Thatcherism – Part One – Birth of a Notion

Hello and welcome to season 7! of Origin Story. In each episode, we take a word, idea, or figure from history, explain its origins, and talk about how it influences political discourse today. I'm Dorian Linsky, author of Everything Must Go, out in paperback this month. And I'm Ian Dunst. I have nothing out at all, but then I would never be the kind of person who would try and promote my things on podcasts like this. It would just be far beneath me.

So I've spoken to a few people recently who discovered us through the latest season, then went back through the archive, which was absolutely lovely. And thanks for finding us. Because we have to do so much research for each episode, as I think you'll see with this two-parter, we rely on Patreon supporters to keep us going. So if you like the show, please consider becoming a backer. You'll get regular exclusive bonus episodes. We've really stepped those up. I've done a lot of those.

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And we worked out if just one in 20 listeners subscribed, that would make a huge difference. And of course, you can also buy the origin story books, which would also make a difference. It does sort of feel like at the moment where the world is. awash with ignorance and meanness that hopefully, like, if you like a podcast because it is humane and well-researched, that might be something you want to support more of in the world. You know, I don't know what all democracy dies in darkness about.

it democracy dies if you don't support us on patreon um no but it does feel there's perhaps a renewed uh urgency

to what we're trying to do. So we're kicking off season seven with a big one that's been on the list since the very beginning, Thatcherism. That means Margaret Thatcher herself, 1925 to 2013. It is her centenary this year. Hang out with the bunting. The longest-serving Prime Minister since Lord Liverpool 200 years ago, who will probably not be getting his own two-part episode. But knowing my luck, he might get a patron-only exclusive. I have to research. Might make Ian do it for lols.

But it's also the idea that bears her name. So what we're going to do is we're going to look at the two Thatcherisms in parallel. One is the political and economic ideology. The other is Thatcher herself and how her personality and choices shaped that ideology. So what is Thatcher? The OED definition...

is one of those basic ones. It goes, the political and economic policies advocated by Margaret Thatcher. Thank you very much. Especially as contrasted with those of earlier conservative leaders. First citation is 1977, but I found a Guardian article from 1975. just after she became leader, which used it to describe radical populatorism.

To be honest, it's not that striking, actually, is it? Because if you think about it, as soon as someone does become a leader, it wasn't too long before someone somewhere said something like Starmerism, which is obviously not a thing. Which does not exist. It obviously doesn't exist. But as soon as someone becomes a leader, people do start asking what that might be.

I mean, that's the thing with all of these first citations. It's like, okay, when did someone first use the word and when did it mean what we think it means? You know, there's often a big gap. Did you come out of this liking her more or less out of interest?

I had more sympathy with sort of young Thatcher. Actually, I was quite interested in it. She wrote two memoirs, one The Downing Street Years, one The Path to Power. Path to Power comes second. It's almost like it's written by a different person. It's just the early years when she's writing about...

childhood or whatever, is warmer, more relatable. It doesn't mean I like Margaret Thatcher, but I think the whole point of this is you're meant to understand at least, you know, with everyone that we've done, you're trying to understand, okay, where were they coming from? Nobody comes out of the gate as like somebody that you represents all these ideas that you dislike. What about you?

I mean, I certainly wouldn't want to have a drink with her. And I don't mean that like politically. She did like whiskey, though. I think we would agree on the drink. I didn't know that. Yeah, all three of us would be open towards that. There's plenty of people who are politically just as opposed to as her that I would happily have a drink with, and you wouldn't think it would be such a terrible idea. The striking thing about going through her life is you sort of think like...

Does she have any sense of humor at all? Does she have any sense of irony at all? And I think the answers to those questions would have been no. So on that basis, in terms of like her, not about the effects, but as a person, and then just the sort of the rigidity, it's more...

Valuable than we think, but this is not someone that you're really going to sit around at 2 a.m. with that whiskey, having an open exchange of ideas, I don't think. But I think that's what's interesting, of course, is she doesn't like... pop out the womb like that you know and and it is a journey towards the thatcher that we grew up with like completely uh unyielding and arrogant about her beliefs and that's what i found

researching the earlier stuff, really interesting, because of course, it takes a while. She has to really succeed before she gets the arrogance.

Everyone knows this already, but it's worth reiterating that this is kind of only partially the story of her. It's really like the origin story of modern British conservatism. Because as you read it, you just think the gap between someone like Heath, you know, was dealing quite consensual politics, trying to bring people together, trying to look for a compromise solution, especially between the market and the state, but all other matters as well. That kind of conservatism...

just fucking dies on its ass, basically. She comes along, and she completely remolds how conservatives like to think of themselves, and that's...

partly emotional. It's partly, you know, the attitude, that kind of stubborn bulldog, don't give a damn, I'll do whatever I please and I'll be vindicated in the end. And it's partly political. It's also this bundle of kind of... under-analyzed inconsistent ideological impulses like this zealous commitment to the free market but then at the same time this kind of traditionalist

patriotic, you know, small, you know, the family in the corners, which doesn't really fit with it. Well, that contradiction where your economics destroy the communities that you celebrate. Yes, exactly. So when people call themselves Thatch right now, we'll obviously get... to all of this. It's like, well, what do they mean? And as I was doing all the research, I was picking out these various attempts to define it. I'll save Thatcher's own one for later. A political scientist...

Patrick Dunleavy, if Thatcherism means a consistent set of policies consistently applied, then there is no Thatcherism. Correct. Biographer Charles Moore, I did not love reading the first volume of his biography, but I'm going to be using it a lot. Thatcherism was never a philosophy. but a disposition of mind and character embodied in a highly unusual woman. I think that's surprisingly accurate. It's pretty good. And then the anti-Thatcher Tory MP, Ian Gilmore.

You end up with a kind of just like a mad list. Thatcherism can be viewed as ideology, style, mood, I must have my own way, monarchism, 19th century liberalism, millenarian revivalism, right-wingery, a method of controversy, a set of moral values, statecraft, or as a combination of...

of all of them. And I was like, there's somebody who's just like, just hasn't edited his notes. It's like, but he's not wrong to say, actually, it can mean all of these different things. I think he stumbled across a bit of... sort of genius there with right-wingery, which I'm now going to fucking use with alarming regularity. I mean, he's not wrong. She was right-wing.

And we're also going to talk about the light her premiership sheds on British politics today. At the end of part one, we're going to talk about Keir Starmer's first term blues. and at the end of part two about Kemi Baden-Ock and Liz Truss's tribute acts. And, you know, also just generally, you could basically, if you really wanted to do an origin story on Brexit...

you would probably start here. This is clearly where you see the seeds, the embryo of what would later come on and pretty much destroy us. So this is obviously going to be a big one. So we decided I'm going to lead on part one, which takes us up to, well, we will find out, but circa the Falklands War in 1982. And Ian is going to lead on part two, which is largely her second and third terms.

her legacy. If you can't break with the Second World War, you might as well break with the Fortunes. It's got to be a war. Shall we begin? Let's do it. Okay.

Margaret Hilda Roberts, born in Grantham, Lincolnshire, on the 13th of October 1925. Today, funnily enough, it is the most Brexity area of the UK. No way! Yeah, Lincolnshire. Oh, wow. Now, she distanced herself from Grantham.

you know you obviously could tell in her accent but just she just moved to the south she became a southerner right as soon as she sort of entered the the workplace but she talked about them in interesting ways like this is her origin story if you will And particularly her father, Alfred Roberts, in May 1979, the month of the election, she said, I owe almost everything to my father.

And she's clarified this later, said integrity. He taught me that you first sort out what you believe in, you then apply it. You don't compromise on things that matter. Which I think is a nice sentiment, but maybe not for Margaret Thatcher. It would be great if it was from someone I agreed with. Yeah, not compromising on things that matter sounds brilliant. But not compromising on, I know, the poll tax, not so much.

So Alfa Roberts was a self-made man born into a large working-class family in 1892, and he ran two upmarket grocery shops in Grantham. But that was not all. He was also a justice of the peace, a governor of local schools. He ran the local chamber of trade, building society, savings bank and national savings movement and served on the town council for 25 years. At one point as a mayor. So...

Busy guy. And what's interesting there is that Thatcher's experience of a successful shop during the Great Depression set her apart from a lot of politicians' experience of the rougher end of the Great Depression. She said, for them, capitalism was alien and harsh. For me, it was familiar and creative. I was thus inoculated against the conventional economic wisdom of post-war Britain.

You could tell basically very didactic, humorless, uptight, parsimonious. They didn't have an indoor lavatory or hot running water, but they could have afforded them. He just didn't want to get them. Thatcher credits him with her belief in hard work, self-reliance and thrift and resisting conventional wisdom and holding to your own guns.

Something about dancing, isn't it? He sort of says, well, if you don't want to dance, don't be someone that dances. And she's like, okay, fine, I'll take that to the extreme. You know, but basically I can have the confidence to not do what all the other kids are doing. Which, you know, again, you know, not terrible things to teach your children. Politically, old-fashioned liberal, big fan of your man, John Stuart Mill, as he stood as an independent.

