On Dec. 15, after the Victoria and Albert Museum refused to accept the collection for its fashion archives, Margaret Thatcher’s clothes and memorabilia were auctioned by Christie’s. While the left-wing British press mocked the auction as a garage sale of tasteless old tat, it brought in nearly $5 million. Thatcher’s iconic handbags and her power suits were sold for prices up to 30 times their estimates. Political association pieces were in high demand. The ceramic bald eagle Ronald Reagan gave her sold for $390,000. Her red prime minister’s dispatch case went for $355,000.
The auction was a telling microcosm of Thatcher’s heritage of international fame and British notoriety. Winning three consecutive elections for the Conservative Party between 1979 and 1987, and transforming a declining, economically troubled Britain with her energy and resolve, Thatcher is viewed by many as the greatest peacetime prime minister of the 20th century. As Charles Moore declares in the second volume of his monumental biography, she also was “the first woman, in the whole of Western democratic history, who truly came to dominate her country in her time.”
Yet she is still the most detested political figure of modern British history, always tagged (among the more printable terms) as the Iron Lady or TBW — “That Bloody Woman.” She was despised by British writers and intellectuals, from Alan Bennett to Hilary Mantel, whose 2014 story “The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher” zestfully imagines her killed by an Irish Republican Army gunman. As the novelist Ian MacEwan writes, “We liked disliking her.”
Moore is certainly on Thatcher’s side. Educated at Eton and Cambridge, he had a distinguished career in the Conservative media as the editor of the Spectator and the Sunday Telegraph; but he is sympathetic and balanced, never a sycophant. The first volume of his authorized biography was hailed as masterly, and in this volume, too, covering the period of her greatest power, 1982 to 1987, Moore combines massive research, prodigious depth of analysis and fascinating narrative detail. He gives us more than 700 pages of text but promises that the book “will not be too heavy to read in bed.” As a passionate Anglophile, I found it riveting, but I wouldn’t advise anyone to risk concussion by reading it lying down.
The most divisive event of Thatcher’s premiership was the miners’ strike of 1984-85. The National Union of Mineworkers, led by the belligerent Arthur Scargill, was prepared to threaten the nation’s energy supply to get higher wages, even if the miners had to endure the hardship of a long strike. Thatcher believed that the trade unions, which had staged recurrent strikes in the 1970s, could not be allowed to create chaos over every wage negotiation and that the coal-mining industry had to compete with other sources of power, including gas, oil and atomic energy. As the strike dragged on, there were violent clashes between the striking miners, the working miners and the police; Scargill sought money to keep the strike going from Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi and the Soviet Union. But finally the union had to give in, and the Tory victory ended the long history of disruptive strikes in Britain.
The miners’ loss, Moore observes, allowed “for the mythologizing of the strike by the left” in movies like “Billy Elliot.” The Labour Party blamed Thatcher for what it saw as her ruthless destruction of the mining industry, her plot to crush the trade unions, and her heartless indifference to the miners and their families. Moore shows that these accusations were untrue, but the strike was tragic, whichever side you were on. The awful job of coal mining, the subject of British myth, ballad and literature, tugged at the heart. The miners emerged as martyrs, and Thatcher bore the brunt of public emotion over their defeat.
She continued the Tory policy of privatizing British industry, selling British Telecom, British Airways and British Gas, and enabling citizens to become shareholders and then property owners who could buy their government-owned housing. Harold Macmillan lamented that Thatcher symbolically was selling off the treasures of the great country houses of the nation: “First of all the Georgian silver goes, and then all that nice furniture that used to be in the saloon. Then the Canalettos go.” But privatization was mainly a successful policy that restored the British economy.
And yet, with all her nerve and assurance, as a woman, Thatcher could not be forgiven for her successes. At the beginning of the book, Moore suggests that “the pronoun ‘she’ is where it all starts, and perhaps where it will finish.” Thatcher became “a mythological figure, the archetype of the ‘strong woman,’ ” and responses to her career and her policies were dismayingly linked to her gender. Her detractors caricatured her as prissy, bossy, a headmistress, “etemper.” One of her colleagues described her as “actually repellent” with her “poisoned smile” and “didactic way.”
But the other side of the misogyny and sexism Thatcher had to endure is the exhilaration of her determination to persevere. Some still underestimate her importance and belittle her achievements. Moore’s superb biography sets the record straight.
