POLITICS
She is too misty-eyed to live up to her Maggismo
NOEL MALCOLM
To say that Mrs Thatcher lacks ruthless- ness would be an exaggeration. But to say that she is not quite ruthless enough is to state a truth which is all too seldom recognised. The popular imagination dwells on those aspects of her conduct which it calls 'resolute' when it likes them, and 'harsh' when it doesn't. It remembers the trail of ejected Cabinet ministers, the unyielding economic policy of the early years, the confrontational style she makes use of in international forums, and the general bravado of toughness (what one might call her Maggismo) which she has always adopted when it suited her to do so. But the public forgets the sentimental attachments, the reluctance to hurt the feelings of those close to her, and above all the curiously misty-eyed loyalties which become elevated into guiding principles of her international policy.
These thoughts are prompted by recent events, both large-scale and small, both sublime and ridiculous. The publication of Lord Young's memoirs, The Enterprise Years, hardly registers at all on the political Richter scale; it is for the most part a solid, unshocking, personal but not excessively egotistical account of policy-pushing and administrative bricolage. One of the few surprises it contains is its revelation of just how little personal closeness there really was between Lord Young and the Prime Minister during his years of glory. But the blow-by-blow account it gives (in a series of diary entries) of the 1987 election campaign does bring to light one rather private aspect of Mrs Thatcher's character which is seldom described: her reluctance to deal strictly with anyone towards whom she feels a sense of personal indebtedness or an emotional bond.
The details are small but telling. One of the acknowledged failures of the cam- paign, for example, was the dismal per- formance of John Wakeham on a Radio 4 phone-in: this had Mrs Thatcher seething with rage, and compounded her dissatisfac- tion with the job he was doing as co- ordinator of ministerial appearances on radio and television. Lord Young takes up the story. 'I said, "What we've got to do is to organise television." "John Wakeham's a total disaster" she said, and really went on about it.' So Lord Young persuaded her to hand over the planning of media appear- ances to him and Mr Tebbit instead. Then, two days later:
I said, 'Prime Minister, you will have to tell John Wakeham,' and she said `Yes.' Norman and I went back to her office bringing John Wakeham and kept everybody else out. We sat down, and in the end she fudged it. All she really said was, it has got to be run from the centre, television appearances must be, run by the three of us; then she left it at that and went off for the day.
When it came to rejecting the Saatchis' advertising material two weeks later, Lord Young was better prepared. 'If you don't like it', he told her, 'all you've got to say is, "No I don't like it, David's got something better, I've got to go off and do my Dimbleby interview, David you sort it out" . . . She looked very relieved at this . . . I've learnt the lesson that she cannot do anything unpleasant.' Such a categorical conclusion does not follow. But she does find it hard to do anything unpleasant to anyone with whom she feels a personal bond — in the Saatchis' case a bond of gratitude for their help in winning two previous elections, and in Mr Wakeham's case a bond of sympathy (even, perhaps, tinged with guilt) for his bereavement in the Brighton bombing.
The bond she feels with Mikhail Gor- bachev is of a more intractably personal kind; and here there is no 'David' for her to turn to and say, 'No I don't like his policies, David's got someone better, David you sort it out.' Her initial delight at being able to speak her mind to a non- catatonic communist, her flattered pride at being courted as a 'world leader' by the president of a super-power, and an un- doubted frisson of personal attraction (for which Boris Yeltsin, who looks like a cross between Edward Heath and a truck-driver, would furnish no substitute) — all these have fused into a bond from which she cannot unbind herself.
Again and again during her trip to Prague and Budapest last week, her hosts tried to tell her why they do not share her spirit of Gorbolatry. They explained that the choice now facing the Soviet Union is not between nice, reformist communists and nasty hardliners, but between the continuation of communism in any form and its complete abandonment. They de- scribed the total internal failure of six long
years of perestroika. They pointed out that the Soviet Union still lacks a truly demo- cratic political system, and that one of Mr Gorbachev's main aims now is to reduce — or eliminate — his own accountability to the people. Yet none of this would deflect her from her chosen course of uncritical support. Mrs Thatcher's conduct of foreign policy is often condemned when she puts other leaders' backs up at Common Mar- ket summits or Commonwealth confer- ences; but in a few years' time historians may well be saying that it was her reluct- ance to put Mr Gorbachev's back up that was her gravest failing.
Her other great sense of loyalty, to the American President, seems a less personal thing now that Ronald Reagan has gone. The personal sentimentality, however, had been mainly on his side of the relationship; what she was misty-eyed about was not so much Ronnie's charm or intellectual spark- le, as the idea of being on privileged terms with the leader of the Western world — something that seemed to symbolise their special devotion to shared values. You cannot be loyal to an idea or a value; either you accept it, or you don't. But your loyalty to a person or institution can be infused with the ideas and values which you hold.
And nothing more clearly marks out Mrs Thatcher as a child of her time (her generation, background and upbringing) than her devotion to the idea of a sort of mystical Anglo-American blood- brotherhood, with which all kinds of im- portant abstractions — freedom, democra- cy, justice, the rule of law — are also somehow entangled in her mind.
Without this potent mixture of beliefs and feelings, now being channelled into her sense of loyalty to George Bush, she would certainly not have been so eager to incur the extra expense and added political risk of sending ground troops to Saudi Arabia. Indeed, the very ostentatiousness of her support for America over the last few weeks has seemed slightly hectic and insecure. It is as if her real concern is not, if we don't support the Americans now in their hour of need, they will turn their backs eventually on the defence of Europe', but something rather different: 'if I don't support George now, he will turn his back on me'.
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