Aligned with conservatives, but not actually running as a conservative. Relatively centrist, not particularly ideological. Interested in sound finances, but also public spending to help the community. not like really an anti-state guy. Another couple of things about him, he was a Methodist, and Methodism is known, sorry, sorry for any Methodist listening, this is very simplistic.

Evangelism is a big part of that. Charity and self-restraint. I was in a conversation the other day with a historian and a good friend of mine. Talking about Methodism, when people come from the Methodist background, they often have a real look in their eyes when they talk to each other, like, oh, you know what I mean. You know what I mean? You really get that sense. It's a hugely important formative part of your youth if you went through it.

And it's said that her Methodism sort of underpinned this workers versus shirkers binary. You know, don't expect a handout from anyone. Economics is a form of morality, which will come up later in. A very famous quote of hers. The other thing is, he was a member of the Rotary International, which is a philanthropic organization. And there's a great line in one of her memoirs.

who says her family first became suspicious of Hitler when we heard that he had suppressed Rotary. Imagine. Hang on a minute, maybe he's up to no good. That was the red line. So there's a great story, I love this, about Alfred. taking in a teenage Austrian Jewish refugee in the late 30s. Very generous whenever. But after a fortnight, she had to find another home because she was too racy.

She was just like lipstick and cigarettes and dancing. And it was like, this is just too rich for the Robert's blood. But he did actually do this, you know, sort of tremendous thing of welcoming in a Jewish refugee. Her mother Beatrice... Barely figures. Thatcher said, after I was 15, we had nothing more to say to each other. Jesus Christ. And Margaret's sister Muriel said, mother didn't exist in Margaret's mind. Oh, my God. So she just doesn't figure. It's all about dad.

Young Margaret, literal-minded, purposeful, diligent and relentless student rather than brilliant. She put the hours in. Could be rather smug. Here's Charles Moore. Her faults in the eyes of her contemporaries concerned her tendency to come top to be... write and to rub it in. So at one point she wanted to be a missionary or a imperial functionary in India. She was fascinated by the empire. Another time she wanted to be an actress.

It's really hard for me to imagine her in India. It's an imperial, but just a very difficult series of categories in my mind. But okay. Well, she was going into Rudyard Kipling. That was like her favorite poet. So that probably played a part. And the Methodist missionaries and so on. Because as a politician, completely disconnected from popular culture, like no interest in the art.

But the bits I enjoyed in The Path to Power, she writes about how much she liked music, literature, cinema, and she says Hollywood offered glimpses into the romantic possibilities of life beyond Grantham. She watched anything with Ingrid Bergman in. And she just... seems like, at that point, you just seem like a normal kind of person that just wants to get out of your boring small town, which you will then proceed to mythologize during your political career.

So she wants to study law, but she sort of drifts into chemistry at school. So that's what she studies at Somerville College, Oxford, starting in 1943. She's a, again, diligent, fairly mediocre chemist, ends up with a second class degree, feels very shy and out of place. I mean, you can imagine how posh Oxford was in 1943. There was a suggestion in what I read that actually the chemistry really didn't help that...

A lot of political figures at that point in their life would have studied something related to politics, whether it was history or whatever. And they would have therefore encountered other political ideas. But because she was studying chemistry, there really was no encountering any alternative ideas. Not through her course, for sure. there's a wonderful little thatchery anecdote there that she started smoking

But then she ran the numbers and decided that she could spend the money on a subscription to The Times instead of cigarettes. The worst anti-smoking argument I've ever heard. But it's extremely Thatcher. It's like... She's not that she didn't like cigarettes. She just would rather spend it on her newspaper. Like you said, her course, nothing to do with politics, but she does join the Oxford University Conservative Association, which at this time is...

a moderate and reformist. And something that I think a lot of people don't know is that even during the war, with Churchill as Prime Minister, the Tory party is very unpopular and out of date. I think I'd grown up with that idea that they were hugely popular. The 1945 election was a bit of a shock, you know. And it was a shock.

There's quite a lot of high-profile Tories during the war going, we're toast. Like, we've just lost it as a party. So... A lot of these people, Harold Macmillan, Rapp Butler, Hogg, were looking for a position that Macmillan described as between the old liberalism and the new socialism, which is...

A very particular version of Toryism. Well, I'd really, like, any time they want to bring that shit back, I'm fucking here for that. I know, we're doing the Centralism book. You know, I did warm to Macmillan. You know. Hugely. You know, you must be sort of ideal, moderate.

Moderate Tory. So, you know, she's quite flexible. She's pro-empire, but she comes around on Indian independence. She doesn't consider herself on the Tory right. She admires Clement Attlee as a serious man and a patriot. You know, she's... She's definitely not on that wing. But in 1945, she expresses a core tenet of Thatcherism in the association's policy report. The individual is more important than the system.

Okay, yeah. Which, again, if someone else was saying it, you'd go, yes, individuals are good. Here you go, okay, right, so there is something... I think Thatcher writes about Margaret Thatcher. This is the kind of cutting analysis I come to you for. We'll give her scores on the scale of one to ten of Thatcher-y things that Thatcher thought. In 1946, she becomes the association's president.

In the holidays, she's going back to Grantham during the war, helping out doing sort of wartime things, and decides what she's seeing is the strength of community rather than the state. That was the lesson she learned. It's not the state. It's ordinary people pulling together. The other... fun grantham fact there is that alfred becomes mayor then he's alderman and when labor take over the council in 1952 they they get rid of him

He's not voted out, but they kind of boot him out. And she brings this up quite a lot as a primal grudge. She gets quite teary. She visibly moved when she brings it up later. Right, Labour did her dad dirty. What is she reading at this point? She mentions Arthur Kersler's Darkness at Noon, very good anti-Stalinist novel. Karl Popper's Liberal Manifesto, The Open Society. Oh no, she's just citing all the best books, baby. John Hersey's Hiroshima.

Brilliant bit of writing. Also, Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfton. Oh, and finally she fucked up. Although she doesn't really absorb it. She doesn't really get it for another 30 years. She literally doesn't talk about Hayek again until the 70s. She sort of read him in the foot, but it hasn't really made a big mark. The book that does, which she said was the most important book she had ever read, was by the American historian Herbert Agar, A Time for Greatness.

which is encouraging America to join the Second World War, and it's about how the West's weakness allowed Hitler's rise. And she writes, it urged a return to Western liberal democratic values and, though I liked this less, a fair amount of left-wing social engineering, which included, for example, rights for black people.

It was one of Herbert Agar's things. So it's very interesting. This was the book she found so powerful, and it's a fairly liberal rather than conservative book. She really is. I mean, you want to say interesting at this point, but she really isn't anything like the caricature of a human that we sort of grew up with.

No, she's like, there's something kind of, you know, there's relatable things that she says and she writes and she's, you know, she's sort of finding her way. Which, again, all stuff that I was quite intrigued that she was so sort of honest about. that in the memoir i almost wanted to say and i was just yeah you know i was all in place there in 1945 or whatever but clearly she wasn't

You said this to me before, but it's almost like politicians write memoirs at the worst possible time. They always write it just after they've fallen out of power. So the whole thing just becomes this, I was right, really, and this is why everyone else was wrong.

In this case, because she writes the book about being in power first, the content of the stuff that you're dealing with is obviously less political or less to do with what just took place. And less raw, right? And less raw, exactly. So you get this much more human version of someone. rather than the person who's just trying to have the last say on their reputation. She comes across as a person rather than an idea.

you know, and the personness of her, I think, sort of fades into the background, at least in the public eye later on. She leaves university in 1947. And she has this sense that if she could make it from Grantham, then nobody else has an excuse. And of course her dad was on the town council and owned two grocery shops. It's not like, you know what I mean? Started from the bottom. So it's a weird one. But she did...

for the rest of her life, loved people from humble origins, especially if they hadn't been to university, people who had really made it. But the flip side of that was very limited compassion for the poor. I think one of the great contradictions of Thatcherism is it's like, well, anyway,

if they've got enough gumption. In any society, some people are going to be doing low-paid jobs. There are always going to be some people who are relatively poor, right? It doesn't matter how wealthy society is overall. There are always going to be some people on the bottom.

And she sort of blames them for not getting their way to the top. And it's like, well, they can't all get their way to the top. Do you know what I mean? It seems to make sense to her, but I find it quite a bizarre way of thinking. And again, it's that moral judgment that success and failure reveal something about your moral character. That there is, and we've come to this, no such thing as society. You know, it's only individuals.

She works at BX Plastics in Essex, tests cake fillings and ice cream for lions, which sounds like a very good job. Sounds fantastic. Basically turns herself into a southerner. In 1949, the Tory party brings in new rules and the parliament brings in salary increases which enable more middle class people to become MPs. She's twice selected for Dartford in Kent in 1950 and 1951 and she twice loses to Labour.

Now she's getting much closer to like the anti-socialist grassroots and away from that Macmillan-Butler post-war Toryism. Her slogan's in 1950. Vote right to keep what's left. That's almost like a clever slogan, but it just can't quite find its rhythm. Stop the rot, sack the lot. Oh, better. I mean, rhythm-wise, anyway. And she's already saying it's a choice between freedom and slavery. She...

