March 26, 2020 35
I’m European.” He meant that he was
attached to his region and its customs,
that he wished to live in peace with
Germany’s neighbors, and that he had
no dreams of empire or domination.
Thatcher, who didn’t understand what it
mea nt to be Eu ropea n i n th is sense at a l l,
hated the food she was served (the local
delicacy was pork belly) and the “filthy”
sweet wine. She declared, on the plane
home, that “that man is so German.”
One also might respond that Thatcher
herself was so English—and in ways
we didn’t fully credit at the time. This
was because she was simultaneously an
English patriot and a British interna-
tionalist, someone who believed that
there was no contradiction between
her love of her country on the one hand
and her belief that her country could
promote democracy and free markets
around the world on the other. In our
own era, these instincts have come to
seem contradictory. Venturing into
geopolitics now loses votes in Britain,
or is believed to do so. Democracy, as
a cause, is out of fashion in Britain too.
So are free markets: although the Con-
servative Party and its current prime
minister still pay lip service to free
trade, they have, in reality, just happily
left the world’s biggest free trade zone.
With each passing year, British politi-
cians are more provincial, more focused
on home to the exclusion of “abroad.”
In the 1980s nationalism and inter-
nationalism didn’t seem contradictory.
In part, this was thanks to Thatcher’s
own deep, ideological commitment to
winning the cold war, as well as her
intuitive sympathy for Eastern Europe-
ans, especially Poles. Her good luck to
have been prime minister while Ronald
Reagan was president also helped. The
two were in agreement about their anti-
communism, about free trade, about de-
mocracy. They were also in agreement
about the importance of a networked,
allied Western world. Reagan’s power
as American president gave Thatcher
status; her ideological sympathy made
him seem less lonely. Moore describes
in some detail their cooperation over
particular issues—there is more of this
in his previous volumes, too—and their
personal harmony. Some of the passages
will make the modern reader blink: it
is almost impossible to imagine, for ex-
ample, the current American president
coordinating a speech on nuclear policy
with his British counterpart, as Reagan
did with Thatcher. It is also impossible to
imagine the current president making
the speech that Reagan eventually gave,
following this consultation. It contained
the sentence that famously expressed
the essence of the Western alliance and
its doctrine of deterrence: “A bomb
dropped on Amsterdam would be the
same as a bomb dropped on Chicago:
if we all maintained this attitude, the
bomb would not be dropped.”
Thatcher sat and listened to this
speech, “enthralled.” At the end, she
whispered to Reagan, “Brilliant, Ron.
Brilliant!” And from her point of view,
it was: here was the world’s most im-
portant leader declaring that Ameri-
ca’s military resources were Europe’s
military resources, thanks to the fact
that America and Europe—not just
America and Britain—shared the same
values. That commitment to the joint
Western project showed itself in other
ways too. At least while she was prime
minister, Thatcher’s Englishness did
not come into conflict with the idea of
European integration. The idea of the
European Single Market, a free trade
area so profound that it would elimi-
nate all borders and customs checks
and require its members to coordinate
their regulations, was partly hers. Be-
cause of that decision, raw materials,
equipment, and spare parts for decades
traveled back and forth from Britain
to the continent with as much ease as
if they were moving within the same
country. Neither Thatcher nor anyone
else thought through all of the conse-
quences of that decision— sespecially
that a unified regulatory regime, while
it had enormous advantages for busi-
ness, gave other countries some influ-
ence over UK law (and vice versa).
This, later on, would be one of the mostimportant sources of anti-EU sentiment
in Britain, including Thatcher’s own.But other things were shifting too.
The change from Reagan to Bush,
coupled with the end of the cold war,
left Thatcher outside the White House
inner circle. Partly this was because
her personal chemistry with Bush
was not the same as it had been with
his predecessor. But American priori-
ties suddenly shifted as well. This be-
came most dramatically clear when
both Bush and Kohl began pushing
for the reunification of Germany after
the fall of the Berlin Wall—a moment
when Thatcher’s anti-German instincts
kicked in. It’s long been known that
Thatcher tried to prevent reunification,
not least by teaming up with François
Mitterrand, the president of France,
who encouraged her, briefly, before
throwing his lot in with the Germans.
According to Moore, she went one step
further. At one point, her American
counterparts were stunned to realized
that she was contemplating an alliance
with Mikhail Gorbachev, then still the
Soviet leader, against Germany. Bush
aides were aghast: “The idea that we
would have to rely on the Soviets to bal-
ance our ally Germany? Our strategy
was to embrace Germany!” All the way
through reunification, she was passing
notes back and forth to her own aides,
fulminating about German national-
ism. This is the moment when her in-
ternationalism began to recede and her
own English nationalism began to mat-
ter. One of her colleagues described
the agenda of the cabinet at this time as
“parliamentary affairs; home affairs;
and xenophobia.”
