
Sunday, June 30, 2013
Margaret Thatcher
I have been reading Charles Moore’s biography of Margaret Thatcher, or at least the first volume which will take us up to the Falklands War. I am not much of a political person, enough to get through The New York Times every day, and read Truthout often but not always, as well as articles that deal with politics in such publications as The New Yorker Magazine. I somehow feel that whatever happens is way beyond me. I am also not very good at understanding economics, having never studied the subject formally at university. Since public life is nothing but theories of economics clashing with one another I am very sorry for this, although on another level, I can’t bear to think about the subject even as vague as it is for me. Moore’s biography requires a great deal of understanding of economics, macroeconomics, monetarism, supply side, finance, and on and on. The exciting feature of this biography is its detailed exposition of the day to day confrontation with the issues of governing that make up the life of a Prime Minister. Fascinating! I marvel that Mrs. Thatcher, trained as a scientist, mastered economics sufficiently to hold her own in discussion with the experts and her ministers. Perhaps I am misled, but I am struck with how even handed Moore seems to be in presenting the Prime Minister. His range of quotation from those who observed her and worked with her is extraordinary and one is left with a very detailed picture of the situation in which she found herself, her challenges, her ideas, her blunders, her successes. On one level she comes across most definitely as a shopkeeper’s daughter with a strong sense of propriety, an unwillingness to move outside and beyond the culture in which she was raised. She is always the outsider among the Tory party’s aristocrats, she has an instinctive empathy with lower middle class people and their aspirations. She was raised as a Methodist; she was not an intellectual, so she did not stray far from the strictures and structures of her religion and her childhood home. Her strength and her failing was that she thought that there was an answer and that she had it, coupled with a housewife’s concern to make things neat and tidy. Economists say there has to be a trade-off between equality and efficiency; she clearly voted for the latter, and enraged the public who cared first and foremost about the quality of citizens‘ lives. She was tough and strong, but then again vacillating, and sometimes wildly emotional. She drove her associates crazy, but there were legions of them who admired her immensely. One doesn’t get the sense of a lot of love, but there is no question about her devotion, her sense of duty. She took refuge in her ideologies, but could be argued out of a position. She loved to dance, she loved clothes. The story of this particular Prime Minister that Moore has to tell is fascinating, this lower middle class small town girl landing, good looking woman that she was, landing into the midst of a group of males whose education at single sex English boarding schools made her a monstre sacré whether she had that in mind or no.
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