64 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER2, 2019
favored consensus, formulas, protocols,
quietly stagnant back channels.
He was also decent, capable, and well
liked. Perhaps she needed him around,
in an odd-couple way, as her reliable
negative: find out what Geoffrey would
do, and then do the opposite. Moore
speculates that she despised his “unman-
liness,” a shrewd surmise given her Lady
Macbeth-like disdain for the slightest
“wobbliness” in masculinity. She regu-
larly rebuked him in front of his peers.
At one of the Chequers seminars on
the Soviet Union, she called out, “Don’t
worry, Geoffrey. We know exactly what
you’re going to say.” After a memorial
service for her old friend Ian Gow, at
which Howe had delivered the eulogy,
she upbraided him in front of Gow’s
grieving sons: “Why don’t you speak up,
Geoffrey? You mumble.” Howe had been
distressed by Thatcher’s opposition to
South African sanctions—he feared that
Britain would be seen as “the sole de-
fender of apartheid”—and now he grew
convinced that Thatcher was attempt-
ing to turn the Conservative Party into
an anti-European tank. On November 1,
1990, she again reprimanded him in front
of his colleagues; later that day, he re-
signed. He did not go quietly. The res-
ignation speech he delivered at the House
of Commons (declaring that Thatcher’s
“perceived attitude towards Europe is
running increasingly serious risks for the
future of our nation”) led Tories to move
against her leadership.
O
nce Mrs. Thatcher’s fall had begun,
the toppling was fast. But perhaps
it had really started earlier—when, in
October of 1989, she fell out with Com-
monwealth leaders on the question of
South African sanctions, and said, “If it
is one against forty-eight, I am very sorry
for the forty-eight.” Or when her second
Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Law-
son, resigned a few days later, complain-
ing that she “just doesn’t listen any more.”
Or in March, 1990, when some of the
worst rioting in modern British history
swept through central London, as thou-
sands of citizens protested the new poll
tax. Or when inflation rates and unem-
ployment began to rise, in the same year.
And how curious that Thatcher, whose
oft-repeated mantra was “Time spent in
reconnaissance is never wasted,” could
not or would not see this. Everyone else,
it seems, was aware of what Moore nicely
calls the “growing fin de régime feeling.”
Parties exist to win elections. Miracu-
lously, she had won three elections; now
she imperilled the fourth: Labour was
polling between sixteen and twenty-one
percentage points ahead of the Conser-
vatives. So she faced a leadership chal-
lenge and resigned, on November 28, 1990.
Two years later, under her successor, John
Major, the Conservatives won the elec-
tion that had looked so grim for them.
She was a violently political animal,
and when the hunt was taken from her
she dwindled away into a cruelly perma-
nent winter that finally erased her only
self. Her private secretary Charles Pow-
ell thought that she never had a happy
day once she left power. Friends and
admirers did their best, setting her up
with houses and assistants—one wealthy
donor sent her flowers once a week for
the rest of her life. She signed up with
a speakers’ bureau, formed the Marga-
ret Thatcher Foundation, and travelled
the world in the remunerative manner—
as a kind of auctioned icon—that is now
grimly customary among former world
leaders, but was then unusual. Her pol-
itics, simmering away untended, thick-
ened into solid reductions: she became
ever more fervently opposed to E.U.
membership. She defended the former
Chilean dictator General Augusto Pi-
nochet, an old ally, when, visiting Brit-
ain for medical treatment, he was placed
under house arrest in compliance with
a Spanish warrant. Once presciently in-
terested in climate change—the scientist
Thatcher had organized an early con-
ference, in 1989, devoted to “Saving the
Ozone Layer,” and a subsequent semi-
nar at which she sat with the environ-
mentalist James Lovelock—she appeared
to recant it all in the book “Statecraft”
(2002), a dull collection of right-wing
speeches and anecdotes. The atavist now
decried the issue as little more than an
excuse for the promotion of “worldwide,
supranational socialism.”
Colleagues noticed her declining ca-
pacities. Giving a speech in 2000, she
repeated the same joke three times. She
suffered a mini-stroke at the end of 2001,
and another early in 2002, temporarily
losing the power of speech. Denis
Thatcher, mysteriously kept alive by a
stern regimen of nightly gin-and-tonics
and two packs a day, died in 2003, at the
age of eighty-eight. His absence caused
further bewilderment: “I must go home
now and get his supper,” she sometimes
exclaimed. As her dementia deepened,
her temperament sweetened; I saw the
same change in my own mother, who
followed Mrs. Thatcher in this regard,
and who, born two years after her, died
a year after her, in 2014. Almost mute,
uncannily gentle, and patient as she had
rarely been in the fullness of her life,
Mrs. Thatcher would—it is one of the
most poignant details in Charles Moore’s
account—sit for hours in front of a cer-
tain painting at the Oxfordshire estate
of a wealthy friend. The painting was a
Victorian scene, titled “The Leaming-
ton Hunt—Mr Harry Bradley’s Hounds,”
by John Frederick Herring. She liked
counting the dogs.
Dementia’s whittling seems crueller
when the oak once stood as tall as
Thatcher did. Her fiercest opponents
could not be unmoved by Moore’s last
pages. But a cold eye is required for her
legacy, which has been calamitous. Brexit
is always at the center of it, and yet al-
most the least of it. She split her own
party, but she also split the Labour Party
(with plenty of assistance from that great
Thatcher admirer Tony Blair). After all,
her opposition to the European Union
wasn’t just about Europhobia; it had
to do with her visceral Americophilia.
When she flew to Washington, D.C.,
in 1981 to proclaim her ardor for the
newly inaugurated Ronald Reagan, she
was not only announcing an ideologi-
cal kinship but binding her country to
the larger power. “America’s successes
will be our successes,” she declaimed.
“Your problems will be our problems.”
That promise was tragically fulfilled
when Tony Blair decided to join George
Bush’s invasion of Iraq—a decision that
fatefully weakened Blair’s party.
Thatcher legitimated a new kind of
inequality; she protected and coddled
Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing press,
which returned the favor with blind sup-
port; she ignored and undermined her
civil service, especially at the Foreign
Office; she divided politics into a purity
war of loyalists and enemies; she stopped
being the leader of one nation; she “dis-
rupted.” Alas, these are now very familiar
woes, with their own familiar rhetoric.
As David Cameron put it when she died,
“She made our country great again.”
