Political commentary
The Browning version
Charles Moore
'Meyer glad confident morning again,'
said Paul Johnson, and Mrs Thatcher fled to India. But was the morning ever all that confident or tremendously glad? Like all mornings, it had a certain freshness to it, but also that irritating quality of sunlight trying to get through one's bedroom cur- tains unasked, and its very brightness presaged clouds by elevenses. When Brown- ing first thought of the phrase he was speaking of somebody who had stood very high indeed in the esteem of people like Browning,
'We that had loved him so, followed him,. honoured him, Lived in his mild and magnificent eye, Learned his great language, caught his clear accents, Made him our pattern to live and to die I ' Except for the clear accents, there is not much of Mrs Thatcher there. If Mr Johnson now sees her as a 'very ordinary woman' he is only saying what millions of people have long thought but are too polite to say in public.
Still, it is true that Mrs Thatcher has en- joyed the approval of the intellectuals in greater measure and for a longer period than any other Conservative Prime Minister this century, more perhaps than any Prime Minister this century, unless it be Harold Wilson for a few months in 1964. There were never any books on 'The Politics of Callaghanism' (though they would have made a good subject) or 'The Douglas- Home Experiment', but there are essays and books and theses on the Thatcher Phenomenon, and a belief, almost univer- sal where right-wing thinkers are gathered together, that there is something very special about our first woman Prime Minister.
One of her special characteristics is her respect for intellectuals. Men like Mac- millan and Baldwin believed in the impor- tance of English literature and English culture, and were, in fact, far more at ease than Mrs Thatcher with the arguments of educated people, but they did not regard daily politics as an appropriate forum for philosophical statements, nor did they see themselves as the upholders or propagators of a philosophical position. Macmillan read Jane Austen or Livy (and has boasted about it ever since) as a way of calming himself and forgetting the problems he was suppos- ed to be dealing with. Mrs Thatcher thinks that Great Books and Great Thinkers pro- vide Answers and, since she is too busy to study them, she defers to the men who have read the books and can tell her what they say. She has handed out honours to men like Peter Bauer, Hugh Thomas, Alfred Sherman. She has sat at the feet of
Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman, Edward Norman; and although she may not have understood what they said, she has returned to her more mundane labours flat- tered by their attention, inspired by their phrases, and convinced that she is somehow practising what they are theorising.
One cannot honestly say that the intellec- tuals have always been as careful as they should have been about these encounters. They are no less worldly than other men, of course, and the pleasure of being sought out by the British Prime Minister has sometimes clouded their judgment. It has made them reluctant to admit that Mrs Thatcher is a person quite incapable of understanding the speculative, ruminative, uncertain character of all intellectual life someone, in fact, who, when she sees the wrong end of the philosophical stick, in- variably grasps it with all the courage for which, in other fields, one admires her so much. They have not dared to say that there is no point in Margaret continuing with her evening classes. So she has floundered on, enunciating principles about freedom and justice and sovereignty whose contradic- tions the intellectuals have winked at for the thoroughly unintellectual reason that she is their woman. Paul Johnson is right that Mrs Thatcher was confused about the issues raised by the invasion of Grenada, but has she not always been equally confused about questions much closer to home — the character of the NATO alliance, the unity of the United Kingdom, the nature of British citizenship and so on?
One suspects that the truth is that clever people are getting bored with the Prime Minister. Looking down from the Press Gallery, I would say that is true of stupid people as well. A little test that you can set yourself is a small headline on the front page of Tuesday's Daily Telegraph. 'SATELLITE LINK FOR THATCHER', it said, and the story went on to explain that 'a highly-developed satellite communications system' will transmit reports and documents to Mrs Thatcher while she is at the Commonwealth conference in Delhi, so that she can go on governing Britain when she is not in it. If your heart gave a leap of pleasure at the idea that Mrs Thatcher's hand would never leave the tiller, then you are not suffering from the prevailing ennui. I must confess, I thought it was a depressing little item.
It is inevitable that the characters of leading politicians are discussed exhaustive- ly, and so almost equally inevitable that those characters wear a bit thin as subjects of discussion. In a way it is odd that this has not happened to Mrs Thatcher before now, for she is not full of surprises. She is not
eloquent: almost nothing she says is well- phrased, and her vocabulary is limited and repetitive. She is not witty. She is not pro- found: nothing that she says makes one think about politics in a different way. She is not politically magnanimous: she has lit- tle sense of occasion. Because of these drawbacks, she has to rely heavily for political success on a few precious qualities. Perhaps the strongest and most obvious of ,these is courage. Courage keeps her going when she is under attack. It makes her work hard, and it gives her the spirit to make others do the same. It enjoys being tested by crisis, and it passes the test. Before the famous Saturday debate in Parliament on the Argentine invasion of the Falklands, there is little evidence that Mrs Thatcher knew what she ought to do, but after it she did know, and it was courage, not expertise or statecraft, which enabled her to do it. Since the last election, Mrs Thatcher has not been asked to display her courage, and so her backbenchers have become listless. She has not cultivated them as assiduously as of old, and she has not energised them against a weak Opposition. She has ap- pointed dull dogs as her deputies.
Mrs Thatcher's other outstanding quality has been honesty. This has never taken the form of Josephite self-criticism; it has in- volved 'telling it as it is' — insisting that wage settlements, public spending, im- migration were too high, saying that unions were too powerful, firms too inefficient, bureaucracies too large. It has been thought to derive from the fact that she is an out- sider, unimpressed by established ways of doing things, though Harold Wilson, from a similar background, was not famous for this quality. Perhaps it is her honesty that has been called into question by her second election campaign and her second ad- ministration. It is easier for a politician to tell the truth about events for which he bears no responsibility. Now Mrs Thatcher has been in charge for more than four years and so is less ready to say what is wrong with Britain. Her pre-Falklands years were devoted to promoting what should have been an obvious truth, that inflation had to be controlled. Her post-Falklands truth 15 surely that the system of welfare and the level of public spending are unsustainable. Yet on every occasion for saying so, Mrs Thatcher has decided not to let on; and when Labour presented it in the form of an accusation shortly before 9 June, all the Tories' powers of disinformation were devoted to rebutting it. It would be a great pity if Mrs Thatcher allowed herself to temporise on this great question, and very sad if intellectuals were too fed up to produce any ideas on the sub- ject. The reform of the welfare state calls for a Beveridge in reverse, and requires more mental agility (though less pure 19- tellectual power) than monetary policy. If It is no longer glad confident morning, but a miserable November afternoon, there is all the more need not to leave the Prime Minister to her own thoughts.
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