Margaret Hilda Thatcher was born (as Margaret Roberts) 100 years ago, on 13 October 1925. In the years since she left Downing Street in 1990, her achievements and legacies have been widely discussed by political commentators. The extent to which she shaped both modern conservatism and New Labour is still debated by her political successors. Anthony Burgess wrote this assessment of her time as Prime Minister the year before she was voted out of office by MPs from her own party.

‘Thoughts on the Thatcher Decade’ by Anthony Burgess (1989)

Mrs Thatcher is herself a notorious philistine. She is never to be seen at concerts, plays, or operas. She reads best-sellers. She recently confided with a kind of pride that she had just re-read The Fourth Protocol by Frederick Forsyth. Re-read, note. She is unintellectual. There is no poetry in her, as there was in Disraeli and Churchill. She has no music, unlike her predecessor Edward Heath. She has absolutely no sense of humour. She has no eloquence, only the capacity to rebuke and rail. But she thinks so highly of herself that she instinctively pluralises from ‘I’ to ‘we.’ ‘We are a grandmother,’ she said. To a BBC reporter in Moscow she boasted: ‘We are in the fortunate position, in Britain, of being, as it were, the senior person in power.’ She promises to become a megalomaniac and, like all who are so afflicted, to have few grounds for this self-augmentation.

For how, with the Thatcherian philosophy, does Britain stand in the comity of industrial nations? When the Iron Lady came to power, the British inflation rate was 10.3 per cent, lower than that of America, France, and Italy. Ten years later it is eight per cent higher than that in any other industrial country. In 1978, Britain had a five billion pound trade surplus. Last year there was a 14 billion pound deficit. As an industrial producer, Britain is just not competitive. Unit labour costs are too high. In 1986, productivity was 73 per cent higher in Japan, 106 per cent higher in West Germany, and 167 per cent higher in the United States.

I look back wryly, and so do many of my journalistic colleagues, to that April day in 1979 when Mrs Thatcher was, in borrowed words, so eloquent in her laudation of a free press. In April 1989, the International Federation of Journalists accused her of a ‘systematic and extensive’ effort to limit free reporting and free comment. It is probably in the area of televisual independence of governmental control that the grosser danger signals are being recorded, but this perhaps has less to do with the desire to muffle or muzzle than a manic devotion to the market. For the BBC is in peril, and the BBC, a free corporation that depends on a licensing system and not on the subvention of advertising, is the sole voice of all the media that sustains a responsibility to the arts, to learning, and to total freedom of comment. Mrs Thatcher would prefer to see the BBC disappear and be replaced by yet another network of banal programmes commercially subsidised, obeying market forces, giving the people what they think they want. If Mrs Thatcher could abolish in Britain such pretensions to intellectuality as exist, she would be glad to do so. The bulk of the citizens would not care. This is sometimes known as democracy.

I have painted a somewhat black picture of the Iron Lady and the decade named after her, and yet the fact that she has maintained herself in power for so phenomenally long a period must point to the country’s ready acceptance of both her personality and her philosophy. In fact, the citizens of England and Wales (if not necessarily of Scotland) seem to approve of the getting and spending policy associated with her rule. There is no great love of socialism, chiefly because socialism has been tried and has been seen signally to fail. The socialist leaders of the country are no gentler, no more humane, than their powerful enemy. They posited a class struggle based on an outworn image of the working man that no longer applies. Working men are joining the middle class if they are prosperous enough; if not, and especially if they are young, they are becoming a violent but inarticulate Lumpenproletariat. The killers and rioters at football matches are expressing resentment at not getting their share of the Thatcherian cake. They are not demonstrating on behalf of a return to socialism. And yet, with a moribund liberalism unable to hope for power, socialism is the only viable alternative to Thatcherism. But what is the nature of this socialism?

It can only be a diluted form of capitalism, with heavier taxes to pay for enhanced state services, especially in the area of health. It cannot reassemble the structure of nationalised industries that the Conservatives are at such pains to dismantle. It may offer a greater sense of social responsibility, as opposed to the smash and grab opportunism of the Conservatives, but it will not offer the people what they really want: more and more goods to consume. In Eastern Europe, where the full, rich, thick cream of socialism used to be purveyed (there was no other nutrient), the people want a capitalist system in which, once bread and sausages are freely available, a flood of washing machines and videocassette players will follow. Nobody wants ideology any more. The mild socialism, especially of the Christian kind, that Western Europe offers is really a kind of capitalist liberalism. But it is concerned with the market and the magic of conspicuous consumerism. This is what the world wants, and it is a kind of Thatcherism.

Of course, to call this monetarism or marketry after the lady with whom it is associated is to give her credit for an inventiveness and originality she does not possess. She is a typical product of the shopkeeping class that sings hymns but abhors ideas as pure subversion. She speaks with a painfully acquired bourgeois accent that sounds affected. She is, and this I have virtually failed to mention, a woman. She is not a sloppy unkempt woman of the bluestocking kind but a snappy dresser (far more elegant than her Queen) who looks after her coiffure with care. She has still a measure of sexual allure which she knows how to use.

Mrs Thatcher, who is only the wife of Denis Thatcher, has been usurping the power of the Queen by turning herself into the nation’s mother, or, if you like, stepmother. She is not the caressing, loving, feeding head of the family. She scolds, raises her voice, administers raps and smacks and hard words. She has relied too much on the fancied glamour of her sex. As a grandmother (who, incidentally, is seen to be not very handy in dandling her new grandchild) she is assuming almost ancestral rights in dealing with her national flock. It is as though she has always been there, like Queen Victoria, and even aging statesmen are no more than her naughty brood.

There is a piquancy in seeing the most successful politician of the age as a member of the sex traditionally downtrodden. The trouble with her is that, despite the allure and the purposefulness, she is not likable. Churchill, with all his faults, was even lovable. So was the cuckolded Edwardian dandy Harold Macmillan. But we have had ten years of a lady who chills the heart and stultifies the national imagination.

She has called into being, almost as by a law of opposites, a kind of independent statesman who has nothing to do with politics. This is Charles, Prince of Wales, who has been demonstrating a genuine concern for the welfare of a nation which will soon acknowledge him as its monarch. He has efficiently inveighed against the wretched architecture which is typical of a utilitarian age. He is against ugliness, and he is all for compassion. Naturally, he has no power except the power of example or persuasion. But he stands for the decent, tolerant, concerned side of the British – the Orwellian side, if you like. If we associate Mrs Thatcher with George Orwell at all, it is in a sense that goes too far. For the vision of Nineteen Eighty-Four was of a genuinely intellectual autocracy, in which an idealistic philosophy (reality exists only inside the collective brain) was imposed on the people. Mrs Thatcher may see herself as Big Sister, but she is not all that fearsome. She will be there only so long as the people want her there. That, too, is what is sometimes known as democracy.

Text copyright (c) International Anthony Burgess Foundation. Not to be used without permission.

• Share | 
• Print