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Margaret Thatcher A Life and Legacy
David Cannadine
Oxford: University Press, 2017 Hardcover. xii+162 p. ISBN 978-0198795001. £10.99
Reviewed by Laura Beers University of Birmingham
Margaret Thatcher : A Life and Legacy is the bound edition of David Cannadine’s expansive entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography for the twentieth century’s longest serving prime minister. Cannadine’s ODNB entry on Thatcher is “the largest entry for any twentieth-century prime minister since Churchill’s” [x]; and Churchill’s entry, written by Paul Addison in 2004, was also repackaged as a stand-alone biography. As entries in the Oxford Dictionary, both are impeccable in their descriptions of the achievements and controversies which defined both leaders’ careers, and of the historiographical debates which have shaped their legacies. As such, they serve as accessible and enjoyable primers for those interested in the political histories of modern Britain’s most celebrated and controversial leaders. Given the limitations of length and focus imposed by the original ODNB form, however, neither book is a life in full. While key personal details are sketched in, the focus remains on politics and policies, not on the extra-political aspects of the leaders’ lives. This is not Cannadine’s first attempt at biography – he has written studies of various lengths of G.M. Trevelyan, Andrew Mellon and George V – and he is conscious of the potential and pitfalls of the form. As he says in the introduction, his aim here has been to approach her ‘divisive’ career as even-handed[ly] as possible, viewing her with what I regard as a necessary and deserving combination of sympathy (she was a major historical figure, with many admirable qualities) and detachment (her critics, both inside the Conservative Party and far beyond, often had a case, although not invariably so) [x]. For the most part, Cannadine succeeds in the task he sets himself. Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party in February 1975, after a successful coup against Edward Heath, orchestrated on her behalf by the back-bench MP Airey Neave. Heath’s fall came on the heels of the party’s failure to regain control of the government in the October 1974 general election, during which, Cannadine writes, Thatcher’s specific policy promises (to introduce the right to buy for council house tenants, to keep mortgage rates below 9.5 per cent, and to replace the domestic rates with a fairer system of local taxation) were almost the only ones put forward in the Conservative campaign [20-21]. These policies were indicative of a commitment to an ‘ownership economy’ and a supply-side policy for economic growth. Cannadine writes that Thatcher had been honing her economic convictions in the months leading up to her leadership challenge: ‘she re-read Hayek and devoured more recent works by such writers as Milton Friedman; and she engaged with the free-market ideas being put forward by Ralph Harris and Arthur Seldon at the Institute of Economic Affairs’ [21]. Over the next decade and a half, Thatcher’s reputation would rise and fall in tandem with the perceived success of her free-market agenda. As Cannadine notes, it initially fell: ‘in September 1981, the Tories were eight points behind Labour in the opinion polls, and three months later only 25 per cent of voters were satisfied with Thatcher’s performance, making her the most unpopular prime minister since polling began’ [42]. The Tories’ reelection in 1983 was less an endorsement of Thatcher’s economic agenda, than a consequence of the ‘Falklands effect’ and the disarray within the left, now further divided by the splintering of the Social Democratic Party from Labour in March 1981. The Falklands War was a perceived victory for the British Empire, yet, Thatcher had an uneasy relationship with the imperial sovereign. Thatcher and Queen Elizabeth II came from different worlds, culturally, socially, and geographically; unlike Thatcher, the Queen was an instinctive paternalist in domestic matters, preferring consensus and compromise to conflict and confrontation; and in foreign affairs she was devoted to the Commonwealth, for whose leaders Thatcher had little respect’ [62]. Thatcher also developed an increasingly hostile attitude towards Jacques Delors, the president of the European Commission from 1985 to 1995. While her chancellor Nigel Lawson advocated Britain’s entrance into the European Exchange Rate Mechanism – the country ultimately joined the ERM in October 1990, only to withdraw less than two years later on ‘Black Wednesday’ when currency speculation pushed the pound sterling to new lows in European markets – Thatcher remained sceptical of the EC. In an infamous speech in Bruges in September 1988, she declaimed: ‘We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels’ [102]. Her views on Europe echoed those of many party backbenchers and members of the wider public, and similar sentiments helped to fuel the Leave campaign’s 52-48 victory in the referendum on EU membership twenty-eight years later. They put in her in conflict, however, with many in her own cabinet, and increased the view amongst longtime foes and former loyalists alike that it was time for the Iron Lady to go. Thatcher was forced out of the leadership in November 1990 in what Cannadine terms a ‘brutal defenestration’ [111]. His concluding remarks on her parliamentary career pay homage to her successful leadership, but contend that, after fifteen years as party leader and a decade as prime minister, ‘she had stayed too long, and the cabinet, the Commons, and the country had had enough’. Major’s successful campaign to succeed Thatcher was premised on scarcely veiled criticisms of his predecessor’s excesses: the idea of a 'classless society' signaled a different view of the growing inequality that Thatcher had not merely tolerated but also justified, while a 'nation at ease with itself' offered an alternative vision to the ten unrelenting years of conflict and confrontation that had gone before [110]. The end of Thatcher’s premiership ushered in a period of comparative political consensus within both party and nation; but a consensus that was, thanks to Thatcher, constituted well to the right of that which had existed before she came to power.
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