Zuma and ANC tactful about Thatcher legacy
Her best moments were when she met old friends to talk of past triumphs and making Britain great again, write Sue Cameron and Joe Rogaly
THE government and the ruling party struck a diplomatic cord on the death of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, as her passing drew both praise and vilification in SA yesterday.
Lady Thatcher opposed calls for the British government to impose sanctions on apartheid SA at a time when most Commonwealth countries thought it appropriate to do so. She upset African National Congress (ANC) leaders when she referred to the party, banned in SA at the time, as a “terrorist” organisation.
Icons including Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu were among those infuriated by Lady Thatcher’s resistance to the campaign to isolate the apartheid regime.
Former president FW de Klerk and Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi yesterday both praised Lady Thatcher and described her as a “friend” who was supportive to them.
Mr de Klerk said Lady Thatcher was a leading light.
“Although she was always a steadfast critic of apartheid, she had a much better grasp of the complexities and geo-strategic realities of SA than many of her contemporaries. She consistently, and correctly, believed that much more could be achieved through constructive engagement with the South African government than through draconian sanctions and isolation.
“She also understood the need to consider the concerns and aspirations of all South Africans in their search for constitutional consensus.”
Lady Thatcher had played a positive role in supporting SA’s own process of nonracial constitutional transformation, Mr de Klerk said. “From my first meeting with her in London after my election as leader of the National Party in 1989 and throughout the rest of her tenure as prime minister, she gave strong and valued support to me and to all other leaders who were working for a peaceful, prosperous and constitutional future for SA.”
Mr de Klerk had met Lady Thatcher in SA and abroad on numerous occasions. “We met in the Cape and in London many times after her retirement from office and before her stroke in 2002.”
Prince Buthelezi said Lady Thatcher was an important global leader. “(She) will forever command my respect and admiration, not only for her leadership in the UK, but for her leadership on global matters.”
She was a “voice of reason” during apartheid and “listened attentively to my plea against sanctions and economic disinvestment, which we both recognised would hurt the poorest of our people the most”, Prince Buthelezi said.
“I was privileged to visit Lady Thatcher at 10 Downing Street in 1986, and was honoured when she specifically travelled to Ulundi to visit me as the chief minister of the erstwhile KwaZulu government.
“Never before had an international dignitary shown such respect for a black leadership.”
President Jacob Zuma, in a terse statement, expressed his condolences. “Our thoughts and prayers are with the family of Lady Thatcher and the people of the UK during this difficult time,” he said.
ANC spokesman Jackson Mthembu said the party had been at the receiving end of Lady Thatcher’s policies when she opposed the idea of sanctions against apartheid SA.
She “was one of the strong leaders in Britain … to an extent some of her policies dominate discourse in the public service structures of the world. Long after her passing on, her impact will still be felt .… ”
SHE changed us all. We went from being a people who saw ourselves as eternally on the downward slide to a nation that was proud to be British again. On the world stage too, she made Britain count once more. She was a startling presence who brought a strong and controversial style to our diplomacy after years of Foreign Office blandness.”
The words are those of Charles Powell, one of the closest aides of the “Iron Lady” during her time in power. Margaret Thatcher, who died yesterday aged 87, not only revolutionised the social order in her own country, but did much to reshape world politics.
The UK’s first woman prime minister transformed a sclerotic British economy, all but neutered the trade unions and endeavoured “to roll back the frontiers of the state” with a policy of offloading the great nationalised industries and selling council houses to their occupants.
Abroad, she was the indomitable leader who won victory over Argentina in the Falklands war, who decided that Mikhail Gorbachev was a Soviet leader she could “do business with”, and who inspired a respect for “Thatcherism” as a political philosophy that was never quite matched on the domestic front.
The flip side of her courage, toughness and radicalism was an arrogance, obstinacy and remo- teness that became more marked the longer she clung to office. She centralised power to a degree not seen before in modern Britain. One result of the way she dominated government was her failure to heal the wounds opened up in her own Conservative Party over her plans for a poll tax and her negative approach to the UK’s role in Europe. Yet such was the force of her presence that what came after her was defined in terms of her absence.
