Her deep understanding of middle- and working-class social aspiration, revolutionary in the placidly entitled world of Conservative Party politics, is what kept her in power for so long, and is also her greatest legacy. She figured out that the labor movement, conservatism’s traditional radical foe, had itself become conservative: it wanted too many things to stay the same. Arthur Scargill, the militant leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, said that his members’ strike was taken in defense of the right of their sons and grandsons to go down the mine. Almost two decades earlier, Mrs. Thatcher, then a young M.P., had said that if she were “given a choice” she would not send her son down a pit. It was perilous and unhealthy: in 1967, three miners were killed a week. The important word there is “choice,” something exercised, in 1993, by the same Arthur Scargill, when he tried to buy a London council flat (the equivalent of public housing), under a right-to-buy policy that Mrs. Thatcher pioneered in the early nineteen-eighties.

There is an unavoidable sense of strategic efficiency about her domestic life. Margaret Roberts was twenty-three when she met Denis Thatcher, and she reported back to her sister thus: “Major Thatcher, who has a flat in London (age about 36, plenty of money) was also dining and he drove me back to town at midnight. As one would expect he is a perfect gentleman. Not a very attractive creature—very reserved but quite nice.” With admirable evolutionary shrewdness, the right mate was being selected: Margaret’s husband, who had means from the family paint-and-preservatives business he managed, would prove to be impressively supportive, and canny at backing out of the limelight. Friends said that it was a solid marriage but no great love affair. “She was pleased to have twins, but more because it meant that she need not get pregnant again than because of a wild enthusiasm for motherhood” is Moore’s dry comment. Not that Denis compensated with any wild enthusiasm for fatherhood. “I just wished the little buggers had been drowned at birth,” he said years later, when asked about his children. He was watching cricket at the Oval when they were born. Mark and Carol were dispatched to boarding schools at the ages of eight and nine, respectively, and Margaret Thatcher entered Parliament, in 1959, as a Conservative M.P. for the North London constituency of Finchley. Her steady rise to power had begun.

Thatcher’s singular mission was political. Such single-mindedness, which is hoarded eccentricity, is easy to dislike—it so isn’t like us. Yet one can only marvel at the determination and the fortitude needed to surmount the slights and obstacles of that time. Nearly every normal habit of life—engaged parenthood, sibling loyalty, marital intimacy, deep friendship, ordinary social intercourse—gave way to the achievement of that one thing. Denis Healey, a brilliant Labour politician of Thatcher’s generation, thought that politicians needed to have a “hinterland”; he said that he had always been as interested in music, poetry, and painting as he was in politics. The English idea of the nonchalant gentleman-amateur—Harold Macmillan calmly reading Jane Austen, and so on—had always presupposed such hinterlands. You had one foot in Downing Street and the other in your country-house library. It was a tradition of male affluence, to be sure, and Thatcher might well have felt that she couldn’t let her guard down. Or perhaps she just had no hinterland. And no innerland, either: in all of Moore’s thousands of pages, there is not the slightest stirring of interiority. What Margaret Thatcher felt privately about God, or death, or a beautiful phrase of music, or love, or sex, or a sad movie, or the great blessings of having children, or the beauties of foreign cities, or the anguish of suffering, is not recorded. Her soul was shuttered.

But how hard she worked at that one thing, and with what steely ministration! Moore provides an example from the beginning of her career. Junior members of Parliament are encouraged to propose their own bills; the gesture announces a freshman’s seriousness of intention. The young Thatcher found a subject—she devised a bill that would force Labour councils to open up their proceedings to the public (including newspapers involved in labor disputes). But she identified an impediment to its passage. On Fridays, when such bills were debated, M.P.s were often absent. Thatcher wrote individually to two hundred and fifty of her Conservative colleagues—“I have always believed in the impact of a personal, handwritten letter”—asking them to stay in Westminster; her private-member’s bill was carried by an overwhelming margin. About a decade later, in the early seventies, she joined Prime Minister Edward Heath’s Cabinet as Education Secretary. When Heath lost the general election of 1974, she made a bid for leader of the Conservative Party, and won, in February, 1975. Just over four years after that, she became, as Moore says, “the first elected woman leader in the Western world.”

