Professional Documents
Culture Documents
A
cademic historians have a real problem on their hands with
Margaret Thatcher. How can we be objective about her?
Everything militates against it. Very few of us are even roughly of
her political persuasion. Many of us feel a sense of professional grievance
against her. While she was in power she was not kind to the universities and
colleges. She overburdened us with students, increased our administrative
load, held back our salaries, removed our tenure, forced some of us into
early retirement, checked up on our teaching and research. We could cope
with all this, perhaps; historians are good — better than most people — at
standing back from their own personal prejudices and interests, and seeing
all sides of a question. But there is more. She interfered shamelessly with
our subject, telling us what we should think about a whole range of
historical issues, and then how we should teach it in schools. She despised
our approach to it: especially our ability to see all sides of a question, which
she regarded as weakness; and our tendency to obfuscate what to her
seemed to be matters of simple common sense. Lastly, she had strong views
about her own place in history, which were controversial, yet about which
she would brook no controversy herself. She engaged with us, but in terms
that would not allow us to engage back. It was as if she were somehow im-
mune, not merely from criticism, but also from the normal processes of
critical appraisal as academics understand them. She lay outside our law.
She was unique in this. No other British Prime Minister has ever joined
battle quite so fiercely with our profession. Others have shown irritation
occasionally: for example, Harold Macmillan, who once berated academic
economists for what he took to be their vocational over-caution: They hate
action and risk. That is why they have become dons. . . They worship
Txomtieth Ctntury British History, Vol. 5, No. 2,1994, pp. 246-56 © OUP1994
THATCHER AND THE HISTORIANS 247
knowledge.' So she tried to stop it; and then when she found she could not,
because the professionals would not budge, disowned it (in an interview in
the Sunday Telegraph).' No other Prime Minister would have interfered to
Hence our irritation with her, and hers with us. Of course this is not the
whole story. There are other, lower reasons for our hostility; and further
ones for hers. We shall be meeting one of the latter later. (Briefly, she holds
us partly responsible for Britain's historical decline.) But the nub of the
mutual friction is this contrast between our mental approaches — com-
tries' too — and eager to share her insights with the rest of us. Sometimes
she was quite fearless in this regard; as in July 1989, when she used the occa-
sion of the second centenary celebrations of the French Revolution to lec-
but always in the same very general terms." She took no notice of the
fusillade of books and articles that broke out afterwards on the subject, pro-
voked by her intervention." She was probably not aware of them. Why
" E.g. speech in Glasgow, 28 January 1983, reported in Guardian, 29 January 1983; In-
dependent Radio News interview, 15 April 1983, reported in The Times, 16 April 1983.
" E.g. James Walvin, Victorian Values (London, 1988); Eric M. Sigsworth (ed.). In Search
of Victorian Values (Manchester, 1988); Gordon Marsden (ed.), Victorian Values (London;
1990); T. C. Smout (ed.), Victorian Values (Oxford, 1992).
" Margaret Thatcher, "Don't Undo What I Have Done', Newsweek, April 1992; repr. Guar-
dian, 22 April 1992.
" Thatcher to Sir Anthony Parsons, May 1987, quoted in Young, On* of Us, p. 223.
252 BERNARD PORTER
ending after the years of slow inexorable slide. 'My colleagues and I turned
round the whole philosophy of government. We restored the strength and
reputation of Britain.' We reclaimed our heritage."' They had returned the
" Tony Benn, Out of the Wilderness: Diaries 1963-67 (London, 1987; pb edn 1988), pp. 239
(29 March 1965), 264 (28 May 1965), 367 (5 January 1966), 461 (27 July 1966); and Office
Without Power: Diaries 1968-72 (London, 1988), p. 124 (19 November 1968).
" J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 2nd edn (London, 1849), book II, ch. 1, s. 3.
THATCHER AND THE HISTORIANS 255
British exports led to conflicts with other countries and peoples, and the
annexation of new colonies, which went right against the free-market grain.
At home disaffection set in in the 1880s, leading to strikes, demonstrations,
11
J. S. Mill, Autobiography (London, 1873), pp. 231-4.
" Two 'freedoms' to which the Victorians were particularly devoted, and which no longer
exist today, are freedom of immigration, and freedom from an intrusive 'political police'. See
Bernard Porter, The Refugee Question in Mid-Victorian Politics (Cambridge, 1979), ch. 4 and
The Origins of the Vigilant State (London, 1987), ch. 1. There are also others.
10
Neal Ascherson, "Law and Order in the Market-place', Observer, 25 May 1985. On the
general question of the present-day association of free marketism with strong government, see
Andrew Gamble, The Free Economy and the Strong State (London, 1988).
256 BERNARD PORTER