Politics
Mrs Thatcher's jubilee
10111 y the time that you read this, you will .1-/have experienced five years of govern- ment by Mrs Thatcher — 'five eventful and action-packed years', as she put it in her anniversary statement at the weekend. Being Spectator readers, and therefore probably members of the social classes who particularly interest advertisers, you will have something to celebrate. You are pro- bably slightly better off than you were five years ago. The top rate of tax is lower, the rate of inflation is lower, interest rates are lower (though mainly by comparison with the amazing level that they reached in Mrs Thatcher's first two years). You are better able to afford something to celebrate with.
These may seem like modest and unelev- ated achievements, but they are real ones. You may have wished for more from so many eventful and action-packed years, but I hope that you are worldly, and so duly grateful for any benefits at all that a government can produce. What is more, these benefits are absolute ones. In a reasonably free society, the growth of per- sonal wealth does not impoverish others. You may prefer to celebrate quietly (there is not that much to celebrate), but you can do so with a clear conscience. People who say that the comfortable south is destroying the poor north are talking nonsense. If the south were like the north, the north would be like Rumania.
In her statement, Mrs Thatcher listed the things of which she is proudest — 'at least five areas' in which 'strong government is paying off'. These are the economy, 'vested interests' (she's against them), law and order, Europe, and defence and east/west relations. When allowances are made for the fact that politicians habitually boast, and even more habitually and understand- ably omit the embarrassing aspects of their record, her claims are quite sound. Indeed she also omits one or two notable plusses. There is nothing about the Falklands cam- paign which, whatever the mistakes that preceded and followed it, was a prodigious political success. And she is unnecessarily reticent about another pay-off for 'strong government' — the retreat of the trade unions.
Perhaps the modesty is part of the `statesmanlike' image which Mrs Thatcher is no doubt being told to cultivate. If so, it only makes even more curious the part of the statement in which she discusses her electoral success. 'I believe', she says, 'that five years ago the British people made me Prime Minister primarily because they sensed that socialism had been leading them to a life of debilitating dependence on the state ... ', and she goes on: 'I believe that I was re-elected with an overwhelming majority last year because the British people recognised ...' etc. No one (including Mrs Thatcher) can tell whether she is correct in her beliefs about 'the British people'. But what anyone can point out is that if Mrs Thatcher believes that the British people `made her Prime Minister' and that they `re-elected me with an overwhelming majority', she is suffering from a Bennite delusion about the British constitution. The Queen made Mrs Thatcher Prime Minister. The British people (except for that part of them that lives in East Finchley) did not return her to anything. They returned a majority of Conservative MPs to the House of Commons. Mrs Thatcher depends on that majority to remain in her office, but the majority does not bestow or define the office itself.
It may seem stuffy and pedantic to insist on constitutional formalities which in prac- tice make little difference, but it is odd that a major figure in those formalities does not take the trouble to defer to them in public. Either Mrs Thatcher actually believes that the British people made her Prime Minister, in which case she has forgotten her sessions at Buckingham Palace and never learnt any British history, or she is deliberately ignor- ing them in her statement. We can be sure that she is doing the latter. In short, the Prime Minister prefers to say that the British people gave her her job and re- elected her with an overwhelming majority. The Queen is left out; so, more notably, is the House of Commons.
Which leads one to wonder what sort of thing an `anniversary statement' is. For the anniversary celebrated is not solely personal in the sense that the anniversary of Mrs Thatcher's election as Conservative leader is. It is the anniversary of the beginning of a Conservative Government, and it is there- fore interesting and odd that it should be treated as a personal occasion. In the state- ment, Mrs Thatcher introduces the word `cabinet' only once and in a rather paren- thetical way. The word 'government' occurs more often, but more or less inter- changeably with the personal pronoun. The thing is Mrs Thatcher's jubilee, and since she is a democratic politician and not a monarch, she holds it after five years, in- stead of waiting 25. One would not guess from the statement that a number of other people have been working quite hard in the same enterprise for the same period of time, some of them doing rather more than standing and waiting. Forgotten but not gone, Mrs Thatcher's cabinet colleagues would be perfectly within their rights to issue their own anniversary statements, though they would not be prudent to do so.
For those who already believe it, the
jubilee will confirm their theory that Mrs Thatcher is trying to establish an elective dictatorship. This is a silly argument. It is still true that no minister, including the Prime Minister, has the power to sack a single career civil servant in his department, or even to demote him. That hardly smacks of authoritarianism: it is evidence of a more hoary and marginally more truthful theory that power in Britain is controlled by a permanent Whitehall 'establishment' upon which elected representatives can make little impression. What Mrs That- cher's statement does suggest is an obsessive quality. Only two entities receive Proper recognition in this document — 'the British people' and herself. Between them, it is im plied, they understand what's what. She has made a sort of private arrangement with the people, and as long as they stick to it theY will be all right. If this is the way that Mrs Thatcher is thinking, it follows that she also thinks that the British people will agree to share the next five years with her with equal pleasure, and, presumably, the five years after them' if she wants it. She may be right. She has' after all, managed so far, partly by defying most of the rules about how to be poPtIlar and facing down all those worldly Tories whose `pragmatism' would actually have produced electoral defeat. But if the British people cease to find her charming (according to last Sunday's Observer, 5.Y cessors have had bushels forcibly
Harris per cent of those who talked to the
poll think that she is too right wing, 62 Fer cent that she does not 'care about the ill: terests of ordinary people'), what happens then?
It is part of her self-confidence an resilience not to try to answer this question: But it is hubris as well. For it tries the
ty of the ministers that surround her. It 7 noticeable that, since the election, th°5 cabinet ministers tipped as possible suc- over their lights. What do we hear of Iv': Michael Heseltine, now that his usefulness as a propagandist for cruise missiles is el: hausted? And is it not sometimes put about by 'sources close to the Prime Minister' tb Mr Norman Tebbit has displeased her on various ways? Mr Tebbit must be haPPyul t be distanced slightly from his patroness, not so delighted to have his humiliatiou3 publicly In reported. up Instead, Mrs Thatcher has talked those senior ministers who could rlevec: overthrow' and probably never, replace Mr Nigel Lawson became her hero with tli5 p to Budget. She helped Sir Geoffrey Howli•,s navigate the storms in his departme are many teacups. In the St James's Sclat of crisis, she handed all decisions and ril°,„s rit_ the credit (such as it was) to Mr Leon 0 _E. ascenclan"_; tan. These men's stars are in the but, for all their great qualities, they are cO,'s stars themselves: they are Mrs Thatch_..rn planets, and they will suffer if their 5" burns herself out.
Charles Moore
Previous page
