Mary Beard Reviews my Margaret Thatcher Biography

This article by Mary Beard was written for The Observer.

couple of decades is a very long time in politics. Twenty years ago, I seethed with rage at the “crimes” of George W Bush. These days, compared with the current occupant of the Oval Office, he comes across more like an old-school politician with whom I merely had some differences of opinion. Even more so, that other former enemy John Major, whose sensible articles on Brexit and prison reform now find me nodding in quiet agreement. But to go back another decade, my anger against Margaret Thatcher has not subsided. I don’t make nods in her direction.

Iain Dale is a lifelong admirer of Lady Thatcher. He met her first as a Conservative student activist in 1982 and never looked back. But he is no ideologue and is prepared to deliver criticism where he thinks it is due. He has that rare gift of being able to see why other people may not feel the same way about his hero.

The intended readers of his snappy, 192-page Thatcher biography are the young people who were not yet adults, or even born, when she was in power, and know her only through the myths handed down (such as Dale’s 25-year-old physiotherapist, who asked him one day at the gym: “I’ve heard of her, but who was she? What did she do?”).

But I suspect that older people are in his sights too: those of us who didn’t get through more than a volume or so of Charles Moore’s “magisterial” (that is, very long) multipart biography, and have found it easier to live with our prejudices about her, whether for or against, than to re-examine them. There is no new information here – how could there be? – but stripping the old information of much of the intricate detail in which it is usually clothed gives it a new punch.

And some bigger questions lurk just below the book’s surface. How are political reputations formed and do they endure? Why believe what we do about politicians of the past? It’s no coincidence that the final chapter is entitled Twelve Myths. Here, Dale sums the book up by briskly challenging the most familiar, and in his view erroneous, claims about the Iron Lady – from “Margaret Thatcher was anti-European and would have supported Brexit” to “she was anti-women and anti-feminism”.

There are some surprises for Thatcher’s critics and admirers who have not done their homework. I confess, for example, that in thinking of her as “pro-apartheid” I had not looked hard enough at her dealings with South Africa and with Nelson Mandela himself.

Dale insists that, while she was opposed to sanctions against the country (on the grounds that they would “entrench poverty among the communities… they were ostensibly designed to help”), she was not in favour of apartheid. Quite the reverse. She consistently put pressure on the South African government to release Mandela from prison and stated firmly that the whole system of segregation was “immoral”. Dale makes a fair point.

But – as he admits – she was also bitterly opposed to Mandela’s ANC, which she branded as a terrorist group. And she cannot have been unaware that her opposition to sanctions appeared to bolster the South African regime. In the end, he didn’t quite convince me that she “helped bring apartheid to an end by a clever policy of detached engagement”. What exactly is detached engagement, anyway?

Her only feminist achievement was turning the handbag into a symbol of power

Other useful correctives sprinkled through the book shook some of my certainties. I had forgotten, or never known, that Thatcher had been one of a small number of Tory MPs to vote in favour of the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967, despite the notorious section 28 in her later Local Government Act (1988), which banned the “promotion” of homosexuality in schools. Nor had I realised that the policy of “milk-snatching” that almost caused her downfall as education secretary in the early 1970s had already been mooted by the previous Labour education secretary.

Overall, though, Dale tends to throw Thatcher a lifeline, where I would not be so kind. “Pragmatic” is one of his favourite descriptions of – and excuses for – her. I might prefer “self-interested”.

But his honourable attempts at even-handedness are likely to be more uncomfortable for those who look back to Thatcher with nostalgia and think that what the Conservative party needs right now is a reinjection of Thatcher spirit.

Dale is frank about the disaster of the poll tax and the growing hubris of her final years in Downing Street (“We have become a grandmother”). And he explains how her key policy of selling council houses (“in many ways an outrageous success”) was marred by the uses of the cash it raised. Local councils could only keep a quarter of the profits and they didn’t use it to rebuild. In the 1970s an average of 100,000 local authority houses were built each year. By the time Thatcher left office in 1990, that had fallen to 8,000. If you are looking for one origin of today’s housing shortage, this isn’t a bad place to start.

For me, however, Dale’s final myth – that she was “anti-women and anti-feminism” – is the most difficult to dismiss. He is honest about the difficulty, suggesting, perhaps rightly, that she thought that her own example was sufficient to encourage other women to break the glass ceiling. But helping other women demands more than just giving yourself a leg up, lowering your voice to sound more masculine (as Thatcher did) and hoping that others get the message. It means creating opportunities for them too.

As Dale also concedes, throughout her whole time in office, she appointed just one female cabinet minister (Janet Young, leader of the House of Lords and lord privy seal). Just one. For me, her only feminist achievement was to convert the handbag from a symbol of vanity to one of power (she notoriously “handbagged” uncooperative colleagues). But that is not enough – as I hope Dale’s physio and all the other young people who really should read this book will realise.

Buy the book HERE.