By Adrian Smith
It’s Margaret Thatcher’s centenary this year. For anyone middle-aged or older it seems impossible – is it really 100 years since she was born, and 35 years since she left office? For Iain Dale she’s still very much alive, and yet in this short biography he promises to temper admiration of his subject with due recognition of her flaws and failures. He writes well, addressing directly a young and curious reader largely ignorant of Lady Thatcher’s life and legacy.
The narrative proceeds apace: Grantham to Westminster in nine pages, and Leader of the Opposition in another 10. An intelligent, single-minded woman faces formidable hurdles, but with due reward once the Conservatives win the 1970 general election. Dale notes the irony of so many grammar schools becoming comprehensives during Mrs Thatcher’s tenure as Education Secretary, but sees this as a Labour legacy. Ted Heath is portrayed as aloof, arrogant and indifferent to new ideas, whereas his surprise successor soon re-energises a bruised party. The new leader’s embrace of monetarism is seen in the context of Keynesian social democracy’s waning hegemony and the imminent triumph of free-market capitalism both sides of the Atlantic. In May 1979 Margaret Thatcher wins the first of three elections.
The account of Mrs Thatcher’s 11 years in office is problematic: the Downing Street chapters are thematic and largely uncritical, and nuanced judgement and careful qualification are left until the lengthy conclusion and myth-exploding coda. Dale would have provided his reader with a more balanced assessment of the Prime Minister’s record had he integrated appropriate criticism into the preceding text. As it is, properly informed analysis of, say, the adverse effect on social housing of council house sales, or the impact on mining communities of accelerated pit closures, comes too late in the narrative.
Reverence for the Thatcher legacy remains strong among Conservative commentators, including the author. The best chapters – covering the Prime Minister’s downfall and her painful afterlife – benefit from Dale’s insider status. He regrets her continuing beyond 10 years, thereby giving enemies such as Michael Heseltine and an embittered Geoffrey Howe the opportunity to orchestrate their coup.
Absurdly, there’s no mention of Heseltine until the very end. For Dale, Mrs Thatcher’s weakness was tolerating hostile colleagues for too long, especially those “wets” who hamstrung her first Cabinet with their patrician disdain and obsolete consensualism.
Dale shows a sound understanding of Mrs Thatcher’s approach to Reagan and Gorbachev. His account of the Falklands War is equally thorough, marred only by endorsement of his subject’s admiration for the monstrous General Pinochet. [NOTE FROM IAIN: THIS IS INACCURATE.] Coverage of European and domestic affairs presents a pragmatic Mrs Thatcher as she was and not as her latter-day devotees would like her to have been.
The author applauds a radical transformation in industrial relations, but ignores the consequence of weak trade unions for a low-income economy. Treatment of the miners’ strike stays the right side of triumphalism, but the “declinist” depiction of post-war Britain is woefully ill-informed. Deindustrialisation is largely ignored, while privatisation is misrepresented as a triumph of popular capitalism. Northern Ireland is generously seen as a journey of enlightenment, while devolution is dismissed as an irrelevancy. All this is open to interpretation, but not Dale’s ridiculous claim that Mrs Thatcher played a critical role in ending apartheid. [NOTE FROM IAIN: IT IS NOT RIDICULOUS. I HAVE THE EVIDENCE. THE REVIEWER SHOULD EXPLAIN WHY HE THINKS IT IS RIDICULOUS BEYOND HIS ALLEGIANCE TO THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM. I GO TO GREAT LENGTHS TO EXPLAIN WHY THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM IS WRONG'.
Dale makes a fair stab at a difficult task, but does his target audience learn just how divisive Margaret Thatcher was when in office? A harsh reality is that her policies and personality accelerated an erosion of social cohesion and of collective or individual responsibility. The ironic consequence was a fatal undermining of her belief in how Britain might become a more prosperous, powerful and caring nation.
