THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER2, 2019 63
Alas, the atavist Thatcher was a differ-
ent creature, and the atavist gradually
consumed the scientist, because the sci-
entist drank her own potion, the one
marked “ideology.” The atavist had been
happy to be called a “reactionary,” before
she became Prime Minister. The atavist
complained publicly about Britain’s being
“swamped” by immigrants; never, as far
as we know, used the National Health
Service herself and wanted to convert it
to an American-style insurance-based
system; believed in capital punishment;
agreed with her husband that the BBC
was infested with left-wing “pinkos”;
supported legislation prohibiting local
government authorities from “promot-
ing” homosexuality; refused to counte-
nance any meaningful political progress
in Northern Ireland; vehemently opposed
German reunification; was virtually alone
among world leaders in opposing sanctions
on the South African apartheid regime;
and called the A.N.C. “a typical terrorist
organization.” The atavist stopped listen-
ing to her colleagues, and deeply distrusted
her civil servants (particularly at the For-
eign Office), whom she worked around
or behind whenever she could. The ata-
vist was the possessor of what one col-
league called “a very English English-
ness”: she didn’t sacrifice Scotland and
Wales as part of a Conservative strategy;
she hardly noticed they were there.
Europe was the great theatre of this
very English Englishness. Throughout
Mrs. Thatcher’s career, Moore observes,
“the story of 1940 was the myth which
most dominated her imagination.” It is
the Dunkirk story, and not wholly myth-
ical: Nazis rampant in Europe, Paris
vanquished, Britain alone as the last bul-
wark of Western civilization, while the
air flashed with Spitfires and Churchill
growled in the Commons. Margaret
Roberts was fifteen, and Britain would
never be as noble again—unless it was
in 1982, when she led the country to vic-
tory over Argentina during the Falk-
lands War, and quoted the Duke of Wel-
lington: “There is no such thing as a
little war for a great nation.” The refusal
to accept Britain’s diminishment, the
refusal merely to “manage the decline,”
was central to Thatcher’s pugilism, and
it is the reason for her Churchillian sta-
tus among contemporary Conservatives.
Yet the question that devoured her
career, and remains grievously unresolved
to this day, is whether Britain is a greater
nation inside or outside the European
Union. Remainers and assorted economic
pragmatists tend to argue that the right
question is whether Britain is a richer
nation inside Europe or out; greatness
will have to look after itself. Brexiteers
reply that greatness cannot look after it-
self when the nation’s sovereignty is cur-
tailed. Thatcher appears to have been
one of those economic pragmatists for a
brief period, when Great Britain voted
by referendum to stay in the European
Economic Community, in 1975, and she
saw the economic possibilities of a large
internal market. Soon she grew dismayed
by French and German plans for greater
integration, a European Central Bank
and single currency, and the borderless
utopia that sought to banish national-
ist rivalry and bloodshed. To her, it all
smacked of socialism. It deprived nations
of their ability to control their own cur-
rencies and interest rates; it favored bur-
geoning German and French power; it
operated by élite consensus and an irri-
tating sort of mild bureaucratic snuffling.
Some of these objections were rea-
sonable, but it’s hard to resist the idea
that the core of Thatcher’s hostility to
Europe was flamingly unreasonable, al-
most exceeding articulate discourse. It
is unreasonable to credit nuclear weap-
ons—but not the E.U.—for keeping the
peace in modern Europe, as Thatcher
did. Moore, a prominent Brexiteer, her-
niates himself in his effort to defend hissubject in this area, assuring us that
Thatcher “was not, in any general sense,
anti-European,” to which the reply might
be: no, only in many specific senses. The
first speech she gave as Party leader, in
1975, pushed against the notion that Brit-
ain had become “a poor nation whose
only greatness lies in the past.” Yet a fro-
zen allegiance to the myth of 1940 rather
guarantees a nostalgia for the greatness
of the past. The theme was struck re-
peatedly. “How dare they! We saved alltheir necks in the war,” she exclaimed at
a European summit in 1984, apparently
annoyed by the spectacle of European
foreign ministers idly drinking coffee
and “swapping funny stories.”
Her deep suspicion of all things
German became more vociferous once
German reunification loomed. She saw
greater European unity, Moore says, “not
as a solution for German power, but as
a cloak for it.” She had a map of Eu-
rope in her handbag, marked up with a
black circle around Germany, and an-
other, even warier circle around the Ger-
man-speaking peoples of Europe. The
German Chancellor Helmut Kohl re-
portedly joked to her at a 1990 meeting
that, at the recent World Cup semifinal,
the Germans had apparently beaten En-
gland “at their national game,” only to
have Thatcher reply that “the English
had beaten the Germans at theirs twice
in the twentieth century.” But it was
Kohl who accurately diagnosed the
problem: “She thinks history is not just.
Germany is so rich and Great Britain
is struggling. They won a war but lost
an empire and their economy.”
Increasingly, her colleagues and civil
servants worked around her. Officials at
the Foreign Office privately noted her
“Germanophobia” and her “obsessions
about the European Community and
Germany.” One minister, Douglas Hurd,
complained that Cabinet meetings now
involved three orders of business: “par-
liamentary affairs; home affairs; and xe-
nophobia.” The greatest pressure was felt
by Geoffrey Howe, who became her For-
eign Secretary in 1983. A loyal colleague
from the earliest days of her leadership
and an architect of the first Thatcher
economic plan, he was perhaps the last
person you would have selected to spend
long hours by the Prime Minister’s side,
as she sliced her way through flabby world
gatherings. Thickly bespectacled, defer-
ential, gently overweight, and meek of
manner, he spoke in a civil murmur, a
kind of clerical stutter that unfailingly
cast a sleeping spell over the entire na-
tion. Denis Healey said that being at-
tacked by Howe was “like being savaged
by a dead sheep.” Howe was a lawyerly
civil servant who had been mysteriously
transferred to the front lines of partisan
politics. Where Thatcher craved deci-
sion, Howe preferred deferment; where
Thatcher disrupted, he convened. He