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Thursday, 11 April 2013 |
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Margaret Hilda Thatcher who died as Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven on Monday morning at the age of eighty seven was better known as the Iron Lady. Though this tag would come later, she lived up to it when she started life at 10, Downing Street, quoting St. Francis of Assisi. “Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.” Homespun philosophyIn the years that lay ahead, her name would come to be associated with free-market economists like Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman. But political analysts realized that her guiding philosophy was really more homespun. “Some say I preach merely the homilies of housekeeping or the parables of the parlour,” Mrs. Thatcher said, in a 1982 speech at a banquet in London. “But I do not repent. Those parables would have saved many a financier from failure and many a country from crisis.” The down-to-earth philosophy that guided her was undoubtedly inherited from her father, a shop-owner by the time she was born, and her mother, who was a sempstress before marriage. Both of them believed in hard work, thrift, and balancing the books. In Margaret Thatcher's own words, as recorded in her autobiography ‘The Path to Power’, she came from a working class family.“Four generations of the Roberts family had been shoemakers in Northamptonshire, at that time a great centre of the shoe industry. My father, who had wanted to be a teacher, had to leave school at thirteen because the family could not afford for him to stay on. He went instead to work at Oundle, one of the better public (i.e. private) schools. Years later, when I was answering questions in the House of Commons, Eric Heffer, a left-wing Labour MP and regular sparring partner of mine, tried to pull working-class rank by mentioning that his father had been a carpenter at Oundle. He was floored when I was able to retort that mine had worked in the tuck shop there.” She goes on to say “family tradition has it that I was a very quiet baby, which my political opponents might have some difficulty in believing.” Not only her political opponents but her staff and the rest of the world as well. Brisk and argumentative, she was rarely willing to concede a point. Colleagues who disagreed with her were often deluged in a sea of facts, or what many referred to as being “handbagged.” Courage and determinationShe could push and bully her colleagues and show them that she could do more work on less sleep than any of them. According to her onetime press secretary, Bernard Ingham, “she was absolutely determined to demonstrate that she could beat the men. She worked very late, and had this disconcerting habit at midnight of saying, ‘Oh, you do look very tired, go to bed,’ and one o’clock came, and she’d say, ‘Got your second wind?’ Ingham further adds, “She was absolutely incapable of realizing how humiliating it was for a man to be hammered by her in the presence of other men. She just didn’t get it … ”
No wonder the White House's statement after her death held the following lines: “As a grocer’s daughter who rose to become Britain’s first female prime minister, she stands as an example to our daughters that there is no glass ceiling that can’t be shattered.” Yet, was Margaret Thatcher a feminist icon? Can her story be narrated simply in terms of gender and power? Probably not. Though she was the first woman to lead a major political party in the West, she rubbed many feminists the wrong way. “The battle for women’s rights has largely been won,” she declared. “I hate those strident tones we hear from some women’s libbers.” She saw feminism as poison and advised “You don’t follow the crowd. You make up your own mind.” Feminist traitsYet, she had the traits of a feminist. She was a warrior and a workaholic. Throughout her career she resolutely demonstrated a strong wish to be in total control. She definitely did not have the temperament of the stay- at- home- housewife. After she left no 10, Downing Street she said “Home is where you come to when you have nothing better to do.” Changeless, ageless, tireless - these words were frequently applied to the lady whom former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, defined as “the best man in Europe”. Further complicating any analysis of her magnetism, Ronald Millar, a playwright and speechwriter for the prime minister says “Margaret Thatcher evoked extreme feelings. To some she could do no right, to others no wrong. Indifference was not an option. She could stir almost physical hostility in normally rational people, while she inspired deathless devotion in others.”The best insight into her personality is revealed in a conversation she has with Roy Plomley on a BBC radio show called Desert Island Discs in which she appeared as a guest in 1978. As Lauren Collins writes in the New Yorker, here she is, as she really was. ROY PLOMLEY:
Now, Mrs. Thatcher, how important to you is music? THATCHER: It’s what I go to when I want to take refuge in something completely different, when I want to go from the very logical life that I’ve lived, and I’ve always been trained to live, really to a different depth of experience. PLOMLEY:You play the piano, don’t you? THATCHER: Yes, but I don’t play any longer. I didn’t get time enough to practice, and I couldn’t bear hearing myself play badly. Or, what happens to you, after a time, is you never learn anything new. You go on playing the things which you learned as a young person and never learn anything new, so I’m afraid I just don’t play at all now. One day, when I’ve retired, I’ll take it up again. PLOMLEY:Now, as a schoolgirl, what were your ambitions? Why had you set your sights on going up to Oxford? THATCHER: I had some very strange ambitions. In my church life, I remember missionaries coming and talking to us about their experience. And I remember that, in the early days, I wanted to go into the, it existed then, the Indian civil service, because there was a tremendous desire to serve. And I knew that to do that, you had to go to university. “But quite apart from that, you know the opportunity to go to university was, to us, almost a challenge undreamed of. My father had never done it. And I was lucky I was quite good at school, and so it was assumed that I would try to go to university. The subject was clearly marked out for me, and so it just seemed perfectly natural. And what was Oxford or Cambridge were, to me, worlds that I’d heard about, and it’s always a good thing to aim for the top. And I did.” She sure did.
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She
was a grocer’s daughter who reached the high echelons of power as the
first female prime minister of Britain. She led her Conservative Party
to three straight election wins and held office for 11 years, (from May
1979 to November 1990) longer than any other British politician in the
20th century. She went to war with Argentina. She helped guide the
United States and the Soviet Union through the cold war’s difficult last
years. She once advised George W. Bush that it would be unwise of him
not to go to war with Iraq. “Remember, George,” she is said to have told
him, “this is no time to go wobbly.” At one meeting she slammed down the
famous black handbag she carried everywhere on a table and snapped,”I
haven’t much time today, only enough time to explode and have my way.”
