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BERNARD PORTER University of Newcastle upon Tyne

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Though Not an Historian
Myself . . .'
Margaret Thatcher and the Historians

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

security, the Mammon of today, and more destructive of the power,


wealth, and strength of England than any of the false gods which we have
worshipped from time to time.'1 Thatcher could have said Amen to that.

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But Macmillan was also half what he called 'a gown man' himself, and
respected academic learning most of the time.J So did other post-war
premiers. None of them openly and continually reviled it as Thatcher did.
Her memoirs are full of gratuitous asides against 'sophisticated people' who
cannot see plain facts when they are placed under their noses, and clever
men (always men) who are too aware of the difficulties of a course of action
to dare to stride ahead.3 They are also full of confidence and a certainty
which are alien to most academics. That may be the main key to the tension
between us.
It is illustrated by an anecdote, which is vouchsafed by an ex-member of
the Conservative Research Department and so may be more reliable than
such anecdotes often are. This story relates to a visit Thatcher paid to
the Department in the summer of 1975, shortly after her succession to the
Conservative leadership. Our witness described the occasion. A 'moderate'
Conservative (later he would be called a 'wet') was giving a paper. 'Before
he had finished . . . the new party leader reached into her briefcase and took
out a book. It was Friedrich von Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty. Inter-
rupting our pragmatist, she held the book up for all of us to see. 'This," she
said sternly, "is what we believe," and banged Hayek down on the table.'4
The peremptory tone of that injunction (reinforced by the physical action)
seems to indicate the contempt she felt for critical thought, by comparison
with conviction and commitment. That reverses the usual academic
priorities. One can hardly imagine a history tutor slamming The Tudor
Revolution in Government down in a seminar and making the same
assertion.
Of course, academia is not the same as national politics, and different
standards are bound to apply in the two arenas. If Thatcher could have ac-
cepted that, we might have met her half way. The real trouble was that she
would not. She believed she knew what was best for our sphere too. This
became apparent in the debate over the new 'National Curriculum' in
history, in which she took an extraordinary interest for a Prime Minister.
Though not an historian myself,' she wrote in her memoirs, 'I had a very
clear — and I had naively imagined uncontroversial — idea of what history
was. History is an account of what happened in the past.' The preliminary
draft of the Curriculum 'appalled' her, because it ignored this obvious truth.
'It put the emphasis on interpretation and enquiry as against content and
1
Harold Macmillan, Tides of Fortune: 1945-1955 (London, 1969), p. 410.
1
Harold Macmillan, Riding the Storm: 1956-1959 (London, 1971), p. 197.
1
Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (London, 1993), passim.
4
John Randagh, Thatcher's People (London, 1991), p. ix.
248 BERNARD PORTER

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

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that extent. This is the first remarkable aspect of this episode. The second is
what it reveals about Thatcher's way of thinking generally. It was founded
not on expertise — Though not an historian myself . . .' — but on instinct.
That instinct was elevated over everything else. It made her inherently wiser
than other people, even in areas of which she was ignorant. Hence the con-
fidence with which she forayed into our field.
Instinct is another recurring theme of Thatcher's memoirs. It was her
truest, most reliable guide. Ignoring it was the cause of most of her
mistakes. It was against her best instincts, for example, that she went along
with Heath's corporatism in the early 1970s.6 Instinct was the main bond
between her and her people — or the people, as she preferred to call them7
— elevating both of them together above those clever men. It was also, of
course — as it usually is for those who rely on it — a way of cutting through
doubt. That in itself is enough to make academics chary of it. We rely on
doubt to preserve us from the possibility of error. (St Thomas must be any
academic's patron saint.) We also tend to be suspicious of the source of peo-
ple's instincts. Thatcher's have been traced back to her early upbringing, in
the corner shop in Grantham, where she herself admits most of her 'mental
outlook' was indelibly formed.1 That mental outlook is unlikely to have em-
braced the full range of human instincts. (Humour, for example, was
somehow left out.) More worrying — from an academic point of view — is
the fact that it did not seem to waver as she grew older. At an age when
most young people begin questioning everything, she stood firm. University
had no influence on her. By the time she reached it, in 1943, her underlying
philosophy was already set, in such a form as to prove impervious to
Oxford's normally softening and broadening charms. She never seems to
have gone through a stage of doubting, therefore. (Her patron was St
George.) That was bound to make it difficult for her to find any rapport
with those for whom doubting was a way of professional life.

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-

' Thatcher, Downing Strttt Years, pp. 595-6.


