60 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER2, 2019
Thatcher—political, but also affective—
troubled me, because it cast a cold shadow
over my filial love. Yet I was hardly alone.
The entire country seemed to be pas-
sionately insane about Thatcher and
Thatcherism. I was thirteen when she
became Prime Minister, in 1979, so all
my adolescence was spent under her long
reign. She was still Britain’s leader when
I left university, in 1988. Where I grew
up, in the North of England, her name
was uttered bitterly. We were twenty miles
from Newcastle, stalked by once power-
ful industries—steel, shipbuilding, coal—
that Thatcherism eyed as chronically sick,
inimical to progress, and infested with
unionist leftism. During the bloody min-
ers’ strike of 1984-85, men and women
collected money every Saturday in the
market square of my home town with
signs that asked us to “Dig deep for the
miners.” In those days, there was no such
thing as political indifference—that would
be allowable only in the next decade, the
era after the fall of Communism, the era
of steady Third Way prosperity, when
history had been called off. Of course,
we couldn’t be dispassionate: Margaret
Thatcher breathed over the country like
a great parental god. She wanted her na-
tion to be as ambitious, successful, hard-
working, thrifty, and right-principled as
she was, and to those ends she hectored,
wounded, pushed, and inspired.
“Force of personality was the most
striking thing about her—almost too
powerful for easy rational discussion,” a
political colleague of hers said. It’s the
dominant theme in the more than two
thousand pages of Charles Moore’s au-
thorized biography, now completed by
its third volume, “Herself Alone” (Knopf ),
which chronicles a political downfall
brought about by a force of personality
too large for rational discussion. As early
as 1981, one of Thatcher’s advisers com-
plained that she bullied her weaker col-
leagues: “You criticise colleagues in front
of each other and in front of their offi-
cials.... You give little praise or credit.”
“If this is the best you can do,” she told
Geoffrey Howe, a long-abused Cabinet
minister, “then I’d better send you to hos-
pital and deliver the statement myself.”
On one occasion, when she became par-
ticularly “strident,” the Canadian Prime
Minister Brian Mulroney had to remind
her, “I am not a member of your govern-
ment, I am the head of a sovereign na-
tion!” But she could just as easily rebuke
entire nations, genders, or both at once.
“You men, you’re all so weak,” she spat
at some Dutch representatives after an
episode of failed European negotiation.
Robin Butler, her principal private sec-
retary, confessed that “dealing with her
face to face was like feeding a fierce an-
imal.” Moore, who has an excellent eye
for anecdotes and a Gibbonian way with
footnotes, buries one of the best of such
tales at the bottom of a page in his sec-
ond volume. Once, at a meeting, when
she compared something to “Waiting
for Godot,” and pronounced “Godot”
with a hard “t,” Lord Carrington, her
first Foreign Secretary, whispered to her,
“It’s pronounced ‘Godo,’ Prime Minis-
ter.” How is it spelled? she asked. Car-
rington spelled it out. “Then it’s ‘Godot,’”
she replied, enunciating the “t” with even
greater distinctness.
Some of the squeamishness she
prompted can be attributed to male
chauvinism and Tory patrician snob-
bery; Moore, a right-wing columnist
for the Daily Telegraph and a former ed-
itor of The Spectator, likes to use this de-
fense when Thatcher is at her most in-
defensible, soothingly reminding us of
her role as the great disrupter of the old
boys’ club and its afternoon fug. This is
undeniable, though snobbery seems gen-
erally to have topped misogyny among
her detractors. Carrington, a suave old
Etonian diplomat, once exclaimed, “If
I have any more trouble from this fuck-
ing stupid, petit-bourgeois woman, I’m
going to go.” Thatcher reminded ValéryGiscard d’Estaing, the aquiline French
President, of a tiresome English nanny
his family had once employed.
Snobbery she could do nothing about.
But the Westminster club remained a
stiflingly male one in large part because
Thatcher, across eleven years and three
administrations, appointed just one
woman to her Cabinet, and to a politi-
cally irrelevant post at that. The womenshe encountered, insofar as they appear
in Moore’s biography at all, seem likely
to have joined the men in their patterns
of fascination and recoil. We aren’t told
what her mother thought of her, but Mar-
garet’s emphatic sidelining of the mater-
nal influence—“I loved my mother dearly
but after I was fifteen we had nothing
more to say to each other”—shades in a
sad mutual attrition. Geoffrey Howe’s
wife, Elspeth, detested Thatcher, and
faulted her for having, especially around
women, “Queen Bee syndrome—I made
it. Others can jolly well do the same.”
Even Queen Elizabeth shared the general
squeamishness; seven years into Thatch-
er’s rule, she let it be known through her
press secretary that she considered the
Prime Minister to be “uncaring, confron-
tational and socially divisive.”I
n the opening pages of “The Rain-
bow,” D. H. Lawrence describes the
long rhythms of traditional agricultural
life in Nottinghamshire. The men, he
suggests, stay close to the ground in
wordless communion, and do not yearn
for a significant life beyond their ele-
mental work. The women are “differ-
ent.” They look out and up, at the hori-
zon, “to the spoken world beyond”—
to the village, with its church and hall
and school. For Lawrence, the woman
is the ever-restless agent of social change.
Margaret Thatcher, born ten years after
the publication of “The Rainbow,” in
the neighboring county of Lincolnshire,
into the same religious Nonconformism
that shaped Lawrence (and, before him,
George Eliot), belonged to that sorority.
With astonishing enterprise and intel-
ligence, she treated her lower-middle-
class background as a problem to be
solved. It isn’t surprising that her school-
mates thought her accent was “affected”
and that she had about her “a smug per-
fection”: she would not be held back;
she was not going to stay in the rural
town of Grantham.
She looked out and up; she instinc-
tively agreed with Mr. Vincy, in “Mid-
dlemarch,” who announces that “it’s a
good British feeling to try and raise
your family a little.” Thatcher’s father,
the deeply pious Alfred Roberts, was a
shopkeeper, and she was born into mod-
est circumstances above the corner store
in Grantham. The family house lacked
a yard, hot water, and an indoor lava-