10 ★ FT Weekend 26 October/27 October 2019Books
M
rs Thatcher’s removal was
the result of a conspiracy”
states Charles Moore
baldly towards the end of
the third and final volume
of his magnificent authorised biography
of Margaret Thatcher. And yet every-
thing else in this fine book shows that it
was only a conspiracy in the sense that
one might say of a railway accident that
it was a conspiracy between rails,
engine, wrongly switched points and the
laws of physics. The crash in Thatcher’s
case took place almost in slow motion,
and its antecedents, carefully chronicled
by Moore, went back years.
This volume starts in 1987 with
Thatcher’s third general election vic-
tory and covers her fall from power in
1990, and hersubsequent decline. The
two previous volumes on which Moore
has worked for 20 years cover her child-
hood and early years, then her first vic-
tory of 1979 and the desperate battles of
the first years of her government.
Not one but two successive chancel-
lors were locked in battle with her over
how to manage inflation; not one but
three successive foreign secretaries
were in flat opposition to her approach
to Europe. And finally, after her crucial
role in partnership with Ronald Reagan
in the ending of the cold war, she
managed to marginalise herself during
the final climactic events by her opposi-
tion not only to her own government’s
stated policy but to that of the US aswell over the reunification of Germany.
The astonishing thing is not that
Thatcher fell, but that she came within
two votes of survival in the first round of
the fatal leadership challenge by Mic-
hael Heseltine. If her civil service staff of
Charles Powell and Bernard Ingham had
been allowed to run that final campaign,
in place of the incompetents who did
run it, she would have won; but the
crash would only have been postponed.
So the details of what actually did
happen in November 1990 when she
fell, are not really the point. It did not
actually much matter what Tristan
Garel-Jones said to Chris Patten, or
when exactly Peter Morrison was fast
asleep, or the degree to which John
Major, her anointed successor, held
himself ready. All that was just the noise
of the crash. It was not why she found
herself, to her total incomprehension,
fighting for her political life.
The febrile Westminster gossip is
good fun, and Moore is good at retailingsaid even those who would never vote
for her in my constituency of Bristol
West. These were her strengths: the
capacity instinctively to understand
what a great swath of the British people
wanted done, and then the courage to do
it when others didn’t dare.
But then it became much more diffi-
cult, and this is why Moore is right to
start the final volume with her victory in
the 1987 election. The old dragons had
been slain, or were expiring fast. How to
focus on the much more complicated
discontents, in so far as they existed out-
side the minds of rightwing think tanks,
in education, health, and social care?
There was no broadly shared direction
to articulate into policy. People grum-
bled about all these things, but didn’t
like the sound of alternatives. They
liked the sound of doing away with the
domestic rates, but not at all with the
alternative, the community charge or
poll tax which I and others crafted.
She understood the widespread grum-
bling about Europe, and grumbled away
with the best of them: but she either
couldn’t, or wouldn’t change her own
government’s policy on it. She made it
impossible to conduct that policy effec-
tively, but could not find the ruthless-
ness or the political power base neces-
sary to change it. So too with ChancellorNigel Lawson and Europe’s Exchange
Rate Mechanism: she made it impossible
for him to conduct what was supposed to
be government policy, but could not find
the ruthlessness to sack him nor the
authority to generate a different policy.
Thus his resignation, when it came over
what seemed a trivial matter, was wholly
incomprehensible to the outside world.
These were the weaknesses that made
the train crash inevitable.
Moore tells all this skilfully, and
with sympathy for most of the protago-
nists. He could perhaps have kept his
old journalistic instincts a little more
undercontrol in the footnotes, andleft
some Olympian udgments of peoplej
he doesn’t like to his newspaper col-
umns: with his historian’s hat on he
has given us all we need to make our
own judgments.
But these are second-order cavils. He
becomes a fine historian when he
describes the extraordinary skill with
which Thatcher used her position with
Reagan and with Gorbachev to help pro-
tect both in different ways from their
own fundamentalists (and he shows
how both were using her, too). And
where hisobiter dictaon some others are
not always fair (on the late Lord Roth-
schild, for example) he shows us all the
evidence we need to make our own judg-
ments on others: above all, to see what
an extraordinarily talented public serv-
ant was Charles Powell.