1
Ibid., p. 13.
' Ibid., p. 10; Hugo Young, One of Us: A Biography of Margaret Thatcher (London, 1989;
rev. edn 1990), pp. 139-40.
' Thatcher, Downing Street Years, p. 11.
THATCHER AND THE HISTORIANS 249

pounded by the fact that we trespassed so often on each other's territories.


We pontificated on politics; she on history, as well as on just about every
other academic pursuit.

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That was another distinctive feature of her reign. Thatcher was always
elbowing her way into our tight little academic bailiwicks, and telling us
what we ought to think about our own specialities. Again, previous Prime
Ministers had generally avoided doing this. The most notorious example
came in May 1988, when she visited the General Assembly of the Church of
Scotland in Edinburgh, and gave a talk — a kind of 'sermon' (nicknamed
the 'Sermon on the Mound') — in which she presumed to instruct it —
learned theologians, many of them, of international repute — as to the true
nature of Christianity, no less. (It turned out to be a version of Conser-
vatism.)' Even their discomfort, however, cannot have been as great as that
of the social scientists, who suddenly woke up one morning in October 1987
to find that, by a diktat from No. 10, their whole subject no longer existed.
There is no such thing as society."0 Puff: it was gone. Compared with this,
historians got off lightly.
What we found confronting us in May 1979 was a Prime Minister with a
very pronounced sense of history; one which did not generally, however,
accord with our own. In this we were more like the theologians. Thatcher
was always invoking history, in a way we found exasperating, because it
was invariably (from our viewpoint) simplistic, at best. She usually did it
for a purpose: to encourage emulation, point dangers, or teach lessons —
which was another thing that annoyed us, because it seemed to be claiming
for history a more narrowly utilitarian value than most of us believe it can
really bear. Munich, for example, was continually cited as evidence of the
wrongness of 'appeasement' in any circumstances, which is nonsense;
although Thatcher, of course, was not alone in doing this. Another example
came in the summer of 1983, when people were worrying about the way the
new technologies were aggravating the already serious unemployment
situation in Britain, and Thatcher cited the example of the early nineteenth
century industrial revolution to prove, reassuringly, that technological
developments 'always', as she put it, created more jobs than they destroyed
in the long term." That is highly contentious. She used other historical
examples to demonstrate similar points. As she went on, she grew more and
more confident of her grasp of history — not only Britain's but other coun-
* The full text is published in Jonathan Raban, God, Man and Mrs Thatcher (London,
1989).
" Thatcher, quoted in the Observer, 1 November 1987. In her memoirs she claims that she
was misunderstood over this, and explains what she really meant; which to this reader,
however, is what he thought she meant all along. The only social ties are contracts between in-
dividuals. Thatcher, Downing Street Years, p. 626.
1
' Interview, 25 August 1983, reported in Guardian, 26 August; and cf. her speech of 29
January 1987 to 900 businessmen in London, reported in ibid, 30 January.
250 BERNARD PORTER

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-

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ture the French themselves on its actual insignificance, by comparison, for
example, with Britain's so-called 'Glorious' one of 1688. Christopher Hill
called this account 'demonstrably wrong in many of its facts and interpreta-
tions', and thought she ought to 'apologise to the people of France for what
she said'.12 That was asking a lot. Usually, however, she stuck to the history
of her own country, on which her ideas were equally trenchant, entirely
consistent, and — she believed — fundamentally supportive of her broader
political and economic philosophy; which of course was the whole point of
the exercise.
Her most famous excursion in this area was her promotion of what she
called 'Victorian values' — that is, hard work, thrift, self-reliance, personal
responsibility, and patriotism — as a model for her own age. Interestingly
enough, this did not start out as a historical idea. The kernel of it can be
traced back to 1975, the time of Thatcher's party leadership contest with
Edward Heath, when we find her lauding almost the same clutch of
qualities, but on that occasion under the name of 'middle class values', which
was probably more accurate.'3 It was apparently the television interviewer
Brian Walden who first coined the phrase 'Victorian values' for them, in
January 1983.M In other words, the principle came first, rooted no doubt in
Thatcher's 'instincts', with the historical connotation being added later by
someone else. Nonetheless she clearly took to the idea, made it her own,
and incorporated it into a historical edifice which she believed was of some
importance in justifying her policies.
This was Thatcher's major engagement with the historians. The others
were all skirmishes, of no great tactical importance. This one was crucial to
both sides. For Thatcher what depended on it was the credibility of the idea
that a return to the values of self-reliance and patriotism would bring pro-
sperity and greatness again. Britain's twentieth century decline had been a
result of its departure from those ideals. For historians it was important to
show that it was not — that nothing in history was — as simple as that. This
was a key professional assumption. So battle was commenced.
The campaign was made difficult for the historians by Thatcher's tactics
of simply firing her cannon occasionally and ignoring the small-arms fire
they directed back at her. She never elaborated her thesis in detail. She
repeated her assertions about 'Victorian values' several times, and forcibly,
11
Interview on French television, 11 July 1989, reported in Times, 12 July; Christopher Hill
in Guardian, IS July 1989.
" Article in Daily Telegraph, 30 January 1975, quoted in George Gardiner, Margaret
Thatcher, From Childhood to Leadership (London, 1975), p. 188.
" Weekend World (LWT), 16 January 1983, reported in Times, 20 January 1983.
THATCHER AND THE HISTORIANS 251