She clearly likes the grassroots in a way that I don't think the Tory leadership does at that period or arguably now. But when she goes, she seems enthused by party conference, by the people there. She does have a connection with them, and that connection basically survives throughout her time as a politician. And obviously there's a lot of sexism. And she turns her gender into an asset by framing politics and economics as household issues, kitchen table economics, which is very effective.

I mean, we can blame Cameron and Osborne's austerity on the success of kitchen table economics. Don't spend what you don't have. You know, there are limits to that. Bill Deeds is a fellow Tory candidate. And he says, once she opened her mouth, the rest of us began to look rather second rate. Oh, wow. So she's already impressing in a way that she didn't really.

at university she marries wealthy businessman dennis thatcher in 1951 has twins carolyn mark in 1953 and in this period she studies law for three years patents and then specializing in tax and it's through the bar that she meets Neve, the war hero who escaped from Kolditz, who becomes a vital mentor later. A really interesting character. And she later said, this is very neatly put and it really sums up perhaps the limits of her thinking.

As a Methodist in Grantham, I learned the laws of God. When I read chemistry at Oxford, I learned the laws of science, which derived from the laws of God. And when I studied for the bar, I learned the laws of man. The idea that the laws of science drive from the laws of God is just one of those things. As an atheist, I'm just like... Finally, 1958, she gets selected for Finchley, a North London suburb, aspirational middle class, 20% Jewish.

which made it sort of seen as that's the Jewish part of London. The local party chairman later admitted, this is in Charles Morse, but it's very good, that he'd rigged it and he thought that her opponent would be fine because he was just another posh guy. He'll get another seat and she probably won't. So I lost two of his votes and gave them to her. Oh, shit! Like in the movie Election, but in reverse.

It's literally election in reverse. So this is an early example of DEI. Angela should be very proud to have it remembered in that way. And her speech is...

are really impressively well-researched. They're very data-heavy. The press is mainly asking her about how to pick a husband. In the 1959 election, she wins. She becomes one of only 12 female Tory MPs. So she first enters Macmillan's cabinet in 1961 as a pensions minister. And Alec Douglas Hume, who becomes prime minister next, tells his wife, you know, she's got the brains of all of us put together and so we'd better look out.

And she already thinks the post-war consensus is failing. Quite early doors to people. Yeah, no shit. And is increasingly obsessed with trade union power. And what's coming out here is her social conservatism. So her first and only rebellion against the whip is to restore corporal punishment for children. Right. Yeah. She's a free speech warrior who defends Oswald Mosley's right to hold a rally in Trafalgar Square.

despite opposition from many of her constituents. She writes to her dad, the constituency correspondence continues unabated, with every Jew in the area demanding more curbs on freedom of speech. Later, she supports Mary Whitehouse censorship campaigns. Right, yes. And opposes most of Roy Jenkins' reforms as Labour Home Secretary, like divorce.

Death penalty, abolition, so on. She does vote to decriminalize abortion and homosexuality, but then later complains that she'd sort of been tricked. You know, Roy Jenkins did it in a very kind of like, we want to spare these people stigma and suffering.

And then she was just like, I wanted to do that, but I didn't want to say that these things are fine. So that kind of makes sense. She wasn't such a headbanger that she would have voted against them, but it doesn't make her a social liberal that she voted for them. the other fact is unfortunately is that dennis her husband is very

enthusiastic about white rule in South Africa and Rhodesia. That is a very unfortunate quality for a man to have. It is. It sounds like a bit of a euphemism. Is he racist? I don't know, but he's very enthusiastic about white rule in Rhodesia. Going to go with it, yes. So Tories get kicked out in 1964, and the next year, Ted Heath becomes leader, who is kind of the anti-Thatcher for a long period.

He's almost a decade older than Thatcher. He becomes president of the Oxford Conservatives Association exactly a decade earlier, then leader exactly a decade earlier. And that decade is important.

in sort of the history of the Tory thinking. So he's to the right of Macmillan economically, but he's still basically a big state guy and he drifts towards the center. I didn't realize that when he initially ran as leader, he was more right wing than we think of him, but he kind of drifted towards the center. And that was almost the message to the Tory right. It's like, well, watch out, you know, the gravitational pull of the centre.

Heath decides not to promote her at first, the shadow cabinet. He says, Willie Whitelaw agrees she's the most able, but he says that once she's there, we'll never be able to get rid of her. How accurate that proved. Eventually, Heath makes her shadow minister for fuel and power, then for education. And she's keeping a fairly low profile, but she's making noises in speeches about the failure of the consensus.

and how you need to have stronger opinions. On economics, her biggest influence is Enoch Powell, who is famous for one thing, above all, being the racism. who was quite respected in the party as an early monetarist. He's against excessive borrowing, inflation, Europe. She agrees on the borrowing inflation, not yet on Europe. As we discussed in previous episodes,

And this is very, very crude split, but the politicians who remember the 1930s at this point think the mass unemployment is the greatest social evil of all. But the monetarists and the neoliberals, although the word neoliberal was surprisingly...

I hardly ever came across it. And when I did, it was like capitalized with a hyphen. It was like, even into the 90s, even though you could read whole books about Thatcher and never see the word neoliberal, it was all about monetarism. Now they think that inflation is the real devil. We talked about this, didn't we? Like the high X, there is nothing worse than inflation because I've seen that.

And then you've got a lot of, you know, you've got someone like Keynes going, there's nothing worse than mass unemployment because I've just seen that. And that is the history of the right-left split over the 20th century is really that, you know, progressive economists concerned about unemployment.

reactionary or right-wing economists, laissez-faire economists, concerned about inflation. And really, they're sort of almost speaking different sets of priorities. That's how that war takes place. She also tells Meenock Powell the phrase enemy within to describe the left.

which you will find quite useful later on. But when you say useful, you mean absolutely fucking dreadful. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And after the Rivers of Blood speech in 1968, she avoids publicly criticising him. This is when Heath... kicks him out of the shadow cabinet. And then she praises him when he denounces Labour for banning the South African cricket tour.

And then you think, okay, well, you know, okay, this is what she's saying at the time. In The Path to Power from 1995, she says he was, quote, no racist and broadly correct about immigration and his sacking was a tragedy. So it's not something that she wanted to bury. She sort of doubled down on it long after he was dead. The future Thatcherites, though, are quite suspicious of her. So Geoffrey Howe, who is going to be a big character in this story. Yeah.

writes a memo to Arthur Selden at the Institute for Economic Affairs. leading neoliberal think tank? Which, unfortunately, most of our listeners will still be aware of. They'll still be aware of that. I'm not at all sure about Margaret. Many of her economic prejudices are certainly sound, but she's inclined to be rather too dogmatic for my liking on sensitive matters like education and might actually...

retarded the case by oversimplification. So they're kind of like, okay, she agrees with us, but she might make this seem a bit batty and extreme. So in June 1970, shortly after Thatcher's father dies. The Tories defeat Harold Wilson's Labour and Heath makes Thatcher Education Secretary, which is not quite what I expected, right? She is very resistant to advice.

and blames everything on civil servants. But surprisingly liberal in retrospect. She does things like she expands nursery education, puts money into building schools, saves the open university from being axed.

raises school leaving age to 16 spends a huge amount of money which again i think one of the highest spending departments She also presides over comprehensives replacing grammar schools and secondary moderns, even though she is personally opposed to this policy and complains that teaching is dominated by communists. So there is a bit of like, she is a good soldier in terms of like the collective responsibility. So she's actually attacked from the right more than the left.

which is very annoying for her. The Guardian, perhaps trolling, praises her for being more than halfway to a respectable socialist education policy. Oh my God, she can't have taken that while.

And it's the same with, like, Teddy has to introduce wage and price controls. I'm not going to get into, like, why, but it was something that was very controversial and un-Thatcherite later. And she says, look, it's collective responsibility, which I noticed, actually, Kemi Badenock says about things that...

that the government she was a member of did. And she goes, well, look, I couldn't say that. It's both true and also just a little bit too helpful to the case. It's very convenient, isn't it? Anything that you did that doesn't seem convenient now, you just go, well, I didn't really want to go along with it.

But then also it exists. It's a thing. Anyway, in 1971, she experiences the first big controversy of her career when she removes free milk from primary school children. And somebody at Labour conference comes up with a good insult, Margaret Thatcher, milk snatcher. Which I still remember as a very young child. It was one of the first things I heard about her. I didn't understand when she'd snatched me. I didn't understand that this had happened before I was born.

I just thought like she was always snatching milk. It was clearly just, it was just, well, I mean, obviously it's, you know, sexist as fuck and basically elemental in terms of it sort of. how powerful it is as a political image. And so what you get is that it just sort of sticks. And she can do all sorts of things. You know, Falkland, she can completely change where the British economy works. And yet what's left at the end of all that is people still saying, Maggie, eat the milk.

It's not true. Well, It is a weird one because it's not really very significant as a policy. If you look into it, Labour had already taken it away from secondary schools. That actually insisted on keeping it for under sevens when the Treasury were like, well, why don't you just take it away completely? And then she wants to spend the money saved. Yes. None of which seems terrible. She's not expecting a scandal.

