POLITICS
Who inspired Thatcher's most damaging remark?
Tony Blair's favourite guru
PETER ()BORNE
Few phrases in modern political history have done more damage than Margaret Thatcher's notorious remark that 'there is no such thing as society'. It was made to the magazine Woman's Own in 1987, when Thatcher was at the height of her power. It has been used against her ever since. The former prime minister's political opponents have manipulated the phrase to demonstrate that she was heartless, lacking in compassion and believed in an atomistic Hobbesian world where each individual looked only after himself.
To give a recent example, here is Tony Blair setting out his new 'vision for Britain' in the spring of this year: 'We are emerging from a long period in which Tory values held sway: elitism, selfish individualism; the belief that there is no such thing as society and its international equivalent — insularity and isolationism.' Even 15 years on. Margaret Thatcher's words are being twisted to portray the Conservative party as callow and selfish. They have caused so much damage that this autumn lain Duncan Smith will launch an apologetic campaign to repudiate this troubled element of the Thatcherite legacy and rebrand the Conservatives as the party of society and the 'vulnerable'. But before he embarks on this course of action, it is worth re-examining what Thatcher really said and meant.
None of her antagonists — who have reiterated the text tens of thousands of times — has ever put the words in context. The then prime minister was being critical of people who looked to the state to solve every difficulty. She said: 'They are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours.'
Reading the full quote, it is easy to understand what was going on. Thatcher was speaking from within the Christian tradition. She was saying that each of us has a personal responsibility to look after our neighbours, and should not merely expect impersonal state institutions to do that job for us. This is how Thatcher herself explained her comment years later: 'My meaning, clear at the time but subsequently distorted beyond recognition, was that society was not an abstraction, separate from the men and women who composed it, but a living structure of individuals, families. neighbours and voluntary associations.' Her remarks have echoes of Evelyn Waugh when accused of being out of touch with the man on the street. He said that 'the man in the street does not exist. There are individual men and women, each one of whom has an individual and immortal soul.'
But now comes a fascinating suggestion that Thatcher was actually invoking the philosopher John Macmurray. This is from Ian Lang, who served in Thatcher's Cabinet. In his autobiography, published this month. Lang discloses how he took exception to the remarks and 'in the intimacy of her study I thought I could (uncharacteristically) risk a confrontation with her by challenging that claim, which I thought wrong as well as politically inept'.
Lang says that he expected a 'fusillade'. There was none. 'She said: "It's an interesting subject. Just wait here" — and disappeared from the room. When I sat tensely tapping my pen on my pad, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom climbed the stairs to her private apartment to find and bring down to me, one of her junior ministers, the answer to my challenge. After some minutes, she reappeared holding a book through which she was searching in vain for a quotation. "Society is a socialist concept," she intoned, while she scanned the pages, -community is Christian." I quickly wrote that down. She did not tell me the title of the book but she mentioned the name of its author, Professor John Macmurray.'
The philosopher to whom Margaret Thatcher was looking for inspiration is the same one about whom Tony Blair once said: 'If you really want to understand what I'm all about, you have to look at a guy called John Macmurray.' Macmurray, largely forgotten now, was fairly well known in the middle of the last century as the author of works of moral philosophy such as A Challenge to the Churches. Thatcher was right to search for a distinction between society and community in Macmurray. As the scholar Sarah Hale from the University of Sussex put it in last spring's Political Quarterly. 'In Macmurray's view society and community are two different things, defined in opposition to each other. Society arises through external pressures and needs and is described in A Challenge to the Churches as "external and compulsive", while community arises from internal human impulses and is "spontaneous and intrinsic".' This fits well with what Margaret Thatcher was trying to say in her Woman's Own remarks, though running flatly contrary to New Labour's habitual confusion between society and community.
But it would be wrong to create the impression that poor Macmurray was some kind of proto-Thatcherite. He surely hated the individualism which she celebrated; his vision of community was much closer to socialism than Thatcher could ever have tolerated. Probably both Blair and Thatcher had an equally partial and flawed understanding of the moral philosopher who exercised such an improbable influence over two prime ministers. Nevertheless it is plain that Margaret Thatcher's remarks came from a deep, humane and profoundly Tory insight into social relationships. They have been cynically and dishonestly twisted by political opponents to discredit her. The political process, not merely the Tories, has been cheapened as a result.
There is just enough space left to aim a giant boot at the great fat arse of Nicholas Soames, who last weekend attacked lain Duncan Smith's 'mad obsession with gays, blacks and women'. The Soames intervention is muddled. Last year Soames was a prominent supporter of the Portillo leadership campaign. Had Portillo won, the Tory party would be more 'socially inclusive' than now, not less. Soames has manifested a reluctance to serve under first William Hague and now kin Duncan Smith. He has retained the right to snipe at both from the sidelines. While disdainful of the Tory leadership, he is capable of grovelling to Downing Street. Before the last election I saw him at an intimate dinner in the Connaught Grill with Jonathan Powell, the Downing Street chief of staff. The late Alan Clark told me how Soames had asked him to use his influence with Alastair Campbell to obtain Soames the plum job of British ambassador in Paris.
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