round.

At the time I was quite convinced that she could never win a General Election, but Jim Callaghan proved to every bit as hopeless as Prime Minister as he had been as Chancellor and Home Secretary. His main error was not calling the election in the autumn of 1978, but waiting instead until after the so-called ‘winter of discontent’ (when many public sector workers went on strike) so that he could lose in May 1979. It’s interesting to consider what might have happened if the election had been earlier and Labour has won – would Thatcher have been forced to resign as leader?

The Falklands War made Thatcher’s reputation as a strong leader battling for Britain, but it could well have destroyed her government. Firstly, the Argentinian forces only invaded the Falklands because Britain had reduced its naval presence in the area in spite of intelligence reports than an invasion was possible. Ultimately the government of the day must take responsibility for that decision. Secondly, the Thatcher government could have negotiated a deal with Argentina but pointedly refused to do so (which would have looked foolish if the war had been lost). Thirdly, information that has been subsequently released shows Britain did come very close to losing the war. Finally, the Labour opposition was in disarray at the time – had Denis Healey been elected leader rather than Michael Foot, things would surely have been very different.

As things turned out, Thatcher could hardly lose the 1983 election – a strong leader who had just won a small war, against an elderly gentleman who came across badly on TV, with the SDP as the jokers in the pack. A landslide victory was hardly a surprise, and it greatly strengthened Thatcher’s resolve to implement the right-wing policies she had been previously been reluctant to even acknowledge, let alone put into practice.

I highly recommend John Campbell’s biography of Margaret Thatcher. I have read the first volume (The Grocer’s daughter) and the second volume (Iron Lady) is out now in hardback and will be available in paperback in September. He has reached some interesting conclusions about Margaret Thatcher, notably that she wasn’t ‘Thatcherite’ when she was education minister and in fact that she was more of an ambitious politician than an ideologue. She surrounded herself with people who were cleverer and more ideological than she was, and was always more focused on trying to present simple ideas and winning support for them. Hence she was the exact opposite of Sir Keith Joseph, an intellectual who had an unfortunate habit of saying the wrong things in public.

Thatcherism is a convenient shorthand for the policies followed by the Conservative government, particularly from 1983 – 1990. Yet it is probably reasonable to assume that any Conservative government with a reasonable majority, regardless of the identity of the prime minister, would have been influenced by Milton Friedman and others and adopted more liberal, free market ideas. Had these been implemented by a less divisive figure than Margaret Thatcher (Willie Whitelaw for example) things might have turned out a bit differently.

If you find ‘alternative history’ (or counter-factuals) interesting, I’d strongly recommend ‘Prime Minister Portillo and other things that never happened’ (Politico’s), which contains a series of essays on what might have been, including some of the scenarios mentioned above. Some of the essays paint a fairly convincing picture of how things could have turned out, others (less satisfyingly) ponder on different scenarios and possibilities. Naturally, Tony Blair’s name turns up in a few of the essays – once as a minor player in a Labor plot, and in another as a leading lawyer and the husband of Home Secretary Cherie Blair…