History of England 1-6

On Thursday 22 November, Thatcher announced her resignation. Tebbit was to call Heseltine ‘a serial Conservative assassin’. The image is not altogether apt: an assassin usually works for others. In the House, Thatcher was greeted by waving ballot papers. When pressed by the opposition on the question of betrayal, she supported her party. Privately, she was distraught. Alan Clark, a true believer, attempted to turn her mind to the glories of the past, but she could not be distracted. The nation did not mourn, but the staff at Downing Street openly wept as they presented her with a silver teapot. ‘How useful,’ was her characteristic response. A camera pointed at her limousine caught her leaning forward, with tears in her eyes and biting her lip.

Her vision had been refracted through prisms softer than her own, but when she spoke her mind, without filter or script, the effect was too often discordant and divisive. And towards the end, she even spoke her mind in defiance of government policy. Not Salisbury, Disraeli, Baldwin or even Sir Robert Walpole had sought so openly to remould the nation in their image. For this attempt alone, popular memory has found it hard to forgive her. Then must be reckoned the 3 million who lost their jobs in her battle with inflation, the hammer taken to the old mining communities, the disintegration of union power, her perceived philistinism, her weakness for tub-thumping, and the suspicion, shared by colleagues and country alike, that she could not listen.

In her own eyes, Thatcher had not ended the post-war settlement but had simply withdrawn it to the frontiers of the feasible. Certainly she did not turn Britain into a copy of the United States, as some suggested. In 1979, Thatcher found herself at the head of a mixed economy, and it was a mixed economy that she bequeathed, though the balance had tilted in favour of the private sector. But she did offer security, of a sort – security for the future, in bricks and mortar, in shares and investments, in a promise of wealth that could be passed on. Perhaps she would have wished the City less acquisitive, British culture less avid for pleasure, or the people less stubborn, but these were birds she had hatched. When Kingsley Amis told his heroine that his latest book concerned a Communist takeover of Britain, Thatcher advised him to ‘get another crystal ball’. And indeed she proved the better seer. Yet although she contributed to the end of the Cold War, it seemed to some as if she had no real desire for a peaceful settlement. She could never quite acclimatize herself to a world without the Red Menace. It had been the enemy for so long that she found it hard to identify new enemies except in relation to old.

When she left Downing Street, the Iron Lady floated away to political oblivion. But she could comfort herself with one certainty: John Major, her appointed dauphin, would surely continue her work. He had defeated Heseltine and Douglas Hurd. The ‘boy from Brixton’, charming, unassuming but tenacious, was ‘gold, just gold’, she told others. If he was wanting in fierce conviction, if he appeared a little too pragmatic on European questions, he was nevertheless ‘one of us’.

That John Major would succeed Thatcher in vision as well as in office was taken for granted by all save Major himself. For all his apparent mildness, Major was resolved to be a leader. The differences, both in style and in address, were legion. Some were more subtle than others. Thatcher may be called the last of the truly ‘English’ prime ministers of the twentieth century. She had wanted not only a nanny but ‘an English nanny’ to bring up her children. This sense of Englishness also informed her attitude to the Celtic nations. As a Londoner, John Major was only incidentally English, and his outlook was metropolitan rather than national. ‘What has the Conservative Party to offer to a workingclass kid from Brixton? It made him Prime Minister.’ So ran the party slogan for the 1992 election. The suggestion was cunning, if not entirely accurate. His father had run a business making that most English of artefacts, the garden ornament, and his mother had been a music hall artiste. The Majors’ fortunes dipped when the business ran into difficulties and the family was obliged to move into lodgings. Despite later claims, the family was more of the lower middle than of the working class, but the diligence so often associated with that group was not noticeable in the young John. He left school with only three O levels and a deep sense of shame for having let his parents down.