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

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should she be? If she had been, she would probably have been unimpressed
by their academic caution, and their lack of an agreed line. (Some berated
Victorian values, for example; others berated her, for not really abiding by
them.) When it came to her broader argument the historians found they had
even less to bite on. There were great gaps in it; some of us hoped these
might be filled in by her memoirs, only to be disappointed when they came
out. Here, however, she had help from other quarters, lieutenants who
covered other parts of the line. Together they managed to put together a
consistent Thatcherite view of the history of the past hundred years in
Britain; enough to give the historians some kind of a target for their puny
guns.
In outline, it looked like this. It began with 'Victorian values'. The Vic-
torian era was Thatcher's golden age, when Britain had been at its peak:
richer than any other country in the world, more dynamic, more stable, and
more powerful abroad. That was due entirely, Thatcher believed, to the
liberation of the free enterpreneurial spirit that was intrinsic to the British
national character, distinguishing Britons crucially from continental Euro-
peans, for example;17 and was an essential prerequisite of progress at any
time and in any place. Thereafter the story was one of decline. The reason
for that, in Thatcher's view, was Britain's gradual espousal of 'socialism',
which had the effect of sapping initiative, and so striking at the motor-
power of its economic growth. Most of that decline had taken place since
the end of the Second World War, when first Attlee and then his successors
— Conservative as well as Labour — had almost smothered the Briton's
natural genius in a blanket of welfarism. The worst offender in this regard
was Edward Heath, because he had seen the need for change, and actually
promised it in 1970, but then reneged on this undertaking later when the
going got rough. Heath therefore was a 'traitor' — the language Thatcher
used for such people;" but his apostasy also indicated the strength of the
trends that had carried him along. By the same token it illustrated the
strength of Thatcher's achievement, in reversing all this after 1979. That
was the climax to the story (for the time being, at any rate); the happy

" 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

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nation — in effect, and making due allowance for some inevitable shifts in
the relative positions of countries20 — to its high Victorian apogee. And
they had done it (this was the key to the most recent stage of this historical
process) through one woman's conviction, determination, and strength of
will.
That was the pure Thatcher version, in almost all the detail she ever gave.
The gaps are obvious. The main one is chronological: the long period
(about half a century, possibly more) between "Victorian values' and the
coming of full-blown welfare socialism to Britain, about which Thatcher is
hazy. The main problem with that period, from a Thatcherite perspective,
is that there was clearly already quite a bit of decline going on then, and yet
not enough socialism to account for it. The two interwar Labour govern-
ments will not do as scapegoats; first because they were too feeble, and
secondly because the onset of Britain's decline obviously pre-dated them.
The memoirs give an account of the 'gap' in terms of national complacency;
the cushion of Britain's overseas investments; the 'deceptive might' of the
empire; 'and, of course, the exhausting losses of the First and Second World
Wars'.21 That is a fairly neutral interpretation; but by the same token also
an uncharacteristic one. (It is really hers? Or one of her collaborators'?)22
To elaborate, we need to look elsewhere. Some of Thatcher's allies at the
time adduced a far more interesting explanation, which had the added
advantage of giving them another villain to shy at before the socialists came
on to the scene. It may seem unfair to link their views with hers, but for the
fact that they are consistent with other attitudes she took. At the very least
they can be regarded as a kind of Pauline extension to her Christianity; an
essential ingredient of Thatcherism, even if they are not explicit in the
gospels themselves.
The scapegoat here was the British upper class and intellectual Establish-
ment. They plugged the gap. The idea was this: that even before socialism
seriously came on to the scene the British spirit of enterprise had been

" Thatcher, "Don't Undo What I Have Done'.