But it goes ballistic for weeks. Finally, it's knocked out of the headlines by a minor strike in early 72. Wow, that's a bit of foreshadowing as well. She's attacked by teachers, social workers, nutritionists. Heath considers sacking her. Press headlines include the most unpopular woman in Britain,

The lady nobody loves. And is Mrs. Thatcher human? It's not a business for people with thin skin. Jesus Christ, how the hell you'd feel reading that stuff? There's something about a woman taking away milk. Obviously, Jen did. Yes. And do you think that's why it became such a big story? If she'd been a man, the story just literally would have been another nib.

I mean, I suspect so. Who knows? It's bizarre how big a deal it was. She complains at this point, I'm afraid I'll be remembered for milk. God. And it's her first experience of really being hated. And she writes, iron entered my soul. And it is interesting. It's almost like the kind of Twitter mob of its day. Yeah, you and I talk about this phenomenon all the time. People get attacked.

And it really makes them double down and toughen up and become really quite harsh. And I think she probably was treated unfair. I mean, is Mrs. Thatcher human overtaking away milk from one, you know, sector? I don't know, it seems weird.

In February 1974, Heath's out. Wilson's back in. Thatcher... Still sort of playing along with gender stereotypes, tells a reporter that it's fine because she can fill the time by spring cleaning the house. But later admits, I can't tell you how lost I felt. Oh, wow.

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So I want to talk to you about the birth of Thatcherism and the ideas that she was pulling together. And the John the Baptist of Thatcherism is Keith Joseph, born 1918. And she first gets to know him when she's working pensions in the early 60s. Loves the guy. Says he was almost too good a man for politics. Then come 1974, right? She's out of office. Troy's out of office. This is neoliberalism's breakthrough year. It's when Hayek wins the Nobel Prize for economics. Right, right, right.

Keith Joseph makes a famous mea culpa speech where he denounces his party and himself for drifting to the left. Drift is a really strong idea here. It's like you've just lost your moorings. He goes, I thought that I was a conservative, but now see, I was not really one at all. He sets up the Center for Policy Studies, making Thatcher vice chair, which is like an alternative power center to the conservative research department, which is run by our consensual centrist friend, Ian Gilmore.

Excellent. Maybe more than Heath. He's like the anti-Thatcher in his essence. And the CPS's director, fascinating character, Alfred Sherman, former communist, fought in the Spanish Civil War as a teenager. turned absolutely maniacal neoliberal. Thatcher once said, we could never have defeated socialism if it hadn't been for Sir Alfred. And Sherman has her number. He says she wasn't a woman of ideas. She was a woman of beliefs.

and beliefs are better than ideas. Oh, wow. What a thing to say. Which is kind of amazing because it sounds like he's slagging her off and then it turns into a compliment. Yeah, yeah. And he actually said, look, early Thatcherism was pure Keith. Joseph, which meant pure Sherman, him. She lacked coherence. So what it seems to me is that she was looking for...

intellectual ballast for her instincts. She has those instincts about the state and the individual and about freedom. But she doesn't have the kind of the intellectual weight. Behind it, Jonathan Aitken, who co-founded the Conservative Philosophy Group, it's been a fun hang, remembered her saying, we must have an ideology. The other side have got an ideology they can test their politics against. We must have one as well.

I just love the idea of just like marching into John Lewis. Do you have any ideologies? So what she does, which is pretty smart, is she seeks out her favorite authors as intellectual mentors, the one who is still alive, obviously. Hayek, Milton Friedman, Arthur Laffer, Laffer curve fame, Alan Walters, Ralph Harris from the IEA.

They're all on economics. And then historians Robert Conquest and Hugh Thomas on the Soviet Union. And this is when she starts waving her copy of Hayek's Constitution of Liberty around. Yeah. Going, this is what we believe. It's very telling because it's almost like it's secondhand. So what do you believe? And it's like, oh, it's all in this book that this other guy wrote. Yeah, yeah. So she likes intellectuals, but she knows that she isn't one. She's basically into...

problem solving rather than coming up with sort of big ideas and worldviews. So everyone around her knows this, all of her advisors know that, but they love her sense of mission and her guts and her passion. And so it sort of doesn't matter that she's not the one coming up with ideas. In fact, they love the fact that she is the best salesperson for their ideas. So Thatcher's side's Britain is in decline and needs national renewal.

And by this point, she hates the post-war consensus almost as much as she hates socialism. Right. Although she doesn't hate anything as much as she hates socialism. So in the October 74 election campaign, remember this is a year with two elections. Heath talks about leading a sensible coalition government of national unity. The Tory manifesto actually promises to consult and confer with other parties to secure policies.

with the consent and support of all men and women of goodwill. Oh, these were the days. I mean, they weren't. They were fucking terrible. But nevertheless, you brought them like a bit of it. That's incredibly centrist of him. Obviously, Thatcher does not like that. The Tories lose again. Then Heath refuses to quit.

Which, considering he's been in charge now for basically a decade, and he's lost a couple of elections, and everyone wants him to go, but he will not. So Thatcher's tipped as a potential leader, but she thinks it should be Keith Joseph. Until he blows it, and we mentioned this in the eugenics episode, he makes an infamous speech calling for poorer, less educated women to have fewer children because our human stock is threatened. And this did not go down well.

At the time. She has many flaws that year, but eugenics actually isn't one of them. So she steps up, but her chances are not great. And Rab Butler... The great kind of consensual Tory asks young Chris Patton, we don't need to take this Thatcher business seriously, do we?

Her campaign manager is Aerie Neve, I mentioned earlier. She'd met at the bar. He thinks differently. He thinks she's the most gifted politician in the Conservative Party and perhaps the most gifted politician for 25 years. She's the first idealist we've seen for a long time.

Probably all of that was true. I mean, there was an energy that was different and it was not about consensus. Yeah. And, you know, obviously she is talking in form of idealism, but just in terms of the qualities that she brought.

To politics, presentational, I mean, we're not really going to go into it. But in terms of just pure PR, the way in which she answers questions when they're put to her by journalists, she was completely befuddling them. She wasn't answering any of the questions. It's almost the beginning of the modern vacuous style. highly accomplished at doing it and she spoke with a sense of kind of like

homespun wisdom that concealed the extremity of the propositions that she was putting forward. She's really very impressive as a politician. And her values are clear then. It's limits on state power, it's individual freedom, consumer choice, support for entrepreneurs. nerves and thrifty and so on. Now, the hostility to Ted Heath at this point is more personal than ideological. It's not so much people want to abandon the post-organ census as they want to abandon Ted Heath.

And one historian said the contest was a competition not to be Edward Heath. And Thatcher won because she was more obviously not Edward Heath than anyone else. He was like a terrible campaigner. At one point he got so frustrated. He said the Tory party consisted of three kinds of people. Shit, bloody shit, and fucking shit. Which is fair, but bad if you're trying to hang on to the leadership. February 1975, she narrowly beats Heath in the first round.

The centrist Reggie Moulding says, this is the darkest day in the history of the Tory party. They've all gone absolutely mad. Just you wait, mate. And in the second, she defeats a bunch of others, including Willie Whitelaw and Geoffrey Howe. One top Tory said, and this really shows, like, where one feels sympathy for Thatcher, I think, is misogyny, right? Of course, Jesus. So one famously expressed, my God, the bitch has won. And you're like...

Very few people at this point expect her to become prime minister. Roy Hattersley said that Labour thought she was a temporary phenomenon and easy to beat. The economists thought the Tories might be out of office for 25 years, which would have taken them up to the year 2000. And most Tory MPs think they should be gone soon and Willie Whitelaw will take over. I know there's a lot of names here. I'm assuming that people will know basically...

When I'm referring, who's a Tory MP? Who's a Labour MP? You don't need to know too much. What we're going to have with Willie Whitelaw is this guy who's defeated then just turns into this absolutely vital right-hand man who just recognises the defeat. and just works incessantly to maintain the sort of consensus in the party that assists her. So he turns into someone that becomes kind of pivotal to her continued success over the years to come. So during the leadership campaign...

She gets the nickname Cautious Margaret because she's trying not to come across as too hardline. That is not a nickname that's going to stick. It really does not. Ain't nobody calling her that in a few years' time. So she's not...

Being overtly ideological. It's like her values, but not so much pushing the kind of ideology in people's faces. Her enemies are clear, though. Inflation, immigration, trade unions, communism. Those are things she do not like. There's a series of Thatcherite documents produced, all available on the Margaret Thatcher Foundation website, which is an amazing resource, including something like the original scans.

called things like stepping stones and the right approach. And Keith Joseph notes towards the definition of policy. which is a reference to T.S. Eliot. Oh, right, of course, yeah, yeah. Again, something that you just do not get in today's Tory party. And if you dig into them, you see some of these more like hardline ideas. But she's not putting them in the shop window. And the first thing that she gets swept up in is the 1975 EEC, European Economic Community, referendum campaign. This...

has been quoted quite a lot, cited quite a lot around Brexit, of course. So people will know that her maiden speech as leader, she denounced the referendum as a device of dictators and demagogues. But then, you know, when it's happening, obviously she has to kind of... muck in. We will come back to Thatcher in Europe, particularly. A lot. Quite a lot. It's a mixed picture. But she had been a supporter of British membership for a long time. She was a member of the European Union of Women.

but it was a trading framework to her it wasn't an idealistic project there was no ever greater unity It was basically like, this is just, this is good for business. And the Tory party was overwhelmingly pro-Europe, so she had to be. We should say, Brie, that at this point, the right was broadly united on Europe and the left was broadly in opposition towards Europe, especially trade unions.