He is right too to make clear the affec-
tion and respect which many who
worked for Thatcher felt for this pig-
headed, formidable, vulnerable, mad-
dening, brave and patriotic woman, and
how many of them really loved her even
— perhaps especially — in her tragic
final decline. She did not always choose
her colleagues well; but she chose well
when she appointed Moore to his gar-
gantuan task.WilliamWaldegravewasaConservative
MPfrom1979to1997andisauthorof
‘ThreeCirclesintoOne,BrexitBritain:
HowDidweGetHereandWhatHappens
Next?’(Mensch)Margaret
Thatcher:
The Authorised
Biography,
Volume Three:
Herself Alone
by Charles Moore
Allen Lane £35
1,072 pagesA tearful Margaret Thatcher leaving 10 Downing Street for the last time at the end of November 1990 —MirrorpixEnd game
Truth be told
A powerful polemic looks to redress the ‘toxic myths’
feeding our fractured culture. ByMelissa BennW
hen Nesrine Malik
was a child grow-
ing up in Sudan,
her grandmother
told her stories
about the house and lands that her
grandfather had once owned, an
estate so vast that family and visi-
tors had trouble navigating it.
When the teenage Nesrine
finally visited the “seat of the
Maliks” in northern Sudan, she
found a property that was “puny,
deserted and crumbling”. Her
grandmother’s story had been a
lie, a myth created to buttress her
against the brute economic and
social realities of life as an impov-
erished widow with fivechildren.
Malik takes this story as a essonl
on the importance of dwelling in
truth. It informs the central argu-
ment of her bookWe Need New Sto-
ries, that we are currently living by
a number of toxic myths that feed
our fractured culture. These
include the wrong-headed ideas
that we have achieved gender
equality, that there is a free speech
crisis and that identity politics is
damaging the natural order of
things. In place of such myths, she
argues, we need truer stories, and
for that we need new narrators.
Malik, a journalist, is skilled at
digging beneath the surface of
political rhetoric and popular cul-
ture to findprejudice,stereotypes
and distorted historical narra-
tives. In each chapter she identi-
fies a tool used to prop up key
myths, giving them itles such ast
“Grievance creation — the Trump
bump”, “The tool — the ‘slippery
slope’” and so on. The effect islike
the prose equivalent of a mechanic
peering under the bonnet of a car
and triumphantly holding aloft
pieces of faulty machinery for her
audience to gawp at.
For all the deployment of such
devices, Malik’s style is dense and
declaratory. She moves rom his-f
torical exposition to straight
reporting (her telling of the mur-
der of Jo Cox is one of the most
chilling accounts of the British
MP’s last minutes that I have read)
to columnist-style polemic.
It is worth persevering because
Malik has important things to say.
She is right to counter the assump-
tion that the greatest threat to
society comes from feminists,
migrants or so-called snowflakes
at a time when political systems all
over the world re increasinglya
under the control and influence of
the traditionalist, often outright
misogynist, political right and
theirnationalist, racist allies.
For Malik, thehammering of
political correctness by commen-
tators and politicians on the right
has relied on manufactured out-
rage at developments which, when
examined more closely, prove
either to be harmless — what
woman of 50 wants to be called a
“girl”? — or simply untrue. Take
the tabloid story of the Muslim bus
driver who apparently threw pas-
sengers off his bus so that he could
pray. In fact, the driver was pray-
ing on his statutory break.Just as often, this kind of manu-
factured alarm is a diversionary
tool that provides a “moral shield,
a get-out-of-jail card, for those
who hold intolerant views, but do
not wish to be held accountable for
them”. It is useful to be reminded
here just how often Donald Trump
invokes political correctness as
proof of a supposedly intolerant
strain in society that inhibits him
(sic) from speaking his plain ol’
mind. Figures such as Nigel Farage
and Boris Johnson, more louche
than loutish, play a similar game:
posing as the fearless truth tellers
pitted against the PC righteous.
Meanwhile well-funded rightwing
groups place controversial speak-
ers on American campuses pre-
cisely to stir up protest and then
claim a clampdown on free speech.
