Mrs Thatcher's crusade
Germaine Greer
Crusade has begun. The Blessed Margaret, already beatified by her lieutenant, N.orman St John Stevas, is mounted and t,i(ling into battle. This crusade might, like tnose against the Saracens, turn into a series Of bloody disasters, and without the excuse of rescuing the Holy Land, for entered on Mrs Thatcher's standards is the single word, 'Pelf.
The pursuit of profit is for Margaret !hatcher a holy undertaking, for her relig!°r! is that of the rise of capitalism. Capitalisni is good for people, good for those who suffer privation and are rewarded with jam tottiorrow, just as good for those who suffer Privation and never get any jam at all, and no better for those who suffer no privation and have jam whenever they feel like it. This is the ideology of the United States Where, on any day and on almost any television station, you may find Garner Ted Armstrong and his cohorts preaching, in much the same terms as Mrs Thatcher, the !°spel of success. Failure, whether of "usinesses, marriages or health, is explained by evil: success in all fields is Po. sitive evidence of virtue. If you are getting richer, you are becoming happier, for You have God's personal assurance that you a,,re on the right path. Witness the millions !flat Armstrong has made out of his preachng. God is served by Mammon, through wlaMmon and in Mammon. Much has been made of the diamond!lard head of Mrs Thatcher, her incisive intelligence, and so forth. What few have grasped is that Mrs Thatcher's undoubted eiaPacity to swot and slug her way through tue thronging tedium of parliamentary life The springs from deep passion and conviction. She has no more ability to assess her actual position or weigh opposing arguments than Joan of Arc, and she may meet the same end, at the hands of her own countrymen and of her own party.
There are fewer women in Mrs Thatcher's parliament than in any since the war. None occupies an important position besides Mrs Thatcher, who downgraded Sally Oppenheim's appointment from a Cabinet post, leaving herself anachronistically isolated and freakish, the only treble raised in a chorus of many voices. She ought not to imagine, however, that she will thereby muzzle the basic misogyny of this nation and in particular her party. Amid the storms of schoolboyish ribaldry at a Tory election night party, one decaying gentleman contributed his opinion that Denis Thatcher looked like a farmer whose cow had unexpectedly won first prize.
British chauvinism is not only sexual. In their triumphant announcements of Mrs Thatcher's election, commentators raved that a major historical precedent had been set, in that a 'major Western democracy' had got itself a female leader. Golda Meir, Mrs Bandaranaike and Mrs Gandhi were supposed to pale into insignificance beside a woman whose personality is so negligible that she is still trying out new images on the public which has already elected her. Compared to those three, Mrs Thatcher is a Head Schoolgirl talking down interruptions in Assembly. Mrs Thatcher cultivates an image of lone womanhood to go with her Joan of Arc posture. Mrs Gandhi and Mrs Ban daranaike both came from societies with distinct and powerful female components. They were first women among women and then women rulers of men. Mrs Thatcher has not one female adviser or confidante, except, of course, the Queen, who does not like Women any more than she does. Neither of them has ever espoused a female cause or concerned herself with the problems of women as a group. It is only a matter of weeks before cartoonists begin to indulge in rich visions of the country ruled by a tea-party of two middle-aged ladies, one of whom has never made a joke and the other never a good one. Their ascendancy is no indication of the status of women in this society. It is simply a freakish circumstance for which women will eventually be expected to pay dearly although it is not at all to their advantage.
Our new leader is committed to spurring the country on to prosperity through a series of hazards. The screaming will begin quite soon when the average man realises that the quality of his life is not improving: the Health Service will be just as unusable, the schools as chaotic, law and order as illusory, his newspaper undelivered and his telephone as unlikely to function properly. Arabs will continue to spit copiously all over the pavements of London, and Mrs Thatcher will not appear to sweep up and give the offenders a whack with her broom.
Once her broken-winded steed has run his head into the stone wall of world recession, Mrs Thatcher has no alternative but to continue spurring it, though blood courses down its torn flanks. Whatever the galled jade may do, Mrs Thatcher's withers must remain unwrung. Although her supporters prop and race off in other directions, she will continue to drive the nation into the wall, out of a crazy certainty that it will eventually gather strength and fly over it. She has actually been elected out of a mad optimism, as irrational in its way as her own conviction that free enterprise is the system designed by God for men to live in and she its prophet. Her terrifying obtuseness was never bet ter illustrated than by her choice, as her Introit to office, of the words of St Francis of Assisi. If it was her token Catholic who suggested it to her as a way of colouring her rule with the tint of paternalism it so obviously lacks, he was indulging in some of the pixyish perversity which has made him so sought-after an after-dinner speaker. If Mrs Thatcher had not simply found St Francis in her Dictionary of Quotations she would know that he was a ne-er-do-well, a lay about, a class traitor. He gave up the life of a prosperous merchant for the love of Lady Poverty. He dressed in the single garment of the peasant with no hose to his legs and begged for a living, and made of that a rule of life.
St Francis, who may be allowed to have been more intimate with God than Margaret Thatcher, certainly did not think that the free enterprise system was the best way to serve Him.
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