Unions, but progressives in general were very critical. Oh, there were far more Eurosceptics in Labour than there were in the Tories. Although interestingly, Geoffrey Howe says that he thinks he was a natural Eurosceptic all along. And Hugo Young, who's one of us, is the... biography that i enjoyed the most and taken quite a lot from here

He thought she only backed yes because she was leader. Had she not been, he thinks she'd have joined Enoch Powell and the backbench Eurosceptics. So it's very debatable. These are just counterfactuals. But it's interesting that some people thought that...

She was more of a Eurosceptic than she appeared. Obviously, we know not to read too much into that picture of her in the jumper with all the flags. Yeah, so this is a famous, you know, thing where she's covered in European flags. And you would see it a lot from whenever, you know, during Brexit, whenever Tory...

of saying something Brexit-y, you would get, you know, follow-back pro-EU type. So, you know, an image of her in that jump being, oh, your hero really loved the EU. The trouble with that was, even during that campaign, she did not love...

Anything to do with the European project. Love is not a word that you would use, and that jumper is not particularly indicative of her overall opinion, even when she was generally supportive on a particular policy. Also, interestingly, she was a bit like Corbyn was in the 2016 campaign. Like, technically...

pro-Europe but obviously her heart wasn't in it and she didn't like the cross-party group Britain in Europe because it was too cross-party obviously too centrist and it made Ted Heath look good She'd just beaten him and now he was back, back, back as the Europe guy. And it was like, we love Ted Heath. Oh, wasn't it good when Ted Heath was leader? But she does make a speech that again was quoted a lot during Brexit. And you would have to say, not wrong.

If Britain were to withdraw, we might imagine that we could regain complete national sovereignty, but it would in fact be an illusion. Our lives would be increasingly influenced by the EEC, yet we would have no say in decisions which would vitally affect us. Bang on.

Yeah, and it's worth just putting a pin in this as well, because this specific issue, sovereignty in Europe, and what that means for a neoliberal agenda, what that means for the country, what that means and what it says about Britain's role in the world, will just be this... theme that runs all the way through her premiership and will eventually destroy it. So she does not love Europe. She does love America. Yes. Which she has visited before.

When she was in opposition, again twice as opposition leader, building a relationship with presidential hopeful Ronald Reagan. In January 1976, she makes an anti-communist speech that leads the Soviet magazine Red Star to call her...

The Iron Lady, which is perhaps the most backfiring insult of all time. Yes, yes. I mean, she was like, I'll have that. But you should have known when you wrote it down. You just thought, well, that sounds outstanding. Well, considering that Stalin means like man of steel. then people aren't going to think the Iron Lady is rubbish. So I don't know. Bad work, Red Star.

She's very good at speeches at this point. Her rhetoric is very good. Her PR advisor, Gordon Reese, who also kind of works on her wardrobe and voice training, all that, tells her every speech should tell a story or a fable, which is something perhaps I think people have been trying to tell.

It's good advice. And at the 1975 party conference, she talks about coming to a turning point in history. Like either Britain continues to go down or we say enough and we rise up again. And Chris Patton... says she cheered up the troops more than any party leader since churchill right she did do that job of like we are in opposition but here's how we're getting back the the job that kimberianock is trying to do now

Plus, like we said before, she got them and she liked them. You know, she could speak to them. Yeah. But her rhetoric is really quite extreme even at this point. She talks about Britain becoming an Iron Curtain state. She claims the National Union of Journalists will put the press in chains, literally just basically enforce socialist propaganda, which is not what the NUJ does. Privately tells a diplomat that she regards Tories who believe in consensus politics as quizlings, as traitors.

Now, 1976, there's two big setbacks, which hurt her chances of becoming prime minister. First, Harold Wilson resigns and Jim Callaghan becomes PM. who was really popular at the time. We think of him as kind of a loser now. I mean, in the public imagination. He was much more popular than Wilson was, and more popular than she was. Then you get the sterling crisis, the International Monetary Fund.

bailout again not something we can go into but the upshot is that callaghan and his chancellor dennis healy declare the end of keynesianism and adopt elements of monetarism. You can buy a centrism book and read all about it. So, you know, she's reading these kind of laissez-faire figures, people like Frederick Hayek. And gradually, and we did cover this in the neoliberalism episode, if you want to go back to that.

You get this period, predominantly under Milton Friedman, where that approach of the critical idea towards the state takes the form of monetarism, which is essentially this idea of like the state's interference in the market should be restricted to trying to control the money supply.

of money that's flowing through the economy and that this is the mechanism that will prevent inflation. So it's an odd theory because, of course, it's a theory for how the state should interfere in the market that is essentially made...

exclusively by people who don't want the state to interfere in the market. And it's just the one bit of interference they're prepared to countenance. They think of it at this time almost like the kind of scientific application of those old laissez-faire, you know, right-wing ideas about limiting the...

Well, this is the neoliberal's big idea at this point. I mean, it really faded away. People don't talk about monetarism. Now, in neoliberalism, you think of like, you know, slashing the state and regulations and so on. But monetarism was...

the engine of it all. Well, it's telling, isn't it, that, you know, during the Cameron Osborne era, you still didn't, you know, they were dealing with all these ideas that came from the same place, pulling back of the state, you know, the big society, you know, which is a sort of form of, you know, there is no society, do it for yourselves.

But no one started talking about monetarism. Because over the years, you know, over this Thatcher period, it was found just simply not to work. And the reason for that is it's really hard. You know, if someone, for instance, if a shop...

sofa shop offers you credit, you know, so that you pay in installments for the sofa, there's been an increase in the money supply. But that's, it's really hard to come up with policies that just control for this factor, let alone very hands-off policies. So throughout that... period. It's really just the sort of pulverizing regular demonstration of the fact that this is just not really a viable way of approaching economic policy.

But because Labour have adopted elements of monetarism, or at least kind of, you know, declared the end of Keynesianism, symbolically, it's not like it completely stopped. doesn't give Thatcher anything to oppose economically. The big peak crisis there has passed. And Hugo Young points out, what this shows is Thatcherism can't just mean.

neoliberal economics because it's already happening without her and not just in the UK like happens under Carter before Reagan it's happening all the way around the world so the idea that it all starts when she gets into Downing Street Of course, it's false. She accelerates it. She believes in it much more than they do. They're just thinking, I guess we'd better try this now. But it's already begun. So she's a bit sort of...

on the back foot at this point. So she focuses on building power within the party and she's looking for these younger allies, like listeners of a certain age will remember these people all the time. Cecil Parkinson, Nicholas Ridley, Nigel Lawson, Norman Lamont. Her policy brain is Shadow Chancellor Geoffrey Howe, but she doesn't seem to like him much. She thinks he's rather too sort of mild and socially liberal and consensual.

You know, this will blow up spectacularly, this relationship. Chris Patton has a great line. He said that Howe resembled a country solicitor with an increasingly demanding client. By the way, that's spot on. But also, it's sort of, I think that's sort of telling us that because his economics really...

don't seem that far away from hers. They're not. But his manner is a million miles away. It's this really kind of gentle, slightly monotone delivery. There's no knives out about him at all. It's this really... quite hush-hush, sort of plodding, urbane kind of sensibility that he has to him. And I wonder how much of it is to do with that kind of the disconnect between their personal vibes. Yeah. Was it Dennis Healy who said that...

Being attacked by Geoffrey Howe is like being savaged by a dead sheep. Yeah, I remember that, thinking that that was the first thing I knew about Geoffrey Howe, I think, was that quote. That turns out to be highly, highly inaccurate. I know. The revenge is coming. Speechwriter John Gummer says, what she liked best was being defiant.

So it was one's job to find her something to be defiant about. I think that's extremely telling. Isn't that good? She needs enemies. So one of these things, she's a bit stumped on economics temporarily, is immigration. She says in 1978, people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture.

And there is a big backlash against this. I didn't know how big it was. The shadow cabinet is unhappy. The broadsheets are outraged. Home Secretary Merlin Rees accuses her of making respectable racial hatred. Because it's a direct attempt to try and get the national... front votes yeah and and it's still used today by you know sort of spectator type people

who were trying to say, well, you know, it's good to engage in a little bit of, you know, anti-immigrant rhetoric in the Tory party because it prevents the extremist parties from ever succeeding. The counter-argument, of course, is you have injected the extremism into the body of the centre-right party. But that...

tactic begins with her during that interview. But it works. The Tories go up in the polls. It does work. It's temporary, but it does work. The Tories are banking on an election in autumn 1978. So Gordon Rees. Works on a voice again. He hires ad agency Saatchi and Saatchi, who produced the famous Labour Isn't Working poster. Possibly the most famous and successful election poster in British history. I don't know whether successful, it's famous. I don't know, because what's weird about it, right?

found the story of it interesting. It features a few young conservatives from Hendon copied and pasted to make up the numbers, which I love. If you look, it's the same people. And it's ironic that we remember this as successful because unemployment at that point was 1.2 million. Under Thatcher, it peaked at 3.2 million. In fact, she was nervous about the poster because she knew that her policies would increase unemployment.

