Deluded Leftists fail to see that Mrs Thatcher’s legacy will never be sunk
The Iron Lady’s critics are still resorting to irrelevant and dated attacks that won’t dent her reputation
The American actress Gillian Anderson has graced us with her thoughts on playing Margaret Thatcher in the next season of the TV series The Crown. “I don’t think I’ve ever taken on a role that presented so much pressure,” she says. “Taking on somebody who is hated as much as Thatcher is, is a whole other thing.” I would suggest Ms Anderson do some homework before taking on the role, and instead of believing the Left-wing dramatist Peter Morgan’s screenplay, she should try to ask herself whether people who are genuinely “hated” tend to win three general elections in a row. One historian, Hugo Vickers, found more than 300 factual inaccuracies in the first season of The Crown alone; it doesn’t look as though the fourth season will have any fewer.
Less than a month ago, meanwhile, the socialist Canadian politician Marlin Schmidt said in a debate: “If nothing else goes right for me in a day, Madam Speaker, I can at least count on the fact that Margaret Thatcher is still dead. The only thing that I regret about Margaret Thatcher’s death is that it happened probably 30 years too late.” The tasteful Mr Schmidt was the minister for higher education for Alberta, which says a lot about the kind of people who are allowed to preside over the university sector nowadays.
The recent death of Clive Ponting, the civil servant who in 1984 leaked two internal Ministry of Defence documents about the last moments of the General Belgrano, the Argentine cruiser sunk during the Falklands War on May 2 1982, is proving another opportunity for his obituarists to portray Margaret Thatcher as a monster, implying that the British task force was in no danger when she took the decision to order the submarine HMS Conqueror to sink the enemy ship.
Yet on any objective analysis, such as that of Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman, the Falklands campaign’s official historian, the Belgrano was sunk because, although it was outside the 12-mile total exclusion zone around the islands, Rear-admiral Sandy Woodward still considered it posed a threat to British lives. Moreover, the Belgrano’s own captain publicly stated in 2004 that his orders had been to attack any British ships he encountered. “What it successfully achieved was to persuade the Argentines to withdraw their carrier fleet from action [for fear of being torpedoed],” summed up one British commentator, “thus sparing our own indispensable carriers from the likelihood of being sunk.”
The decision of the War Cabinet that day had been unanimous – not just that of a prime minister driven by bloodlust, as Margaret Thatcher’s detractors have claimed. The ship had changed course several times, zigzagging in and out of the total exclusion zone, and was steaming towards the shallow water of the Burdwood Bank south of the islands, where the Conqueror might well have lost contact with her. “Particularly compelling,” writes Freedman, “was the question of what the politicians would say if they had refused the military request when the Belgrano could have been sunk, and the cruiser then went on to sink a British carrier with hundreds of casualties.”
There is a thin dividing line between whistleblowing, which is commendable when it exposes corruption or gross negligence or evildoing in public life, and treachery, where one puts one’s own political opinions first and leaks secret military documents despite your position of trust and signature on the Official Secrets Act. In my view, Ponting crossed that line. For all that filmmakers and documentarymakers lionise whistleblowers/traitors nowadays, the real heroes are those civil servants who do their duty to the public by not revealing the Royal Navy’s wartime operational data.
After leaving the Ministry of Defence, Ponting wrote a series of what purported to be history books but were in fact simply attacks on Tory prime ministers, with a particular animus against Winston Churchill. Fortunately, these books were so shot through with factual inaccuracies, guilt by association, fatuous innuendo and sheer spite that they convinced few who did not already hate the Tories anyway. His book attempting to explode the “myth” of British heroism in the Blitz reminded me of nothing so much as the bald clerks in Betjeman’s poem Slough, who “daren’t look up and see the stars, but belch instead”.
The assault on Margaret Thatcher’s reputation has, of course, barely flagged since she was forced out of office in November 1990, and since her death in April 2013 – the event that still gives Mr Schmidt so much pleasure. Yet fortunately it comes up against two strong granite walls, which protect her reputation as far as any reasonable people are concerned who are genuinely seeking after the truth. The first is the website run by the Margaret Thatcher Foundation, which is the British equivalent of an American presidential library and is the largest contemporary history site of its kind, offering free access to thousands of Thatcher-related documents so readers can assess her legacy for themselves. (Full disclosure: Lady Thatcher appointed me to the Margaret Thatcher Archive Trust, which publishes it.) The second is Charles Moore’s threevolume biography, which also explodes any number of Leftist myths about her. Together they provide intellectual protection for her legacy, and will for decades to come.
As the last general election showed, Margaret Thatcher is finally now slipping out of the arena of current affairs and into that of history. The Red Wall seats are Conservative now, in a way that they have not been for decades. Even people who did indeed hate her in the past have started to admit a sense of grudging respect for what she achieved for Britain in the Eighties. Which makes the comments of people like Gillian Anderson, Marlin Schmidt and Clive Ponting’s apologists seem dated and irrelevant.
For in fact, what the life and career of Margaret Thatcher tells us is that if a politician is willing to endure some short-term unpopularity by telling the truth and doing the right thing, then ultimately they will be rewarded with the trust of the people. That honesty made her respected, admired and, by some – such as me – loved, unlike any politician who has so far followed her.