A hundred years ago, two women were born just six months apart. Together they shaped Britain: Mrs Thatcher and Queen Elizabeth. We are now living in the aftermath of their joint legacy.
They didn’t click. One represented “consensus politics”. The other denounced it with her trademark energy and dogmatism. In 1981 Thatcher stated, “To me consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects. The process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead.” She concluded with a rhetorical flourish: “What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner ‘I stand for consensus’?”
The answer, above all others, was the Second World War. Because, of course, a historic consensus can be the opposite of vacuous. The Britain that Thatcher inherited as prime minister in 1979, was in fact a product of its success, personified by the Queen.
Both women had legendary self-discipline. They rarely clashed in a way the public could perceive. A vivid exception was in the South Atlantic. After the Falklands victory that forged her premiership, Thatcher flew down to thank the troops personally. In its windy environment she wore a headscarf in the style that the Queen had made familiar from informal photoshoots. Then she bestowed medals to soldiers. Elizabeth was furious. Nothing like it happened again. There was space for only one Queen!
Yet both believed in the worship of her throne. Both the doer – who hacked her way through the heartless misogyny of the Tory establishment, from the Grantham grocer’s shop to the pinnacle of power – and the done-for, who effortlessly inherited the throne with unrestrained celebration when merely 25.
The result was a profound socio-cultural stasis beneath the incredible decade of the Eighties that Thatcher dominated. The sheer provocation of her supremacy filled the years of her premiership with energy and inventiveness. All of us, across all the spectrums of politics, culture and the economy, fortunate enough to be active at the time, were forced to raise our game – whether to support her, oppose her, or avoid her altogether.
For she made ideas matter, as well as money. Even when she adopted appalling policies – such as the poll tax – this led to new forms of mass disobedience and turbocharged Scottish devolution.
What was her outstanding achievement? Was it her calculated sympathy with those who felt “swamped”, which preserved the salience of racism and ensured she was elected in 1979? Or the destruction of British industry with insane early monetarism? Or the elevation of Rupert Murdoch after a secret meeting at Chequers? Or the reckless gamble of the Falklands that made her fortune? Or the destruction of the labour movement’s praetorian guard, the miners, thanks to the myopic syndicalism of their leader Arthur Scargill? Or enabling more than a million families to buy their own council homes, while skimming much of the proceeds into the Treasury and preventing councils from building new ones? Or frittering away the cornucopia of North Sea oil, the essential lubricant of the UK’s Eighties expansion, on unemployment benefits? Or shattering the closed shop of the City with the “big bang”, to make London the epicentre of early neoliberalism? Or her identifying Mikhail Gorbachev as a Soviet leader the West could “work with”? Or her go-ahead for the creation of the European Union’s single market? Or her deranged and fatal opposition to German reunification?
Whatever it was, it was history-making on an epic scale.
The contrast with Elizabeth could hardly be greater. The Queen dedicated her life to “being” not “doing”. She left behind no tangible achievement that we can say was hers, not even a stamp collection like her father. Her project was the preservation of the media-symbol that the British monarchy had become, so that her subjects could continue to worship it as their enchanted mirror. For decade after unendurably enervating decade, the country ululated before its empty signifier, none more so than Thatcher.
We all knew this could only slow down, not reverse, Westminster’s degenerative sclerosis. Labour clung to its fading shibboleths, as we can see to this day. Thatcher, by contrast, rebelled against the confinements of becoming second-rate. This was the shock of her attraction – her apparent anti-establishment energy.
Yet the heart of the Thatcher project was to renew what is still the cause of our country’s downfall. The way out of the mausoleum of the British state and constitutional monarchy is via the door that leads to a democratic constitution. In 1989 I enjoyed provoking her to respond to Charter 88’s demand for real change in the way we are governed. Thatcher’s answer, “The government consider that our present constitutional arrangements continue to serve us well…”
She kept that door firmly shut. On it was embossed the Royal Coat of Arms.
Back in 1982, celebrating the Falklands victory, Thatcher declared, “There were those who would not admit it…[who] had their secret fears that it was true: that Britain was no longer the nation that had built an empire and ruled a quarter of the world. But they were wrong. The lesson of the Falklands is that Britain has not changed.”
What Queen Elizabeth embodied only Thatcher had to nerve to say out loud. Now, a century after their birth, the country is actively threatened by the incoherence of their joint legacy. Royal consensus is terminating in Keir Starmer while a re-energised right calls on Nigel Farage to implement an “explicit British nationalism”. One that vaporises “human rights”, annuls the Good Friday agreement, abolishes the “fake” parliaments of Scotland and Wales, and delivers mass deportation. Finally, true Thatcherism awaits us.
[Further reading: Mrs Thatcher’s bastards]
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