Malik acknowledges that there
may be excesses to some elements
of political correctness or identity
politics — the university union
that urged people not to clap or
whoop because it might be trigger-
ing, for instance, or attempts
within the study of literature to
“cordon off experiences that the
author has not lived”. However, in
general she defends both conceptsWe Need New Stories:
Challenging the Toxic Myths
Behind Our Age of Discontent
by Nesrine Malik
Weidenfeld & Nicolson £16.99, 304 pagesHer strength was to
understand what a great
swath of the British peoplewanted done — then do it
A
s high-powered family
sagas go, that ofChina’s
Soongs takes some beating.
The life story of the patri-
arch, Charlie Soong, was
striking enough as he emigrated from a
poor village in southern China to the US
in 1879 and returned six years later as a
Christian convert to become a leading
tycoon in Shanghai and backer of Sun
Yat-sen in his 1911 revolution against
the Qing dynasty.
Charlie’s son, Tse-ven (TV Soong),
and his son-in-law Kung Hsiang-hsi
(HH Kung), were both major figures
under the Nationalist regime of 1927-49,
each serving as prime minister and
using family and political connections
to amass huge fortunes. The two leading
figures of Republican China, Sun Yat-
sen and Chiang Kai-shek, married into
the clan, Chiang remarking that this
brought him the “prestige” he needed to
go with political and military power.
But it was Charlie’s three independ-
ently minded, American-educated
daughters who played out what JungChang describes in her new book as “the
best-known modern Chinese ‘fairy
tale’”. The sisters — Ei-ling, Ching-ling
and May-ling (to use this book’s translit-
erations) — established themselves as
exceptional figures, especially for their
country and time, in a narrative by
which “One loved money, one loved
power, and one loved her country.”
Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister, writ-
ten in a compulsive style that sweeps the
story along, is much the fullest account
of their remarkable lives available in
English. It ranges from their formative
years at Wesleyan College in Macon,
Georgia where they were sent by their
father to absorb what he treasured from
his own time in America, through the
overthrow of the Qing, the subsequent
warlord era, he Nationalist regime andt
the eight-year war with Japan.
And so on to the Communist victory
of 1949 which led to Ei-ling and May-
ling ending their lives in exile from
mainland China after Chiang withdrew
his forces to Taiwan. The personalities
of the three sisters are clearly portrayed
in both their differences and in their
shared sense of entitlement under-
pinned by their marriages.
“Big Sister” Ei-ling, strong-willed and
focused on moneymaking, was the
queen bee at the heart of the Soong hive,
a constant presence in the story as she
cares for the family’s privileged welfare.It would have been good to have more
information about how she and HH
Kung made their money and just how
justified the widespread allegations of
corruption against them were.
“Red Sister” Ching-ling married Sun
Yat-sen after Ei-ling had kept him at
bay. It was a marriage that horrified her
parents since Charlie had broken with
the erratic revolutionary and deplored
his decidedly unprincipled private life.
In a split from her sisters that reflected
the national division that racked China
in the decades-long struggle between
Nationalists and Communists, she
veered to the left, worked with the
Moscow-run Comintern to advance
communism globally and ended up as a
vice-chair of the People’s Republic.
The descriptions of her life both as an
exile in Moscow and Berlin during the
1930s and then in Beijing after 1949 are
one of the book’s strong points while thewarts-and-all portrait of “the Father of
the Republic” is a welcome corrective to
the conventional hagiography which
provided the middle sister with her
claim to historic status as his widow.
“Little Sister” May-ling, who outlived
her century to die at the age of 105 in
2003, was the most prominent of the
trio through her marriage to Chiang, her
public appearances and her role as
Nationalist China’s principal spokesper-
son to the west during the war with
Japan, including her striking presence at
the Cairo conference with Roosevelt and
Churchill in 1943. Most foreign visitors
were impressed. Some saw her as a
seductive Dragon Lady — Franklin Roo-The three sisters of China
Jung Chang’s biography of
three siblings reveals a ‘fairytale’ in times of revolution
and warBy Jonathan FenbyBig Sister, Little
Sister, Red
Sister: Three
Women at the
Heart of
Twentieth-
Century China
by Jung Chang
Jonathan Cape £25
374 pagesgated the three women to secondary
roles in a male-dominated system run
by the military, Kuomintang Party
cliques and regional barons.