Born in 1925 in Grantham, Lincolnshire, Margaret Hilda Roberts was the younger daughter of a corner-shop grocer, Alfred Roberts, and his wife Beatrice. He was a self-made man, a Liberal alderman and a father whose tenets of integrity, hard work and self-reliance were strong influences throughout her career. His younger daughter’s self-belief manifested itself early. Told by a teacher how lucky she was to have won a poetry reading contest, the 10year-old Margaret replied: “I was not lucky. I deserved it.”
Though far from poor by the standards of a provincial town in the depression, the Roberts family had neither hot running water nor an indoor lavatory. Yet she and her sister Muriel were well-dressed — their mother was a seamstress — and in a classconscious era the ambitious Margaret took elocution lessons when she went to Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School. She read chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford, then a huge achievement for a girl of her origins, and joined the university’s Conservative Association, becoming its president in 1946.
After Oxford, she worked as a research chemist but spent much time in Dartford, Kent, where she became party candidate. It was a hopeless seat for a Tory but at her adoption meeting she was offered a lift home by a wealthy businessman, a divorcé some 10 years her senior called Denis Thatcher. As he later said: “She stood for Dartford twice and lost twice, and the second time she cried on my shoulder I married her.” Denis Thatcher was to give her unstinting support emotionally and financially throughout her career.
In 1953 the couple had twins, Carol and Mark. Denis’s wealth meant they could afford a fulltime nanny so motherhood did not stop her reading law, passing her bar exams and in 1959 becoming member of parliament for the London seat of Finchley.
She stood out from the beginning. Westminster’s few women MPs tended to be older and unmarried whereas Ms Thatcher, apart from her mastery of detail and her fluency as a speaker, was a young mother with an almost chocolate-box prettiness. She was made parliamentary secretary to the pensions minister and after the Conservatives’ 1964 defeat the new party leader, Edward Heath, promoted her to his shadow cabinet even though he had been warned that “if we take her, we’ll never be able to get rid of her”.
When Mr Heath won the 1970 election she was given the cabinet post of education secretary. But, in the eyes of her contemporaries, she was still the token woman in the government.
She might have remained such, but for her performance as a minister and her ability to capitalise on her luck. As education minister she approved more comprehensive school schemes than anyone before or since, and she earned notoriety by ending free milk for pupils over the age of eight. “Maggie Thatcher, milk snatcher”, became the first of many derogatory slogans applied to her.
She formed an alliance with Sir Keith Joseph, a tortured intellectual of the right, who was appalled when Mr Heath performed his great U-turn, back towards the corporate state and the imposition of controls over prices and incomes. By the time the Heath government fell in February 1974, Mr Joseph’s circle was more influential.
Mr Heath lost a second election that October, yet declined to stand down. Had he done so, any one of a number of prominent male colleagues might have succeeded him.
Probably Ms Thatcher would not have made the attempt. But as the manoeuvring proceeded the men wrote themselves out. When Mr Joseph refused to stand following an ill-judged speech about working-class inbreeding, she said she would do so “because somebody with our viewpoint has to stand”.
Airey Neave, an anti-Heath backbencher who was later murdered by the Irish National Liberation Army, put his organising talents, and a list of supporters
Her finest hour really was with the economy and changing people’s perceptions of what we ought to be doing
already garnered, at her disposal. She trounced Mr Heath on the first ballot and clinched the leadership against a pile of secondrounders. As opposition leader she and her team evolved a statement of principles entitled The Right Approach to the Economy. Its essence was monetary and fiscal prudence, the detachment of the trade unions from the management of national affairs and a reduction in the role of the state. It became a foundation document of Thatcherism.
Soon she had made her mark, not just at home but also on the world stage — much helped by an early speech attacking the Soviet Union, which led the Red Army to come up with the “Iron Lady” epithet. Oppositions often depend on the incumbent government destroying itself. Labour obliged. The 1978-79 “winter of discontent” was marked by public sector strikes that left rubbish piled high in the streets and the dead unburied. Labour’s electoral hopes were destroyed for a decade.