" Thatcher, Downing Street Years, p. 5.
11
Ibid.
" This highlights a problem which will always attach to The Daunting Street Years as a
historical source. We know that Thatcher had help in writing it. No professional historian is
mentioned in her preface, where one would expect to find all her collaborators' names; but it is
possible that tome of them were kept secret, including a historian's, difficult as it may be to
imagine any self-respecting one agreeing to become a party to such deceit. He or she may have
been responsible for this passage. It is for this reason that these memoirs may come to be
regarded by future historians as a less reliable guide to her true way of thinking than her
various directly reported statements over the years.
THATCHER AND THE HISTORIANS 253

withering in a culture increasingly dominated from the later nineteenth


century onwards by people and institutions — the aristocracy, landed gen-
try, intelligentsia, literati, professions, universities, and in particular the

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public schools — which looked down their noses at 'trade', as they called it,
and so would not accord the same recognition, in terms of status and
respect, to success in trade that they accorded to success in their own
spheres. The growth of the empire — calling for administrative rather than
enterpreneurial abilities — had much to do with this. The result was to
seduce the best young talents in Britain away from wealth-creating activities
into basically parasitic ones. Hence this early stage of the country's
capitalist decline. This was not a new theory," but it attracted fresh atten-
tion with the timely publication in 1981 of the American historian Martin
Wiener's English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, which
elaborated it." That book made a deep impression on the "New Right'.
Populist versions of its main thesis appeared everywhere.25 It was a god-
send. It completed the historical picture. It also, of course, pandered to that
instinctive antipathy towards certain social and intellectual elite groups in
Britain, including academia, which we have noticed in Thatcher already; an
antipathy that now seemed vindicated by the part the latter were shown to
have played in the decline of British capitalism, and hence of Britain herself,
all those years before.
In the 1980s this was the dominant version of recent British history, cer-
tainly outside the academic historical profession. It is easy to see why. It
was intrinsically credible, and even highly plausible. It pandered not only to
political and social prejudices, like Thatcher's against aristocrats, intellec-
tuals, and socialists, but also to much better-founded concerns that had
been building up over the years about the deleterious effect on British in-
dustry, especially, of class snobbery and bureaucracy. These concerns were
by no means confined to the political right. One man who shared them in
the later 1960s, for instance, was Tony Benn, whose diaries for that period
often anticipate the arguments of the New Right uncannily. (He thought
Britain's rot had started when imperialism had diverted it away from a
vigorous industrialism, for example; that public school 'amateurism' had
" The idea that thrusting entrepreneurs were seduced away from productive enterprise by
their social (aristocratic) pretensions goes back to the nineteenth century itself, and was for a
long time part of the common currency of economic historians searching for causes of the
'Great Depression' of 1873-96. See also Correlli Barnett, The Collapse of British Power (Lon-
don, 1972).
" Martin J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850-1980
(Cambridge, 1981).
11
See e.g. Lord Young of Graffham, Enterprise Regained (London, 1985), pp. 5-8. A more
accessible (because widely remaindered) version is the same author's autobiography, The
Enterprise Years (London, 1990), pp. 25-9. Lord (David) Young was brought into her Cabinet
by Thatcher in 1984, partly because of his entrepreneurial credentials.
254 BERNARD PORTER

undermined manufacturing; that the Post Office — for which he was


responsible — needed to import some private enterpreneurial vigour to
make it efficient; and that civil servants had always been the enemies of

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change." Thatcher would have gone along with all of that.) What these
shared perceptions suggest is that this interpretation of Britain's past was
one very much of its period; a product itself of history, therefore, in much
the same way as (for example) Whig, Marxist, and social Darwinist versions
were in earlier times.
Of course, this does not necessarily mean it was wrong. Many an idea
that has turned out to be true was 'of its time' originally. Some may even
have been 'instinctive'. In this case, however, there are reasons to believe
that Thatcher's version of history expressed, at best, only a partial truth. It
remained weak, for example, on thereasonswhy Britain wandered from the
path of economic 'freedom' in the first place — even after the aristocrats and
literati were brought into the picture alongside the socialists. In the
Thatcherite view this was simply a result of error, fuelled by old-fashioned
attitudes, sectional interests, and a misplaced sense of philanthropy. But
there may have been more to it than that.
One alternative version, of course, is that unfettered free enterprise
capitalism was abandoned because it failed. There can be no doubt that this
view was widely held at the time. One of the reasons for that judgement was
the hopes its original aficionados had placed in it, which were higher, in
general, than they are today. It was supposed to eradicate poverty and
unemployment, for example, through what today is called the 'trickle-down
effect'; and even to reduce inequality. John Stuart Mill believed that this
was one of the things that morally justified it, to the extent that if the results
turned out otherwise — if free market capitalism did not conduce to greater
equality — what he called 'communism' would be preferable." It was also
thought to bring other advantages in its train, including political liberty (as
distinct from the economic kind), domestic concord, and international
peace. But none of this happened. Poverty persisted. Unemployment was
endemic throughout the later nineteenth century, though it was largely
masked by such factors as the increasing prevalence of casual labour, the
workhouse system, and mass emigration abroad. (This is why Thatcher's
historical lesson on the work-creating benefits of new technologies should
not be taken too seriously.) Industrial profits fell. The economy generally
began struggling, and fell into what was called a 'depression' — though it
was a mild one by modern standards — in the 1870s. Attempts to promote

