62 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER2, 2019
identified an impediment to its passage.
On Fridays, when such bills were de-
bated, M.P.s were often absent. Thatcher
wrote individually to two hundred and
fifty of her Conservative colleagues—“I
have always believed in the impact of a
personal, handwritten letter”—asking
them to stay in Westminster; her pri-
vate-member’s bill was carried by an
overwhelming margin. About a decade
later, in the early seventies, she joined
Prime Minister Edward Heath’s Cabinet
as Education Secretary. When Heath
lost the general election of 1974, she
made a bid for leader of the Conserva-
tive Party, and won, in February, 1975.
Just over four years after that, she became,
as Moore says, “the first elected woman
leader in the Western world.”
Colleagues were astounded at how
thoroughly she could master briefing
material. She needed little sleep, and
worked late into the night. In 1984, when
the I.R.A. bombed the Grand Hotel in
Brighton, where the Prime Minister was
staying for the annual Conservative Party
Conference, she was polishing her key-
note speech at the moment her suite’s
bathroom exploded, at 2:50 a.m. On a
twenty-four-hour flight from Hong
Kong to Washington, D.C., in a gov-
ernment jet equipped with a bed, she
told Robin Butler that, while he could
go to sleep, she was going to stay awake
for the entire journey while she studied
the intricacies of the Anti-Ballistic Mis-
sile Treaty. She intently marked up ev-
erything that came her way, blitzing her
colleagues’ internal memos and policy
proposals with double and triple under-
linings, groaning castigations, and flat
prohibitions: “No,” “Very disappoint-
ing & sketchy,” “This is awful. ” Va c a -
tions provoked something like bewildered
impatience; in his long chronicle, Moore
eventually flourishes a droll shorthand
for these recurrent challenges: “For her
customary but always unwelcome sum-
mer holidays, Mrs. Thatcher...”
I
ndeed, what emerges from these im-
peccably researched, coolly absorbing
volumes are two Margaret Thatchers,
whom we might call the scientist and
the atavist. For the scientist Thatcher,
the chemist who had studied with Dor-
othy Hodgkin at university, knowledge
existed to be mastered, made use of, lev-
eraged. This Thatcher had read Fried-
rich von Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom”
at Oxford, and at opportune moments
would pull his “Constitution of Liberty”
out of her handbag. Christmas of 1975
found her doggedly continuing her anti-
communist “holiday reading”: “The Pos-
sessed” and “Darkness at Noon.” This
Thatcher was genuinely interested in
whether Mikhail Gorbachev could re-
form Soviet Communism; she coaxed
and encouraged him before any other
Western leader dared to, and engaged
him in passionate, freewheeling collo-
quies. (Their first lasted six hours.) She
convened what were essentially academic
seminars on the Soviet Union at Che-
quers, the Prime Minister’s country res-
idence (with guests such as the British
historians Robert Conquest and Hugh
Thomas and the Columbia University
scholar Seweryn Bialer).
The scientist surrounded herself with
intelligent men (Nigel Lawson, Geoffrey
Howe, Keith Joseph, Douglas Hurd),
and approached Britain’s manifold woes
at the start of the nineteen-eighties with
an unsentimental willingness to push ex-
periment to the edge of cruelty. Britain
was teetering: the figures still astonish.
Interest rates in 1979 reached seventeen
per cent and inflation a staggering eigh-
teen per cent. Nationalized industries
were sluggish and fabulously costly to
the taxpayer. British Leyland, the auto-
motive conglomerate that included Jag-
uar, Triumph, and Austin Rover, was pro-
ducing comically dreadful cars and had
consumed about two hundred million
pounds a year in government subsidies.
Many of these companies approached
customer satisfaction like the proprietor
in the Monty Python cheese-shop sketch:
“Normally, sir, yes, but today the van
broke down.” Moore, in one of his foot-
notes, remembers trying to get a phone
installed in 1981, and being told by Brit-
ish Telecom that it would take six months,
owing to a “shortage of numbers.” As
Howe, Thatcher’s first Chancellor of the
Exchequer, noted in his budget speech
of June, 1979, Britain’s share of world
trade in 1954 had been equal to that of
France and Germany combined. Now
the French and German share was three
times bigger than Britain’s.
Controlling expenditure and the
money supply was part hypothesis
(Thatcher’s fabled monetarism, which
she got from Milton Friedman) and part
common sense: uncontrolled inflation,
like religion, poisons everything. A sys-
tem that was increasing miners’ pay by
nearly ten per cent a year was clearly un-
sustainable. Since many of the major in-
dustries (including railways, coal, tele-
communications, and a good chunk of
automobile production) were national-
ized, the government was effectively act-
ing as a giant employer. But since many
weren’t profitable, it was also acting as a
giant bank. The country had apparently
wandered into the worst of two worlds:
nationalization of the means of produc-
tion (largely achieved by Clement Att-
lee’s postwar Labour government) could
offer no magical respite from the mar-
ket—which had decided, for instance,
that it didn’t want badly made British
cars—and so it simply insured that cap-
italism was being done poorly. As a rem-
edy, Thatcher and her ministers em-
barked on a campaign of privatization,
releasing British Gas, British Airways,
British Telecom, BP, and British Ley-
land from government control.
Government subvention had fended
off the ravages of capitalism in one im-
portant way: it had provided steady em-
ployment. Now the country’s unemploy-
ment rate rose; it hit a high of thirteen
per cent in 1984, and was still seven per
cent in 1990, the year of Thatcher’s
ouster. Thatcher’s calculation was that
widespread unemployment was an un-
avoidable fact of economic reform, that
certain jobs would have to be the mulch
that went into the revival of the gen-
eral economic habitat. Apart from the
profound human misery that resulted,
there was an enduring political cost—
much of Scotland, Wales, and the North
of England remains lost to Conserva-
tives. This was the Thatcher who main-
tained that there was “no such thing as
society,” only individuals, “and people
must look to themselves first,” a state-
ment that Moore attempts, with little
luck, to wrestle from its infamy. That
unequal society tended toward ugly ex-
tremes, with great new impoverishment
and great new enrichment. Still, the
new order created undeniable economic
expansion (an average G.D.P. growth
rate of 3.2 per cent in the nineteen-eight-
ies), and Thatcher was reëlected in 1983
and 1987, the first Prime Minister after
universal suffrage, Moore notes, to win
three elections.
