Mrs T’s unfinished business

Soon after Margaret Thatcher was elected leader of the Conservative party she came for lunch at The Spectator and our then proprietor, Henry Keswick, wanted to offer his congratulations — and his advice. It was time to crush the trades unions, he told her. ‘Mr Keswick,’ she replied. ‘You have spent the past 14 years in Hong Kong, where such things may be doable. I have spent them in Britain, where things are very different.’ She was advocating a simple principle: practicality comes before ideology. The only point in fighting battles is to win them.

Her victories were so decisive and spectacular that it is possible — as we have seen in the last few days — to dwell almost entirely on them (and those who didn’t like them). But another part of the Thatcher story is the battles she regarded as unwinn-able. She knew, for example, that the welfare state had started to ensnare the very people it was designed to help, that the National Health Service was being slowly captured by a bureaucratic elite, and that state schools were being made into the playthings of local government politicians. But there was only so much she felt able to do.

She had the solution. It was 1981 when Mrs Thatcher first came up with what she referred to as ‘education credits’ — now known as the Michael Gove agenda for school reform. Her mentor, Sir Keith Joseph, was put in charge of the project but faced uniform hostility from his department. His only reinforcement was a son of one of his friends, a young Cambridge graduate named Oliver Letwin. The two of them were blocked by their civil servants, failed to articulate a clear agenda, and reform was formally abandoned in 1983.