So the whole idea that the most famous anti-Labour poster is going, almost Labour doesn't care about unemployment, is the exact opposite of their positions. But it can be hypocritical and mendacious and still successful in electoral terms. Oh yeah, yeah. Much like a certain bus, you know. It's not... Political advertising is not the history of really honourable, truthful, you know, political communication.

So Callaghan should have called the election then when everyone was expecting it, because even Thatcher thinks that he would have won. There's some revenue from North soy oil coming in. Emigration was down. People didn't talk much about emigration, but it was happening a lot in the 70s. People were going, Britain is such a basket case. I'm moving abroad. Economic confidence was up. Norman Tebbit, later her attack dog, said that there was an air of defeatism.

at the end of 1978 what she needed was the winter of discontent yeah at exactly that time this wave of strikes because what it did is it shattered labor's big pitch to voters during the 70s throughout the 70s They had a better relationship with the unions than the Tories did, so they could deal with the unions and avoid all of this strife.

Thatcher writes, without the exposure of the true nature of socialism, it would have been far more difficult to achieve what was done in the 1980s. I don't agree with her framing about the true nature of socialism, but... she's right like that was a gift without the winter of discontent you don't get thatcher you don't get thatcherism

Well, certainly not in that form. I mean, you spent most of your time reading about this period just livid with rage at the trade unions for their complete inability to recognise the damage that they're doing to their own cause. We're just like, honestly, do you not see the proposition that you, if you're saying...

going to bring down Labour governments. Where do you think that argument gets to? Does it get to you being in charge? No. When it is clear that the Tory opposition fucking hate the unions. Exactly. Exactly. February 1979, the Tories are 19 points ahead. The government loses a vote of confidence, calls an election for the 3rd of May. And she runs a campaign which is quasi-religious, the evangelical streak of Methodism. She says in Finchley,

There's a choice between good and evil. Jesus Christ. In Wales, if you've got a message, preach it. The Old Testament prophets didn't go out into the highway saying, brothers, we want consensus. They said, this is my faith and my vision. This is what I passionately believe. In Bolton, it said that there is one thing stronger than armies, and that is an idea whose time has come. It's quite...

That thing that Ian Gilman said about millenarian revivalism, it really does have that quality. So Labour's trying to paint her as reckless and divisive. She's going to fuck the economy. But Callaghan privately admits, it doesn't matter what you say or do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves. I suspect there is now such a sea change and it is for Mrs. Thatcher. Because he's personally more popular.

Labour until recently were more popular, and yet he somehow feels like the moment is gone. Yeah. And now a new era is coming. Essentially, the winter of discontent is your Liz Trust, basically. Yeah. It's just like one of those political events that it's just kind of impossible to get out from underneath the bottom of no matter how accomplished you are. The Sun's headline is, Vote Tory this time. It's the only way to stop the rot.

The Winter of Discontent basically sells her argument that she is there to save Britain from terminal decline, right? The Tories win a majority of 43 with a swing of just over 5%. which is the biggest swing since 1945, but the lowest vote share apart from the two elections that Labour won in 1974. So Andy Beckett, whose books I've drawn on here, just a very good historian of this period.

points out that Labour actually increased its vote numerically, especially among the middle class and the wealthy. The Tories took more votes from Liberals, Nationalists and the National Front than they did from Labour. Wow. It wasn't a lot of switches. The Tories were doing well with skilled workers, women and young voters.

That's fascinating. So when people always say, oh, you know, you know, people have that real sentimentality about the young people. They go, when are young people ever wrong? And it's like, it was the young that were very strong for Thatcher. So sometimes the kids aren't all right. So her speechwriter, Ronnie Miller, who was like a playwright, had her misquote St Francis of Assisi on the steps of Downing Street.

Everyone's seen this, right? A film that takes place in the 80s. Where there is discord, let us bring harmony. Do I need to do the whole thing? Does everyone know this? I mean, if you promise to do it in her voice, I think it's important that you do. Where there is discord, let us bring harmony. No, where there is error.

we bring truth where there is doubt may we bring faith and where there is despair may we bring hope am i the only one that found that quite arousing quite sexy francis didn't say that um but it gave her a nice sort of religious crusade. But, of course, that doesn't sum up, like, the idea of where there is discord, let's bring harmony. Well, it's literally the opposite of everything she ever did. Yeah, and I think it was just a case of, like, her speechwriter just thought it was cool.

It really doesn't say anything about her actual mission. So at 53, Margaret Thatcher becomes the first female leader in the Western world. Before then, the most famous female leader in the world was Indira Gandhi. She'd actually visited in India to try and sort of pick up. Oh, really? Yeah, she'd done a lot. As leader of the opposition, she visited countries all the way around the world. She was fascinated by Indira Gandhi. But she's instantly polarizing.

Obviously, a lot of people hate her straight away. And most of the cabinet had not voted for her on the first ballot. Jim Pryor, another... Centrists called it the most divided conservative cabinet ever, and Thatcher calls herself the rebel head of an establishment government, which is quite cool.

I don't think, I admire that. But I mean, that's a good way of framing it. And Liz Truss, I think, tried to do that same thing. Yes, yes. Of just, I'm trying to do things, but all these kind of moderate quizlings are getting in the way. So what she does is... She appoints these loyalists around her. Her PPS is Ian Gow, true believer. Bernard Ingham is press secretary. John Hoskins.

The rich businessman who helped her shape the economic policy is head of the Downing Street Policy Unit and Alan Walters as economic advisor. A lot of these guys are going to have major roles coming up, in particular Ingham, who is still kind of a sort of Fleet Street legend to this day, really, for that role, for the kind of press attack dog for the prime minister.

And a former Labour man, which I think she liked. She liked the fact he'd switched sides. And she has a binary view of everyone. Cecil Parkinson, one of her kind of young protégés, noticed during a meeting that she had a list of civil servants and she marked a solid line or a dotted line under each...

name as they spoke. I soon realized that the dots were for the goodies and the line for the baddies as she saw them. There were only two categories and everyone fitted into one or another. So that is one aspect of her leadership style. The other thing is she's incredibly hardworking and micromanaging. So Callaghan had this sort of hands-off big picture approach. I'll let you guys get on with stuff and I'm going to kind of shape the... the national vision.

No, no, no, no, no. She's writing endless notes and memos. PMQs for her is a chance to find out what every single department is doing. She goes to bed at 2, wakes at 6, works almost all the time. That four-hour sleep thing is one of those...

sort of core things they always say. I know, right? And you sort of, you just expect it to be one of those myths just because something that's repeated that often is used. And you're like, oh, no, that's actually true. No, no, because I saw the exact time. I don't know how you function like that. I'm a very sleepy fellow.

Hates holidays, has no hobbies. Doesn't really have that many friends. Doesn't really have any friends, really. I mean, there's a few sort of people that pop around for dinner, political types and admirers, but no one's ever mentioned any kind of intimate friendship. No, I don't know who that is, I wonder. I think it was... People who are political allies, essentially.

She loves an argument, she says, which I think is true, but only if she wins. I mean, but we all have arguments if we win. But the point is, it's almost like she loves hearing other people's views so she can push back in, which sharpens her thinking. It doesn't mean that she wants to change her mind. This is a great anecdote from Malcolm Rifkin, one of her ministers.

She was asked, Mrs. Thatcher, do you believe in consensus? To our surprise, we heard her saying, yes, I do believe in consensus. There should be a consensus behind my convictions. I thought at the time that this was an extraordinary example of wit. But as the years have gone by, I've realised that she was actually being deadly serious.

So she dislikes anything that sort of gets in her way. Pluralism, checks and balances, the commons, the civil service, public inquiries, cabinet. She had no royal commissions.

No Royal Commission is doing our whole time in government. One civil servant said they didn't even have cabinet government. We have a former presidential government in which she operates like a sovereign in her court. And even some of her loyalists were going... you are treating people appallingly you are a bully you don't praise people you you blame them for things and these are people that were kind of in

team thatcher well there's this sort of i mean at the beginning this you still have some people say sometimes you know her approach is like you know challenge the the the minister make sure they justify themselves and there's still a few people around in the beginning who are like you know what there's some moments with us

a healthy process and it works out better and as the years go on there'll be fewer and fewer people saying that more and more people saying she's just a kind of crazed egomaniacal bully And I didn't realize quite how early the bullying started. Now, look, we can't talk about everything that happened in this, particularly as many listeners who remember this stuff and they go, well, what about this? You know, we can't cover everything. So just sort of broadly speaking.

how much her personal prejudices shaped her policy. Like she really admired fact-based fields, law, science, but she didn't like the arts and universities because they were wishy-washy and lefty and you couldn't really sort of put a price on them. Plus she was a bit of Philistine with the arts as well. And so much of that just comes from her.