After she left office, her provincial-
ism deepened. As Moore explains, thisis partly because Thatcher gradually
lost touch with the realities of world
politics. She had lost Reagan, she had
lost the cold war as an ideological
guide, and there was no set of causes, of
similar weight, to which she could eas-
ily attach herself in the 1990s. She was
resentful of Major, whom she came to
suspect, unfairly, of helping Howe and
Heseltine remove her from office, and
she sniped at him from the sidelines.
She fell back on her prejudices and in-
stincts, including her intuitive dislike
of Europeans. Moore even suggests
delicately that she was overly influ-
enced by the speechwriters and ghost-
writers who helped her produce books
and memoirs, especially as she began
to show the first signs of the dementia
that eventually destroyed her memory.There were occasions, he notes, when
her later public writings fit “too eas-
ily into an identikit right-wing mode
which she had not followed when she
held power.” While prime minister, she
had been interested in fighting climate
change, for example, and in expanding
the Single Market. Out of office, she
became more critical of both of those
causes, though she never turned openly
against British membership of the EU.
Unlike other British leaders, most of
whom fade into a background world of
company boards and high-level com-
missions, Thatcher and her post–prime
ministerial views continued to matter.
Partly because of the way she had been
suddenly ejected from power, Thatcher
remained a kind of lodestar for people
who were disappointed by the way
things went under Major. Like Bush,
Major played an important part in re-
uniting Europe after the fall of com-
munism, but unlike Thatcher, he didn’t
try to lead a moral crusade. He didn’t
tout a transformative economic re-
form program or call for revolutionary
change. He thought that governing qui-
etly, from right of center, in coopera-
tion with European allies as well as the
US was enough, after the turbulence of
the Thatcher years. He was sufficiently
popular in the country to be reelected
in 1992, but he inspired no great admi-
ration among Thatcherites who wanted
the revolution to continue. In subse-
quent years, Thatcher’s would-be heirs
fought with one another and with the
rest of their party until finally, in 2016,
the purest and most loyal among them
emerged as the leading Brexiteers.
Moore—a Brexiteer himself—is care-
ful to avoid claiming that Thatcher
would have supported that cause. With
her devotion to geopolitics and her pas-
sionate interest in the world, it’s hardto see how she could have. Nor was she
ever fanatical about very strict notions
of sovereignty, as some of her followers
later were. Several years after leaving
office, she gave a speech in Zagreb, Cro-
atia, in which she spoke openly about
the limitations of sovereignty and the
importance of universal values. “The
state is not, after all, merely a tribe. It
is a legal entity,” she said. “Concern for
human rights... thus complements the
sense of nationhood so as to ensure
a nation state that is both strong and
democratic.”
It is not hard, by contrast, to under-
stand why so many of her followers
wound up on almost the opposite side
of that statement, arguing that the na-
tion was indeed a kind of tribe. They
picked up on the “English” part of her
personality—the strain of provincial-
ism that made her suspect, in Howe’s
words, that Europe was “positively
teeming with ill- intentioned people”—
and chose to celebrate those preju-
dices, instead of her internationalism or
her belief in universal democratic values.
The deep European integration, the bor-
derless trade and regulatory harmony
that Thatcher most valued, is precisely
the aspect of European Union mem-
bership that the advocates of Brexit are
now seeking urgently to bring to an end.
They also sought to maintain her radi-
calism: that feeling she gave them of
being on the cutting edge, in the avant-
garde, in opposition to the boring
centrists and predictable leftists, was
something they longed to preserve. The
2016 referendum gave them the chance
to be revolutionaries once again.As a national figure, Thatcher re-
mained controversial, for those reasons
and many others, right up until the end
of her life. Britain is still arguing over
her economic legacy as well as her for-
eign policy legacy: her struggle against
trade unions, her closure of coal mines,
her privatization of industry. In retro-
spect, it is now clear that her reforms
revitalized Britain at a crucial moment,
pulling the country out of the despon-
dent state it had reached in the 1970s.
It is also clear that her reforms gave
financial markets, and the people who
earn money in them, an enormously
distorted role in the UK economy, at
the expense of other economic sectors,
including those that employ the kinds
of working-class people who voted
for Thatcher. Much of British politics,
both inside and outside the Conserva-
tive Party, now consists of arguments
over how the country should change its
course in order to compensate for the
errors of the Thatcher years, without
losing the achievements.
People from all sides of the political
spectrum still agree that she changed
the country in ways that cannot be un-
done, and she is both praised and hated
for it. That divisive legacy led to an
outburst of ugly rhetoric after she died.
When her death was announced in
2013, Prime Minister David Cameron
recalled parliament from its Easter re-
cess so that speeches could be made in
tribute; Buckingham Palace also de-
clared that the queen would attend her
funeral, a tribute to Thatcher’s signifi-
cance to British politics. At the same
time, anti-Thatcher street parties broke
out spontaneously in Belfast, Brixton,
and Glasgow, and the song “Ding-Dong!
The Witch Is Dead” rose to number 2
on the UK pop singles charts. TherePrime Minister Margaret Thatcher at the 1988 Conservative Party conference,
Brighton, EnglandGeorges De Keerle/Hulton Archive/Getty Images