When Ms Thatcher came to power in 1979 the British polity was in a mess. Inflation and unemployment were rising and the unions, to many, seemed out of control. Against all conventional wisdom, she took an axe to public spending. At one celebrated meeting she even demanded an extra £1bn cut in spite of warnings from those present that the country would fall apart.
Resisting calls for a softer line, she told the 1980 Tory conference: “To those waiting for the favourite media catchphrase ‘the U-turn’, I have only one thing to say: U-turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning.”
The economic medicine was hard to stomach. Unemployment rose above 3-million, manufacturing output fell and the new prime minister’s poll rating slid. Yet by 1983, inflation was down below 4% from a peak of 22% and the Conservatives’ ratings were up again. Years later, Lord Carrington, who became her foreign secretary, said: “Her finest hour really was with the economy and changing people’s perceptions of what we ought to be doing.” It was, he said, greater even than her display of leadership in the Falklands war.
When Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in 1982, Ms Thatcher barely hesitated before sending a 25,000-strong military task force to reclaim the tiny colony. Victory and her unswerving purpose throughout the war cemented her image of determination at home and abroad. So too did her successful, tablethumping battles to reduce the UK’s contribution to the European Community budget, insisting: “I want my money back.” Despite being described by François Mitterrand, then the president of France, as having “the lips of Marilyn Monroe and the eyes of Caligula”, her European and global fan club multiplied. Her election victory in 1983, against a Labour Party led by the elderly Michael Foot, seems in retrospect to have been almost too easy.
If Britain’s military triumph in the South Atlantic was the most dramatic event of her first term, the vanquishing on a peacetime battlefield of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) was the outstanding victory of her second. It was a bloody conflict with communities torn apart and pitched battles between miners and the police. Yet the NUM, previously regarded as invincible by any government, was eventually forced to back down.
On the economic front, Ms Thatcher continued the battle to “roll back the frontiers of the state”. Privatisation began with National Freight and was extended to include steel, gas, telecoms and water. State support for private industry was phased out. Local authority homes were sold at a discount to tenants, dramatically boosting home ownership though at the cost of an enduring void in housing provision for the poor.
These advances towards an increasingly liberal domestic economy, within a world marketplace where Britain was again respected, began to appear unstoppable. So did she. At the 1984 Tory conference in Brighton, five died and others were seriously injured when an IRA bomb ripped through the Grand Hotel. The prime target survived. Next morning, condemning the attack as an attempt to cripple democracy, she told reporters: “This is the day I was not meant to see.”
It was her opposition to communism that helped bring about what she later regarded as her greatest achievement: the collapse of the Soviet empire. Her decade in Downing Street coincided with Ronald Reagan’s eight years in the White House and the two became political soulmates. She supported Mr Reagan as he brought the Russians to their knees by his willingness to outspend them on defence. At the same time she encouraged Mr Gorbachev’s reform programme, recognising that it could help destroy collectivism from within. She won the hearts of much of the Soviet public in a barnstorming visit in 1987. Complete with a stunning new wardrobe, as one aide said she “came on like a modern Tsarina”. Barely two years later, the Berlin Wall fell.
At home, however, her attitude to Europe was the cause of political setbacks. One of the biggest was the dramatic departure from her cabinet of Michael Heseltine, who walked out following a row over whether the Americans or Europeans should rescue the Westland helicopter company. On the surface she remained unruffled. She even recovered, although only temporarily, from the resignation of Nigel Lawson as chancellor of the exchequer.
Yet each new departure left her more isolated. Each was, in essence, a replay of the argument over the UK’s place in Europe. As prime minister, she had sanctioned the Single European Act, creating a genuine single market. Yet she hated any idea of a European superstate. In an outspoken speech at Bruges in 1988, she insisted: “We haven’t worked all these years to free Britain from the paralysis of socialism only to see it creep in through the back door of central control and bureaucracy from Brussels.”
Her strident tone dismayed pro-Europeans in her cabinet. Ms Thatcher was unrepentant and the wound festered. So too did that caused by her plans to introduce a regressive local government poll tax in the face of wide-scale opposition from Tories.