Similarly on Europe, Europe immediately thinks, oh my God, thank God Labour's gone. We've got a Europhile in office. Lord Soames called her an agnostic who continues to go to church, which probably sort of sums it up. That she's not overtly Eurosceptic. At this point. At this point. Extremely hardline on terrorism. Now, both Aerie Neve, her mentor and campaign manager, and Lord Mountbatten, who we will encounter...

later in the season as the last viceroy of India, killed by IRA bombs in 1979. And she just sees red about terrorism, and later, of course. She was almost the victim of an IRA bomb. So when IRA prisoners in Northern Ireland go on hunger strikes to protest the removal of special status, basically the same reason why the suffragettes. She let them die despite international outrage. And her anti-terrorist stance is going to come up later, particularly in reference to South Africa.

and her conviction that the ANC are terrorists and you don't compromise with terrorists. So that's really important. In the US, not much to say about her relationship with Jimmy Carter, even though they overlap.

you know, getting on for two years. Yeah, we forget, right? Yeah. I mean, they mainly clash over independence for Rhodesia, but she does actually U-turn, one of quite a few U-turns that she doesn't like to talk about. Then her friend Ronald Reagan becomes president in January 1981. And actually the special relationship had sort of been declared dead at the end of the 70s. And so much that we think about the special relationship is Reagan and Thatcher, right?

And they like each other more than they like their advisors. But I think that's also critical because obviously there's the political alignment and that's legit, bona fide, 100% true. But more important is the fact that they just seem to like each other. And it's weird because... Their personalities are really different. Like, she's a workaholic. He's very passive and lazy and not on top of policy.

You know, she's much more hawkish on deficits. He's much more into tax cuts and, you know, let the deficit grow. They've got all these differences. They clash on foreign policy sometimes, but they both have this morally simplistic view. It is a crusade for freedom. Yes. It is good versus evil and the USSR is evil. And I think because they both share this religious crusade almost, that they could weather these quite big disagreements on policy.

And it didn't matter. And that was so important to her in what I'm about to describe this incredibly tricky first term. is that she's got the president on her side. Their kind of deal, as she sees it, and clearly as he does, is that she will basically only ever support him in public. She'll never have any notice of criticism. But then in private, she reserves the right to speak her mind.

Which she really does. I mean, she's got a really granular understanding of where the positions are around the president. And she's sometimes enlisted by people around the president. But she goes in for quite incisive moments when it's balanced and tips it one way or another.

with regularity he seems to really enjoy the intervention so there's a point there's a story where she calls up to harangue him about something and so he's just on the phone surrounded by his advisors just literally getting screamed at by her and just holds the phone up so everyone else can hear and just looks at them and says, isn't she wonderful?

I mean, what a thing to have the U.S. president on your side. Yeah, yeah. Hard to imagine now. Younger listeners might not know that the U.S. used to be an ally of the United Kingdom.

And an enemy of Russia. So, things are coming to a head, this episode, Anna Vestem, with just this unbelievable economic crisis, partly caused by her. Like there really isn't much of a political honeymoon. So in 1980, inflation hits 18%. For comparison, the post-COVID peak in 2022, which caused some sort of Cozzy Lives crisis, 8%.

The biggest rise in unemployment since 1930. The biggest fall in output since 1931. Interest rates and debt are high. Growth is low. The CBI calls it as gloomy a picture as it is possible for anyone to paint. And what she's done is she's gambling against that post-1930s consensus. She thinks, and most don't, that voters will stomach massive unemployment if the government can beat inflation.

Treasury Minister John Biffen says, this is such a good line, she bows before the retail price index like some primitive Saxon on his knees before the great god Thor. That's absolutely fantastic. Isn't it good? Just great. Just obsessed with inflation. Therefore, of course, consumers before workers. And she says in 1981, another one of those famous quotes I had to check because I thought, is this real?

Economics are the method. The object is to change the heart and soul. That moralistic view of, you know, rewarding people. And really just not caring about the unemployed. Her opposition includes the Treasury, the Bank of England, her own colleagues, the so-called Wetz. One Nation Tories. Wetz is like a public school.

But basically moderate, moderate conservatives. Yes, it's Ian Gilmore, Willie Whitelaw, Jim Pryor, Francis Pym. And she thinks in her worldview, moderates are by definition cowards. It's not that they believe in moderation.

It's that they're too cowardly to believe in anything. Which I suppose is a classic argument against centrists, right? Yeah. I mean, it would be like the Nazi view on liberals, you know, against communism. It was just like, you know, they're cowards. So the Wets think that monetarism will lead to...

economic disaster, loss of social cohesion, and electoral defeat. And it's expected that they'll force her out. But, classic centrists, they're too respectful and they don't really have an alternative, so they don't really put up a real fight. And the expectation for her to make a U-turn is what inspires the famous line by Ronnie Miller again.

The lady's not for turning. That was really a message to the wets because Heath was known for U-turns. And it was going, it was more to them than to the country. She's going, no, I'm doubling down on this.

And there were U-turns. There was a minor strike that we never would talk about in early 1981 where they backed down. Yes. Humiliatingly backed down. Yeah. They bailed out British Leyland. I mean, again, some of this just sounds like you're talking just, you know, it just seems so long ago, doesn't it?

But it was a big deal at the time because they were like, oh, so it is okay for the state to bail out a company. Almost all the names that we mentioned in this episode to me just sound like I'm six years old. That's it. No, the same. Just the news bubbling away in the background.

So things come to a head, or their first head, over the March 1981 budget, which is brutal. Thatcher says to her advisor, Alan Walters, you know, Alan, they may get rid of me for this. At least I shall have gone knowing I did the right thing. And it's an ultra monetarist package of tax increases, spending cuts. Some Tory MPs actually walk out during Geoffrey Howe's speech. 364 economists sign a letter to the Times denouncing it as likely to lead to depression.

Milton Friedman and members of the IEA think she's bungling monetarism and making them all look bad. Plus, you've got the SDP has just launched and is taking centrist voters. People know the Social Democratic Party formed by the so-called Gang of Four. So Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen, and Bill Rogers, all ex-Labour, and they formed a new centrist party, right?

Things get worse during the summer, riot sweet Britain. She visits Liverpool, is pelted with tomatoes and toilet rolls, a good Scouse welcome. And even the Sun and the Times attack her for being uncaring. And she kind of is because...

To her, there is no social evil. There is only human wickedness. So she refuses to see a connection between the riots and unemployment or deprivation. She thinks, well, you just shouldn't riot. And the wets and the press and the left, everyone else is basically going. Well, yeah, but this is probably because of like rising unemployment.

and inner city decay and all that. And she goes, no, it's just because they're bad people doing bad things. I think this sense never quite goes away, even when later she becomes more popular than she is now. That sense of there's something terribly cruel about... all this, there's a lack of compassion here, is an uncertainty in the British public that stays hanging around her throughout her administration.

And the Tories are really worried. 23rd of July, 81, there's an awful cabinet meeting over this spending review when even the loyalists are getting cold feet. Lord Hailsham, who she had campaigned for back when she was at university, compares her to Herbert Hoover. the start of the Great Depression. Ian Gilmore says it points to the decline and fall of the Tory party, and there's a group of new MPs, the Blue Chips Group, including Chris Patton, William Waldergrave, and young John Major.

who are saying we should go back to consensus, otherwise the social fabric of Britain is going to rip. So there's a lot of opposition in the party. Her response is a reshuffle, she sacks most of the wets, brings in hardliners like Norman Tebbit, and he...

And I never really understood the significance of this quote. He said that during the Great Depression, his unemployed father didn't riot. He got on his bike and looked for work. Oh, and that's the quote. I mean, my thing is like, you keep talking about the Great Depression, but that's no excuse.

You know, again, it's constantly breaking this taboo about mass unemployment and the legacy of the depression. And it gets worse. In the autumn, the stock market falls to its lowest level since 1964. Interest rates are up. In one poll, the SDP Liberal Alliance, because they've joined forces here, is at more than 50%. In another poll, Thatcher's approval rating is just 23%, which is the lowest since polling began.

And you can't overstate how fucked she was at this point. The Guardian writes, a brief obituary of Thatcherism is now in order. And even Charles Moore, who is... all the way up her arse, I would say, having read his book, thinks that if Labour had chosen Tony Benn instead of Dennis Healy as a deputy leader, it was this super knife-edge vote. And it basically decided...

Because Michael Foot could sort of go either way. He was pretty left-wing, but well-liked across the party. Tony Benn, very divisive figure. If Tony Benn had won instead of Healy, then I think it had a flood of Labour votes going elsewhere. Right, right. So, and then the alliance would have won the election. That's what Charles Moore thinks. Interesting. Interesting. In January 1982, unemployment hits 3 million. The symbolic. Yeah.

the breaking of the taboo. You cannot survive three million. And then Argentina invades the Falkland Islands. Yes. Start your week from the bunker is your essential guide to the news you need to look out for in the week ahead. I'm Jacob Jarvis and this week I was joined by Gavin Esler. Gavin, what did we discuss?

