Charles Moore:
‘She was the most divisive prime minister of modern times.” As I go round talking about the new (final) volume of my biography of Margaret Thatcher, variants of this sentence are the most common opening line of questioning, especially on the BBC.
Yes, she was divisive in some ways, as are all leaders who make a difference. The divisions over Europe which re-emerged in her time are the forerunners of our Brexit divisions now. On the other hand, there were important aspects of Mrs Thatcher’s legacy which brought peace. The two most obvious and important are the end of the Cold War and the fact that industrial relations in this country are no longer a battlefield.
How many working days are lost to strikes, for example? In 1979, her first year in office, more than 29 million. In 1990, her last year in office, about two million. In 2018, the figure was 273,000.
Why is the “divisiveness” always put first? Churchill’s belligerence often caused huge divisions. So did the socialism of Clement Attlee. So, in the end, did Tony Blair. None of them has the “divisive” epithet pinned on them every time.
If you had to choose one adjective by which to introduce Mrs Thatcher, it should surely be “successful”. By this, I do not necessarily mean that she was right – simply that she won every single election she fought as leader with large majorities, survived longer in office than any prime minister since the 19th century and achieved a high percentage of the changes she sought to bring about, making herself world-famous in the process. Her success was a fact. Success in politics is rare and therefore worth putting high up the order. We have not seen major political success in Britain since the first term of Mr Blair. It is interesting – nostalgic even – to be reminded what it looks like.
When an author speaks at book festivals and the like, he is asked to sign afterwards some of the copies he sells. Quite often, buyers ask for an inscription as well as a signature. Last week, someone asked me to write “To Philip and Theresa” on his copy. I began writing, and then realised that this might be rather a famous couple. I checked with the purchaser and found that it was so.
Naturally I was pleased that Mr and Mrs May would be getting a copy of my book, but I was puzzled what to write. I was reminded of the line from Philip Larkin in a poem called “Talking in Bed”, when he speaks of trying to find words which are “not unkind and not untrue”.
A comparison between Mrs May and Mrs Thatcher comes naturally, since they are our only two women prime ministers, but that was obviously a dead end. Praise died on my lips; criticism would have been quite inappropriate; sympathy would have seemed patronising. With utter feebleness, I wrote, “With best wishes”.
Afterwards, I remembered that it was the week of Mrs May’s birthday. She is now 63. I should have written, “Many happy returns”, which would have been both friendly and sincere.
Sometimes book purchasers seeking a signature and dedication have kindly written it on a Post-it note in advance and hand it to you as they pass you the book, to save time and discourage misspelling.
In the queue at an event on Saturday, a Post-it note laid before me said “To Karen from Gay Bowers”. I looked up and saw the girl I had known when we were five years old at the same kindergarten. You can tell how very long ago that was by the fact that the place was called “Gay Bowers”.
As millions of people brace themselves to be inconvenienced by Extinction Rebellion over the next fortnight, it is worth asking why we have to put up with this stuff. It is partly because of a newish concept called “the right to protest”.
In any free country, of course, protest should play its part. Our law has usually dealt with this by the very important British principle that everything which is not forbidden is allowed. (Continental law tends to operate on the opposite principle.) This means that most protests can happen, but the public authorities can ban them because of public-order issues or disruption to normal life.
This common-sense attitude is not enough for the purveyors of international “human rights”. They put the right to protest on the level of the right to free speech or the right to vote. The police then zealously uphold it. It causes major problems, for instance, in rural areas, where masked animal-rights extremists disrupt legal hunts, shoots and sometimes even forms of farming, and get away with threatening behaviour and worse.
If the police are visible at all on such occasions, they are little more than spectators, implying they are neutral between peaceful, legal activities and trouble-making fanatics. Officers may arrest a few obviously law-breaking activists on the day but little attempt is made to prevent the disruption from happening in the first place.
The problem is nowadays really acute in the Whitehall/westminster area of London. Egged on by the broadcasters, extreme groups see this as an open-air theatre for their causes. This gives them – which is what they seek – media attention far beyond their numbers, and gives the impression that Parliament and Government are besieged. It also drives the ordinary working citizen crazy: what about the human right to go about one’s own business?