By the time of her 10th anniversary as prime minister, others, but not she, could see she had been in office long enough. In 1989, a pro-European backbencher, Sir Anthony Meyer, stood against her and gained enough votes to show there was real discontent in the party.
The coup de grâce came the following year from Geoffrey Howe, her former chancellor and foreign secretary, who suggested in his resignation speech that Ms Thatcher’s attitude was “like sending your opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find, the moment the first balls are bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain”.
A few days later Mr Heseltine, her long-time opponent, stood against her. A badly organised campaign and an arrogance that saw her flying off to Paris on the night of the vote brought about what many had believed unthinkable: she failed to win outright on the first ballot. She had been proved mortal. Discontent over poll tax, her anti-European stance and her imperious style led her cabinet, one by one, to tell her that she should go.
The trauma of her unseating was to ravage Tory unity for years. One small consolation for her was that John Major, not Mr Heseltine, succeeded her.
Her final speech as prime minister in the House of Commons was a bravura performance as she defended her record, even at one point insisting: “I’m enjoying this!”
Although they stayed in power until ousted by Tony Blair and New Labour in 1997, the Tories were deeply scarred by the manner of her departure. It was to be 20 years before the party entirely regained its confidence. Ms Thatcher lived to see her party return to power under David Cameron in 2010, but was too frail to attend the 85th birthday party in Number 10 that had been arranged for her.
She had never fully recovered from her abrupt and forced exit from frontline politics. In 1992, she went to the House of Lords as Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven. For a while, on the international lecture circuit, she received ecstatic receptions from foreign audiences, amazed that the British had ditched her. But it was not the same.
Her health started to deteriorate. In 2004, Sir Denis died and she was left alone. She battled on, but her best moments were when she met old friends to talk about past triumphs and to dream of marching into Downing Street and making Britain great again. Financial Times
THE most controversial postwar British prime minister has died at the age of 87. Margaret Thatcher still divides British opinion, especially those who lived under her premiership: she is either “the blessed Margaret”, a “true conviction” politician, or simply “that awful woman”.
From lower-middle class origins, a grocer’s daughter, she trained as a chemist at Oxford and then later as a barrister. She became the first woman to lead a major British political party and then the first female UK prime minister in 1979.
Just more than 30 years ago, urban riots, recession, mass unemployment, big government spending cuts and disputes over immigration and European unity dominated UK politics. Not much has changed, except perhaps for the dominant leadership of one politician. This mastery prompted her friends, and enemies, to dub her the only real man in the cabinet. She was said to clash sometimes with Queen Elizabeth, especially over major Commonwealth concerns about white rule in Rhodesia and SA.
From outside the UK, she was often compared with Charles de Gaulle, who restored French pride after the humiliations of German conquest and imperial decline. In the UK, however, she was a highly divisive figure, especially among the opponents of Tory monetarist policy, which introduced the smaller state and privatisation of nationalised industries, especially coal mining.
She destroyed the power of the trade unions for almost a generation. She reformed her Conservative Party and, by accident, the opposition Labour Party too. Thatcherite policies became almost the norm. In this sense, Tony Blair became the true heir of Thatcher, although he was never a conviction politician. He was always a pragmatic opportunistic “moderniser”.
She held power for 11 years and 209 days. When she reluctantly resigned, she gave way to a lesser leader, John Major, who was unfairly lampooned as “the man who ran away from the circus to become an accountant”.
In foreign policy, she was an ardent Cold War warrior. She embraced the special relationship with another hardline conservative, Ronald Reagan, in his campaign against the “evil empire”, the Soviet Union. Against much domestic opposition, she supported putting cruise missiles on the European mainland and in the UK. She ignored her cabinet and went ahead with the purchase of the US Trident nuclear deterrent system.
Yet she was agile enough to recognise change in Moscow. After Mikhail Gorbachev introduced perestroika, she said he was a man “we can do business with”. Like Reagan, her toughness and flexibility helped to end the Cold War. But she feared the resulting German unification. She was suspicious of the political unification of Europe and the possibility, now the inevitability, of German economic supremacy.