Colleagues were astounded at how thoroughly she could master briefing material. She needed little sleep, and worked late into the night. In 1984, when the I.R.A. bombed the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where the Prime Minister was staying for the annual Conservative Party Conference, she was polishing her keynote speech at the moment her suite’s bathroom exploded, at 2:50 a.m. On a twenty-four-hour flight from Hong Kong to Washington, D.C., in a government jet equipped with a bed, she told Robin Butler that, while he could go to sleep, she was going to stay awake for the entire journey while she studied the intricacies of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. She intently marked up everything that came her way, blitzing her colleagues’ internal memos and policy proposals with double and triple underlinings, groaning castigations, and flat prohibitions: “No,” “Very disappointing & sketchy,” “This is awful.” Vacations provoked something like bewildered impatience; in his long chronicle, Moore eventually flourishes a droll shorthand for these recurrent challenges: “For her customary but always unwelcome summer holidays, Mrs. Thatcher . . . ”

Indeed, what emerges from these impeccably researched, coolly absorbing volumes are two Margaret Thatchers, whom we might call the scientist and the atavist. For the scientist Thatcher, the chemist who had studied with Dorothy Hodgkin at university, knowledge existed to be mastered, made use of, leveraged. This Thatcher had read Friedrich von Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom” at Oxford, and at opportune moments would pull his “Constitution of Liberty” out of her handbag. Christmas of 1975 found her doggedly continuing her anti-communist “holiday reading”: “The Possessed” and “Darkness at Noon.” This Thatcher was genuinely interested in whether Mikhail Gorbachev could reform Soviet Communism; she coaxed and encouraged him before any other Western leader dared to, and engaged him in passionate, freewheeling colloquies. (Their first lasted six hours.) She convened what were essentially academic seminars on the Soviet Union at Chequers, the Prime Minister’s country residence (with guests such as the British historians Robert Conquest and Hugh Thomas and the Columbia University scholar Seweryn Bialer).

The scientist surrounded herself with intelligent men (Nigel Lawson, Geoffrey Howe, Keith Joseph, Douglas Hurd), and approached Britain’s manifold woes at the start of the nineteen-eighties with an unsentimental willingness to push experiment to the edge of cruelty. Britain was teetering: the figures still astonish. Interest rates in 1979 reached seventeen per cent and inflation a staggering eighteen per cent. Nationalized industries were sluggish and fabulously costly to the taxpayer. British Leyland, the automotive conglomerate that included Jaguar, Triumph, and Austin Rover, was producing comically dreadful cars and had consumed about two hundred million pounds a year in government subsidies. Many of these companies approached customer satisfaction like the proprietor in the Monty Python cheese-shop sketch: “Normally, sir, yes, but today the van broke down.” Moore, in one of his footnotes, remembers trying to get a phone installed in 1981, and being told by British Telecom that it would take six months, owing to a “shortage of numbers.” As Howe, Thatcher’s first Chancellor of the Exchequer, noted in his budget speech of June, 1979, Britain’s share of world trade in 1954 had been equal to that of France and Germany combined. Now the French and German share was three times bigger than Britain’s.

“It’s good, but not forty-five-minute-wait good.” Facebook

Twitter

Email

Shopping Cartoon by Brian Hawes and Seth Roberts

Controlling expenditure and the money supply was part hypothesis (Thatcher’s fabled monetarism, which she got from Milton Friedman) and part common sense: uncontrolled inflation, like religion, poisons everything. A system that was increasing miners’ pay by nearly ten per cent a year was clearly unsustainable. Since many of the major industries (including railways, coal, telecommunications, and a good chunk of automobile production) were nationalized, the government was effectively acting as a giant employer. But since many weren’t profitable, it was also acting as a giant bank. The country had apparently wandered into the worst of two worlds: nationalization of the means of production (largely achieved by Clement Attlee’s postwar Labour government) could offer no magical respite from the market—which had decided, for instance, that it didn’t want badly made British cars—and so it simply insured that capitalism was being done poorly. As a remedy, Thatcher and her ministers embarked on a campaign of privatization, releasing British Gas, British Airways, British Telecom, BP, and British Leyland from government control.

Government subvention had fended off the ravages of capitalism in one important way: it had provided steady employment. Now the country’s unemployment rate rose; it hit a high of thirteen per cent in 1984, and was still seven per cent in 1990, the year of Thatcher’s ouster. Thatcher’s calculation was that widespread unemployment was an unavoidable fact of economic reform, that certain jobs would have to be the mulch that went into the revival of the general economic habitat. Apart from the profound human misery that resulted, there was an enduring political cost—much of Scotland, Wales, and the North of England remains lost to Conservatives. This was the Thatcher who maintained that there was “no such thing as society,” only individuals, “and people must look to themselves first,” a statement that Moore attempts, with little luck, to wrestle from its infamy. That unequal society tended toward ugly extremes, with great new impoverishment and great new enrichment. Still, the new order created undeniable economic expansion (an average G.D.P. growth rate of 3.2 per cent in the nineteen-eighties), and Thatcher was reëlected in 1983 and 1987, the first Prime Minister after universal suffrage, Moore notes, to win three elections.