Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (13 page)

He was also a devout Methodist who insisted that his family attend church up to four times on a single Sunday and regarded public dances as deplorable frivolities. By the 1930s English Methodism had lost some of the socially activist spirit
that had made it such an influential force in nineteenth-century Britain, especially as far as the creation of the Labour Party was concerned.
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But the ethics of activism that alderman Alfred Roberts transmitted to his daughter Margaret certainly retained a strong whiff of John Wesley’s original brand of antiestablishment revivalism. Wesley developed Methodism as a way of bringing God back into the lives of those who experienced the poverty and social turmoil of the Industrial Revolution and whose spiritual needs, as he saw it, were neglected by the entrenched Church of England. Like modern evangelical movements, Methodism emphasized a direct and individual relationship to Christ; the path to salvation did not lie through official institutions or trust in elites. Though Wesley preached strongly against greed, his teachings also contained a strain of individual self-improvement that has to have impressed itself on the ambitious young Margaret Roberts—as this excerpt from a Wesley sermon might suggest:

            
These cautions and restrictions being observed, it is the bounden duty of all who are engaged in worldly business to observe that first and great rule of Christian wisdom with respect to money, “Gain all you can.” Gain all you can by honest industry. Use all possible diligence in your calling. Lose no time. If you understand yourself and your relation to God and man, you know you have none to spare. . . . If you understand your particular calling as you ought, you will have no time that hangs upon your hands. Every business will afford some employment sufficient for every day and every hour. That wherein you are placed, if you follow it in earnest, will leave you no leisure for silly, unprofitable diversions.
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Church of England stalwarts derided what they saw as the unseemly fanaticism of the Methodists: there was something distastefully effervescent about all those public displays of godly fervor, all that preaching in open fields and the insistence on charity as an everyday reality. Wesley was fond of quoting Galatians 4:18: “It is always good to be zealously affected in a good thing.”
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One can easily imagine Alfred Roberts making the same arguments to his daughter. “Never do things because other people do them,” he told her. “Make up your own mind what you are going to do and persuade people to do things your way.”
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The message of gritty self-sufficiency undoubtedly resonated amid the deprivations of a small English town during the Depression. But Thatcher’s value system was affected most dramatically, as was the case with most of her generation, by the experience of the Second World War. She had done well enough in school that she
managed to earn a scholarship to Oxford, and she arrived at Somerville College when the war was already well under way. The sense of patriotism and political ferment that reigned there at the time dovetailed with her natural inclinations. Many of the students were off in the war, and those who remained spent a good deal of their time debating the postwar political order. Marxism was a dominant intellectual current at wartime Oxford, but Roberts certainly did not find it amenable. She was already defining herself as a Tory, though the party was in the midst of an agonized redefinition triggered by the disaster of the Depression and the rising popularity of Beveridge-style plans for the future. Since the Oxford Union was closed to women, Roberts cut her political teeth in the Oxford University Conservative Association. (She became its head in 1946.) True to her no-nonsense mind, she eschewed the liberal arts in favor of hard science, choosing chemistry as her major. (When she was later asked about her status as Britain’s first female prime minister, she would say that she preferred to be remembered as the first scientist who won the office.)

At Oxford, Thatcher did not make a name for herself as a radical enthusiast of the values that would later be associated with her name. The Toryism of the time was very much under the sway of the period’s progressive mainstream. Just before the 1945 election, Oxford’s student conservatives published a paper declaring that “Liberal Capitalism is as dead as Aristocratic Feudalism,” and welcoming “a state without privilege where each shall enrich himself through the enrichment of all.”
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No one can recall Margaret Roberts taking up a stand that radically differed from this stance. She later claimed to have read Friedrich von Hayek’s
Road to Serfdom
during her last year at Oxford. If so, it had little visible effect on her public positions.

But she was eager to make her mark. Upon her graduation she got a job as a chemist with a food company, where she worked on the development of cake frostings and pie fillings. This position, however, was merely a placeholder for someone of her ambitions. The Conservative Party, to which she remained loyal, was eager to field more female candidates, and she soon got her chance to campaign for a seat in Parliament. She lost on her first try for Parliament in 1950 (as the youngest Conservative woman candidate), and the next year as well. But she was certainly noticed.

She met Denis Thatcher in 1949, at her induction as a Tory candidate for Parliament. They married two years later. For her it meant a step up the social ladder. Her new husband, who had served with distinction during the war, ran a chemical company that had been founded by his grandfather. With his support she set out to study law, and in 1953 she qualified for the bar. It was also the year that she gave birth to twins, which actually made it harder for her to get a candidacy. Several local
party associations rejected her on the rationale, more or less openly expressed, that a young mother would find it harder to campaign. Finally, in 1958, circumstance conspired to give her the chance to campaign for the seat from Finchley, a northern suburb of London that usually voted for Tories with comfortable majorities. In 1959 she won with a comfortable majority, a seat that she would retain for the next thirty-three years. In 1961 Prime Minister Harold Macmillan gave the young striver a job in the Ministry of Pensions. In 1965 she and her parliamentary colleague Keith Joseph had suggested encouraging private alternatives to the National Health Service and state pensions as a way of reducing taxes—a modest position, by today’s terms, but one that stamped them at the time as staunch conservatives.