Her defence of the distant Falkland
‘The Red Star newspaper tried to insult Thatcher by calling her the Iron Lady; she eagerly adopted the name’
Islands after the Argentinean invasion of 1982 won her much domestic acclaim. The victory was a close-run affair. Today’s reduced military may not be able to repeat the trick.
In 1990, Margaret Thatcher was determined to kick Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, after the Iraqi invasion. She told then US president George Bush: “This is no time to go wobbly.” But dissenters within her own party forced her to resign just before the ensuing war in which the UK backed the US.
Thatcher often relied on her instincts. In the beginning, she was often right but, like most politicians, the practice of power corrupted perception and good instincts. On Africa, she was often wrong. A Conservative Party observer group said that the so-called “internal” April 1979 elections in Rhodesia were free and fair. She wanted to recognise the administration of Abel Muzorewa, even though the “external” parties loyal to Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo were excluded. Peter Carrington, Thatcher’s foreign secretary, worked hard to dissuade her. At the Commonwealth conference in Lusaka in August 1979, presidents Julius Nyerere and Kenneth Kaunda worked on her.
In a carefully stage-managed male chauvinist strategy, two of the tallest, most charming and handsome of the Commonwealth premiers, Michael Manley of Jamaica, and Malcolm Fraser of Australia, wined, dined and danced with her. Despite a stare that could freeze even veteran statesmen, the Iron Lady was susceptible to male charm and sometimes deployed a coquettish manner in response. To conservative UK politicians of a certain age, Thatcher was something of a sex symbol in the 1980s.
Ultimately, she was charmed and persuaded not to recognise Muzorewa, a glove puppet in the hands of Ian Smith. Instead, the Lancaster House talks followed, leading to new elections and the independence of Zimbabwe under Mugabe. By accident, one of the most right-wing of British prime ministers had created the conditions for the first electoral triumph of a Marxist leader in Africa.
Thatcher opposed apartheid, she said, but she also opposed the African National Congress (ANC). She saw the ANC as communist terrorists. In 1984, National Party leader PW Botha paid a controversial visit to Thatcher. She described herself as a “candid friend” of the apartheid politician. She thought persuasion, not sanctions, would bring reform. In 1987, she said anyone who believed the ANC would rule SA was living in “cloud-cuckoo land”. She fought a long rearguard action against comprehensive sanctions and trade embargoes.
So what is Thatcher’s legacy? She might have been misguided about Southern Africa, but she was instrumental in restoring British economic and diplomatic prestige in the 1980s. She played a key role in the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. But the costs in domestic hardship, especially the imposition of the detested “poll tax”, still inspire venomous comments about her.
All these emotions were dredged up by the film, The Iron Lady, starring Meryl Streep. Much criticised for showing Thatcher suffering from dementia in her last days, Streep was also praised for her amazing ability to capture Thatcher’s courage in overcoming class and gender to reach the top.
Thatcher did not expect to become prime minister, while many former Etonians, such as David Cameron, seem to act as if the premiership is almost a birthright. As the UK faces the hardest times since the Depression of the 1930s, Cameron has begun to assume some of the Thatcherite values of a conviction politician, especially regarding Europe.
Thatcher in her last years in power was savagely satirised in the Spitting Image TV programme as a mad, bullying tyrant. Her puppet boasted grotesquely large staring eyes. And yet, during her long illness, many politicians, of all parties, were debating whether Thatcher should enjoy the first state funeral for a prime minister since her hero, Winston Churchill.
The release of government papers, under the 30-year rule, shows that Thatcher was exercised by the state expenditure of £19 on an ironing board for her official residence, Number Ten Downing Street. She insisted on paying for it herself.
The Red Star Soviet newspaper tried to insult Thatcher by first calling her the “Iron Lady”, but she eagerly adopted the sobriquet. Ruling politicians in Southern Africa, of a different mettle perhaps, might correctly decry the lady’s lack of vision regarding the politics of race. They could also learn from her incorruptibility and moral courage.
Moorcraft is a visiting professor at the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University in the UK.