Ei-ling was, in any case, careful to
keep in the background as she built up
her wealth before decamping to the US
as conditions in China deteriorated.
While Ching-lingheld a grand title in the
People’s Republic and was wheeled out
to impress foreign visitors, shewas
always a secondary player in the vicious
politics of China’s Communists, both in
their ascent and once they had won
power. May-ling was an international
figure of renown in her heyday and at
one point helped to rescue her husband
from detention by a remnant warlord.
Yet US president Harry Truman
snubbed her and attempts to assert her-
self in Taiwan following her husband’s
death in 1975 ended in embarrassing
failure, after which she retreated to live
out her days in New York.
The sisters were stars rotating in
their fairy tale rather than central
power players — no less intriguing and
interesting for that, but with diminish-
ing impact as China moved towards a
new era.JonathanFenbyisauthorof‘Generalissimo;
ChiangKai-shekandtheChinaHeLost’
(Simon&Schuster)and‘ThePenguin
HistoryofModernChina’as “attempts at negotiating the
parameters of respect in a diverse
society” and enabling the expres-
sion of reasonable demands by the
previously marginalised or mis-
represented. Movements such as
#MeToo are not, as many com-
mentators have alleged, a cross
between gross overreaction and an
attempt to “crush” men but sober
collective protests at deep, previ-
ously hidden, injustices.
Malik tackles similar ground to
the American essayist Rebecca
Solnit in her latest collection
Whose Story Is This? oth writersB
take on what they see as a failed
establishment dominated by
white men and champion the
emergence of a new politics.
Solnit, however, is celebratory of
the new while Malik concentrates
almost exclusively — and furiously
— on the multiple failures of the
old. It doesn’t make for an easy
or comfortable read, but her
arguments echoed powerfully in
my mind long after I had put the
book down.MelissaBennisauthorof‘Life
Lessons:TheCaseforaNational
EducationService’(Verso)it; but he has also made himself a good
enough historian to show us that this is
all surface stuff.
The root causes lay far further back
and much deeper. Why could Thatcher
not find a chancellor with whom she
could agree? Or a foreign secretary?
Why was she, far more than Labour’s
Neil Kinnock, the real leader of the
opposition to the crucial central policies
of her own government, on the manage-
ment of the economy and on Europe?
The answer, Moore shows, lies in the
way her strengths were also her weak-
nesses. In the first periods of her govern-
ment she articulated very widespread
national feelings. She articulated them
harshly, but she represented the zeit-
geist when she said there was no alterna-
tive to confrontation with politicised
trade unions. Labour’s James Callaghan
and David Owen of the Social Demo-
crats knew it too, as did thousands of
ordinary trades union members. Ditto
on the ending of the soft corporatism
which had brought sloppy monopolist
companies in both public and private
sectors far too close in to the state. Ditto
on appeasement of the elderly monsters
of the early 1980s politburo in the USSR.
On all these and more Thatcher put
into action a very deep seated desire for
change, widely shared, and saw it
through. Then there was the high drama
of victory in the Falklands, to which no
other of our politicians of the time could
have led us. “You have to hand it to her,”Ei-ling, May-ling
and Ching-ling
Soong, the
sisters at the
heart of Jung
Chang’s new
booksevelt worried that she might try to
“vamp” him when she stayed at the
White House during a triumphal tour of
the US in 1943 during which she
addressed a joint session of Congress.
Wendell Willkie, Republican presiden-
tial candidate, was bowled over when he
met her on a wartime visit to China and
wanted to take her home with him.
The sisters make a great story told
with considerable sympathy for them.
But, for all the interest they provide, the
claim on the book’s cover that they were
“at the centre of power and each left an
indelible mark on history” is overstated.
The structure of the Nationalist state
and Chiang’s “Confucian Fascism” rele-The final volume in Charles Moore’s biography of Margaret Thatcher proves
he’s more than a match for his gargantuan task, writesWilliam Waldegrave
OCTOBER 26 2019 Section:Weekend Time: 10/201924/ - 18:22 User:paul.gould Page Name:WKD10, Part,Page,Edition:WKD, 10, 1