" 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,

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riots, and the growth of socialism. That was the context of Britain's original
backsliding. The reasons for it looked good at the time.
The point of the backsliding, of course, was to protect British capitalism
from the effects of all this turbulence. The problem was that capitalism was
not benefiting everyone, and so was not as widely accepted as had origin-
ally been hoped. There were two ways of coping with this. One was to force
capitalism on those who considered themselves to be its victims; but that
would have compromised the political liberalism that had always been
intimately associated with it. The second was to modify it, to made it more
acceptable, and so enable the country to retain its political freedoms. At the
time most people plumped for the second of these options — including, for
example, J. S. Mill, who at a certain point decided that the failure of free
market capitalism to fulfil what had seemed to him to be its early promise
required that he now become a 'socialist'.2'The same rationale underlay all
the social reforms of the following century, culminating in the welfare state.
This was a factor entirely missing from the Thatcher historical view. The
reason for that omission was largely ideological. By the 1970s the old con-
nection between the free market and social and political liberty had gone.
Capitalism was no longer expected to benefit everybody, certainly not to
the extent of achieving equality; and its supporters were less fixated on cer-
tain kinds — at least — of individual and political freedom than the Vic-
torians had been." (This is where Thatcher's espousal of 'Victorian values'
strikes a particularly false note.) The trouble about a free market
economy', wrote the journalist Neal Ascherson in 1985, 'is that it requires so
many policemen to make it work.'30 This is precisely what had turned the
Victorians away from it, but the association held no terrors for its ad-
vocates now. Hence the latter could not even perceive the 'failures' of
capitalism which had been so apparent, and so damning, to their forebears.
And yet they perceived the failures of socialism only too well. This blind-
ness was partly a generational phenomenon. Thatcher was the first British
Prime Minister on whom the unemployment of the 1920s and 1930s had
made almost no impression, even vicariously; certainly nothing to match

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

the searing impact of the 'petty jealousies, minor tyrannies, il—


neighbourliness and sheer sourness' which she remembered from the post-
war 'age of austerity', which was her formative period.J1 This limited the

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range of her empathy, obviously, and consequently flawed her historical
judgment."
If capitalism's failings were even more serious than the reformers
believed, then her myopia could have had a disastrous effect. That was a
possibility. It was always the Marxist line, of course, that capitalism was in-
herently doomed, bound to self-destruct ultimately through the force of its
own contradictions; a process which might be delayed temporarily by, for
example, the kinds of modifications Britain's social reformers proposed for
it, but could never be halted for good. Few people had accepted that in the
1950s and 1960s, because of the apparent success of the reformers, which
seemed to have discredited the Marxist view. Thatcher considered herself to
be an anti-Marxist above everything; but by returning Britain to the path
predicted by the Marxists — red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalism — she could
be said to have vindicated it.
Does this make her a tool of history, even of the enemy's history, rather
than — as she preferred to think of herself — a prime mover in it, holding
things back, turning them round, and reclaiming ancient heritages?33 It
would be ironic, to put it mildly, if this were so; and also a sweet revenge
for academic historians, to have her destroyed by the subject she had — in
their view — so much abused. None of us will want to make our minds up
on this, however, for a very long time yet. We need to weigh up the
possibilities, look at things from all sides, see how they turn out. That, of
course, is all part of our besetting professional weakness: prevarication;
which is what made us no match for Thatcher, the 'conviction politician', in
the short term. Her version of British history, therefore, looks to be the one
most likely to prevail for a while yet. In the long term, of course, we shall
have the advantage of the final word on her. By that time, however, it
really will be merely academic.

" Thatcher, Downing Street Years, p. 12.


" 'Empathy' of course, was another of the features of the 'New History' in schook of which
Thatcher disapproved. See ibid., p. 596.
" Thatcher, "Don't Undo What I Have Done'.

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