Margaret Thatcher’s most surprising virtue: imagination

In almost every one of the many biographies of Margaret Thatcher that now exist, the story is told of her being congratulated for her good luck in winning a prize when she was nine — either for reciting poetry or for playing the piano. She indignantly replied, ‘I wasn’t lucky. I deserved it.’ Now, in Charles Moore’s biography, we reach the splendid zenith of Mrs Thatcher’s career in the form of her second administration of 1983–7. We have to ask the question again: was she lucky, or did she deserve it?

Clearly, one of the chief reasons that she was re-elected in 1983 after a period of staggering unpopularity was the Falklands triumph of 1982, with which Moore concluded his first volume. That wasn’t luck, at least in the sense that it happened at all; any other politician in Thatcher’s position would almost certainly have sued for peace. But the scale of the war, and its moral clarity, were no doubt helpful.

And on the domestic side, Thatcher was certainly lucky in her opponents. Arthur Scargill, the architect of one of the principal challenges of her second term in the form of the longest miners’ strike of the period, ultimately made things easier for her by his behaviour. She was fortunate, too, in the leaders of the opposition she faced. Michael Foot was so unelectable that he could safely be treated with elaborate courtesy. Neil Kinnock, handed the one parliamentary opportunity of the decade to eject her from office on grounds of improper behaviour over the Westland affair, made a mess of it. Had she been less competent, it would have made no difference. To that degree she
was lucky.

But, reading the detail of this superb and utterly absorbing volume, it is clear that luck really had very little to do with it, and the most compelling episodes of her administration were created by her, and carried out at her insistence.