In the 1960s some Conservatives were already articulating a program of opposition to the reigning wisdom. One of them was Enoch Powell, a Tory stalwart who railed against socialism in terms that came close to the apocalyptic. Some of his ideas would become mainstream in the 1980s, but in the 1960s, as one commentator notes, his philosophy was regarded as “extreme.”
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Powell believed that the solution to all economic problems, great and small, could be found in the market. Competition within the private sector, rather than the close collaboration of business and state, was the source of lasting growth. In 1964 he even came out in favor of “denationalizing” the postal system and the state telecommunications monopoly—an idea far ahead of its time. Powell regarded inflation as an unmitigated evil, the scourge of productivity rather than the somewhat regrettable side effect of a worthy effort to manage demand. Luckily, there was a simple remedy: slow down the government printing presses. Powell believed that the most effective way to combat the state’s pernicious intervention in the workings of the market was to exercise tight control of the money supply.

Unfortunately, Powell also happened to profess radical views on the even more delicate subject of immigration and race. In 1968, he gave a soon-to-be notorious speech—dubbed “Rivers of Blood” for its near-apocalyptic rhetoric—in which he declared that the influx of immigrants from the former colonies would, if unchecked, lead to the collapse of British society. It effectively ended his political career.

Yet his airing of free-market ideas, summarily dismissed by most of the political elite, resonated within the party. Thatcher—a member of the new shadow cabinet under the Conservative leader of the opposition, Ted Heath—was one of them. By now she was avidly consuming the publications of the Institute of Economic Affairs and steeping herself in the works of Hayek (whom she later claimed to have begun reading during her Oxford days). Her positions in the cabinet—first as the future minister responsible for the energy industries, then for transportation—confronted
her directly with the issue of state ownership of strategic segments of the economy. Under Heath’s leadership, the Tories pledged to stop any further nationalizations—but that was as far as it went. In the late 1960s, the notion of actually returning state-owned industries to the private sector was regarded as wildly outlandish.

Unlike Powell, whose radical economic ideas were way ahead of his time, Thatcher always remained a practical politician, acutely conscious of the gap between idealism and political reality. Her career climb was going smoothly, and she was not prepared to jeopardize it at this early stage. Heath, the party boss, was a firm believer in the reigning mixed-economy consensus, and as a future minister, she took care not to depart too far from his line. Heath was a brilliant politician, a man who had risen from circumstances even more humble than Thatcher’s (his father was a carpenter, his mother a maid) to gain admission to Oxford’s Balliol College in 1935. His travels around Europe as a student in the 1930s, including an alarming visit to Nazi Germany, made him a foe of appeasement—at the time a choice decidedly at odds with majority views in the Conservative Party. After 1945, however, he wholeheartedly embraced the “postwar settlement.” He believed firmly in the principle of state intervention in the economy, though perhaps not as actively as some Labourites. In Heath’s vision, it was “partnership” between an active, entrepreneurial private sector and the government that reigned supreme.
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This was, at the time, a solidly establishment view. In 1968, when Heath scolded a few lonely Conservatives who had dared to express sympathy with some of Powell’s economic ideas, he was praised by the
Times
for exercising “plain common sense.”
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Thatcher knew that the Conservatives had a good chance of winning the next election, so she was not about to declare herself a rebel. Yet Powell’s iconoclasm clearly resonated with her, and that same year—in 1968—she made a small but discernible step toward defining a distinct political identity. Addressing the meeting of a Conservative policy group in the seaside resort of Blackpool, she set out markers that clearly identified her as a member of the party’s incipient free-market camp. She expressed doubts about the virtues of state intervention and declared herself firmly in favor of rigorous control of the money supply. But none of this deviated too drastically from conservative rhetoric. She said little, for example, about privatizing those parts of the economy that were already under state control.

In retrospect, though, it was not her policy prescriptions that made the speech striking. It was, instead, a first distinct flash of the missionary zeal that one day became such a clear mark of the authentic Thatcher. It is important to remember that Thatcher’s arguments in favor of free enterprise were never only about economic efficiency. She believed, with Hayek, that state intervention in the economy limited
the scope for individual freedom. As she explained to her Blackpool audience, giving markets the room to operate was a moral imperative, and not just a matter of sound administration: “It is good to recall how our freedom has been gained in this country—not by great abstract campaigns but through the objections of ordinary men and women to having their money taken from them by the State. In the early days people banded together and said to the Government, ‘You shall not take our money before you have redressed our grievances.’ It was their money . . . which was the source of their independence against the government.”
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There was nothing wrong with people wanting to earn more money, she continued. But they should also be expected to contribute to society as a whole. She strongly rejected an uncritical embrace of materialism, declaring at one point, “Money is not an end unto itself.”

It was this fundamentally moral impulse that drove her, in the climax of the speech, to an explicit rejection of the hallowed principle of consensus. Consensus, she declared, should not be viewed as an end unto itself; consensus could also be viewed as “an attempt to satisfy people holding no particular views about anything.” Much more essential was to have “a philosophy and policy which because they are good appeal to sufficient people to secure a majority. . . . No great party can survive except on the basis of firm beliefs about what it wants to do. It is not enough to have reluctant support. We want people’s enthusiasm as well.”
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As Thatcher biographer John Campbell observes, “More than anything else it was this crusading spirit which was Mrs. Thatcher’s unique contribution to the anti-collectivist counter-revolution which ultimately bore her name.” It was other thinkers—eccentric fellow politicians such as Powell and her friend Keith Joseph and the scholars at the conservative Institute for Economic Affairs—who elaborated the policy ideas that animated her reign in office. What Thatcher brought to the mix was the ferocious zeal with which she pursued the realization of these political aims. British politics in the three decades before her arrival on the scene was dominated by consensus. Thatcher, by contrast, believed in the value of polarization; she had a penchant for defining herself as a rebel and a revolutionary. The conventional political wisdom, in her view, needed to be demolished, and if this required a certain degree of aggression, so be it. It was characteristic of her mind-set that her ire sometimes focused on the doubters within her own party as well as her opponents in the others.
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