Well, we discussed everything from Trump's major party in Washington, the birthday party, or sorry, I should say his great parade of not very many soldiers and not very many people watching it. We also discussed much more seriously the Minnesota shootings in which a number of politicians were attacked. Israel and Iran, of course. And we discussed the new person in charge of MI6 and therefore Britain's spies abroad. Not that we have any.

But if we did, she'd be in charge of it. Let's start your week from the bunker. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.

So the Falklands War, we can't, I mean, this could be a whole episode, right? So one interesting thing about it, it's a victory made possible by a catalogue of errors, because Thatcher just didn't really want to think about the Falkland Islands, because Argentina would be making these empty threats. For years, I mean, they've been coup after coup and hunter after hunter and so on. They all wanted the Falkland Islands back. It's this, you know, tiny British territory with 1,800 inhabitants.

And she just thought, oh, they're just going on about this again. So she doesn't support efforts to reach a settlement. There are quite a lot of... You know, there were efforts to try and kind of reach an arrangement where you hand it back to the Argentina, but you still allow the Brits to live there. Not least, because by the way...

It's really expensive. Britain doesn't really want it. Any kind of imperialist case you make against Britain doesn't work. It's just a very expensive pain in the arse. She wasn't really behind that idea, but then she was also endorsing defence cuts that gave the impression that the UK wouldn't. defend them. So it was a weak status quo that she thought could be preserved. Unfortunately, General Gautieri seizes control of the Hunter at the end of December 1981 and decides to go for it.

Forcing the Americans into the position of figuring out which of their right-wing extremists they most like. So the invasion goes ahead on the 2nd of April. Next day, Thatcher tells the Commons that she's going to send a task force to retake the Falklands. Now, in some respects, she wasn't alone at all. Michael Foote leading Labour back the task force on day one. No question. 83% of the public did. But...

At the actually going to war, because the task force was going to take weeks to get there, right? She was under a lot of pressure from the Reagan administration, her foreign secretary, Francis Pym, who was one of the dastardly wets. But Lord Carrington had resigned over the invasion, so she had to deal with Pym.

So there were a lot of people that wanted her to settle. And that was where she kind of bunkers down with the generals and basically runs the war herself, really without talking to the ministers. And if the war was lost and she was finished... Like when you consider the economic background. Oh, God, yeah. There's no way. Hugo Young says, here was a cause which, unlike the trade unions or the economy, exactly matched the simplicity of her temperament.

It's very good. It's very, very good indeed. It's entirely correct. Which seems harsh, but in a speech to the Scottish Tory conference, which the Scottish Secretary George Younger compared to a Nuremberg rally, she did actually say, when you spent half... your political life dealing with hundrum issues like the environment, it's exciting to have a real crisis on your hands. You know, and that's where, you know, I'm sort of torn. It's like, you shouldn't let fascist military dictators.

you know, invade territory, right? But she was enjoying it so much. And I've done quite a lot of study about protest songs of this era. And a lot of it was how she came across. It wasn't as much the war in itself was a bad idea. Like you said, Michael Foote supported it. It was the way that she seemed like too into it and that it was almost her survival was wrapped up in it. I suppose also you must be able to, you know, you look at...

He's not showing any of it right now, Keir Starmer, a new sense of mission and purpose on the basis of dealing with Ukraine stuff around Trump. But you see the advantageous polling impact that it has. Presumably, she was getting that on steroids. Just this moment of like, you know what?

I can turn all of this around with this new storyline, which is much more beneficial to me than the previous one, which was about to bury my entire career. So the 25th of April, the British recapture South Georgia, which is another smaller territory just off the Falklands. And she famously answers a reporter with the word. rejoice and she recalls one went from near despair to confident reassurance which is interesting that she was at near despair prior to that

Then you've got the sinking of the General Belgrano, the Argentine cruiser, and the HMS Sheffield, the British ship. And you get new calls for settlement. And Thatcher does actually agree to one. But then Galtieri gets off the hook by rejecting it.

Yes. I was always told that was a sort of tactical British genius. Like, we don't like it. But as long as we don't say that we don't like it, we'll just say, well, we want to hear what the Argentinians would say first. It could be that she did it knowing that the Argentinians would reject it. Then you've got the task force landing on the Falkland. Like I said, whole big story, whole other episode. War ends on the 15th of June. Argentina surrendering.

Death toll 255 British, 649 Argentines and three Islanders. And worth saying, just because we all know that Britain won, but that at the time... The expectation was that this was actually a very, very difficult thing to achieve. And it was sort of like a victory through the skin of your teeth, really. Now, it did wonders for Thatcher. As expected. On the first day of the war, Ipsos had Labour at 34 and the Tories 33.

By the end of the war, Labour 24, Tories 51. Fucking hell. And Molly Panther Downs in The New Yorker, who we always quote because she's worked for decades. She was last appeared in the Harold Lasky episode. Even those who dislike her in the normal... course of things regard her now with a sort of awe. I mean, absolutely transformative. Now, the problem is it convinces her of certain things, of this sense of sort of destiny.

the rightness of her instincts, the refusal of vice or compromise. It's like she did it her way and she prevails. Therefore, she is right about everything. And she literally draws up a list of goodies and baddies. Well, in the whole world. No, yeah, based on who supported her. Reagan, good. Mitterrand in France. David Owen of the SDP. General Pinochet of Chile. They were good because they supported her in the war. Baddies, the UN, the Pope, Ireland.

Dennis Healy and Francis Pym because they criticised her. The whole of Ireland. The BBC. Incredible. Oh, yeah, because Ireland was very against the war. And in fact, in her victory speech, she ties the war to her economics. She says, we have ceased to be a nation in retreat. We have instead a newfound confidence born in the economic battles at home and tested and found true 8,000 miles away. She goes into the 83 election.

it is a war. It's us against socialism. So just to wrap up, I know we normally say wrap up at the end of part two, but I thought it was really interesting about the first term.

It's like I kept thinking, as I'm sure you did, of Keir Starmer. 100%. Right? You know, because I thought, okay, she comes in, she says her economic inheritance was worse than expected. Recovery would take two terms, not one. She says things will get worse before they get better. Members of her own government go, we are asking people to make sacrifices without hope. You have to give people more of a ray of light.

You know, she's battling an insurgent third party that is doing surprisingly well in the polls. But the bit that really struck me was the interesting take from the US Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance. The government was well-placed to ride out the storm since it has a 43-seat majority and the Labour Party is in disarray. It really is quite uncanny. It's really, really weird. But it's not the same situation. What did you think? Was there anything that Starmer could learn from?

Look, it's not really a policy thing so much as... I think the central lesson is just chill the fuck out. In most political scenarios, we act like nothing like this has ever happened before. There is no doubt about the scenario that we're in. No one could possibly question. And in actual fact, what you see over and over...

is just like, no, things are really incredibly tenuous. We forget how tenuous and how changeable they were once they take place because that kind of like the molten wax solidifies in our memory of the storyline. You'll see the same later, by the way, during the real...

moments of Thatcherism, loads of the time. She's suffering in the polls. She's behind Labour. We now think of it as the triumph of the yuppies and she reigns supreme of a British politics. In fact, she had a much more difficult time than we think. Again and again. I mean, the only thing... I thought if I was Keir Starmer, which I find a bit dispiriting, was that she did have the US president on her side. Yes. And that was very, very helpful.

on the international stage. And she did have a divided opposition, but there was nobody to her right eating into the base. Whereas, of course, it does have that threat from... you know, the Greens and Lib Dems and Independents. So it's not quite the same, but that general message of like how absurd it is to predict in the first year, oh, well, if the election was held tomorrow...

It's like, well, the election won't be held tomorrow. You know? Yes, exactly. At one point, if the election took, Roy Jenkins would have been Prime Minister. It's like, well, it didn't happen. And people can be so sort of short-termist. It's always a very important thing to remember with polls, is a poll will tell you what will happen if the election is happening tomorrow. But if an election is not happening tomorrow, that is not the most useful data point for you to be looking at.

You know, Thatcher seemed to get more of a battering from all sides than I would say that even Starmer has had. Oh, 100%. Yeah. So that is where we're going to leave Thatcherism for this week. Thank you for listening to this episode of Origin Story. And you can see all our sources on the show notes and give us feedback.

via the Patreon page or on Blue Sky. If you become a patron, you'll get access to the book club where we talk about each of the subjects that we've looked at comes on at the end of the episode. And we slag off the books that we didn't like and we praise the ones that we did. I've got a feeling that Dorian's got some emotional trauma he needs to get over from that rather supportive book that he read before he goes on to the praise of the less supportive ones that he went through as well.

Also, you'll get each episode a week early. So right now, patrons have both episodes in their inbox. You can join them by signing up to support us today. It's good to be back, guys. It's good to talk to you again. We'll see you next week. Origin Story Season 7 was written and presented by Dorian Linsky and Ian Dunst. The producer was Simon Williams. Music was by Jay Bailey. And art was by James Parrott and Misha Welsh.

The group editor was Andrew Harrison and the executive producer was Martin Boitosh. Origin Story is a Podmasters production. every great business starts as a dream but turning that dream into reality that's where shopify comes in shopify is proud to power many sources of uk e-commerce from brands like mattel and gymshark to new entrepreneurs

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