Margaret thatcher

Tuesday

Charles Moore

Thatcher wanted to privatise Channel 4

It is always amusing to hear the left selectively invoking Margaret Thatcher. This week, they are doing so to prevent the privatisation of Channel 4, citing the fact that she brought the channel into being. She did, in 1982; but in her memoirs, she explains that by 1988, when she was striving for the phasing out of the BBC television licence fee, she decided that Channel 4 would be better off privatised. On both subjects, she was defeated by what she calls ‘the monopolistic grip of the broadcasting establishment’. That grip is scarcely looser today.

Thursday

Charles Moore

What would have happened in the Falklands if Thatcher had been a man?

Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands 40 years ago. I had joined the Daily Telegraph as a reporter in 1979 and was by then a leader writer. The Falklands was the first really seismic story I had encountered. What made it so exciting was that it was both genuinely absurd and genuinely important. The absurdity lay in Argentina’s vainglory. It violently claimed a right to the islands which not one single Falklands resident accepted. Its caudillo, General Galtieri, was from the comic-opera school of Latin American dictators, covered with gold braid and frequently drunk. In his invasion broadcast, he invoked the Virgin Mary. But Our Lady wisely ducked the contest, leaving

Wednesday

Charles Moore

What would Thatcher have said about Putin?

When Sir Tony Brenton writes a letter to the Times, as he frequently does, it always says at the bottom that he was British ambassador to Moscow. The uninformed reader could be forgiven for thinking the sub-editors have got it back to front and he was actually the Russian ambassador to London. Sir Tony’s message in every letter is ‘It’s all Britain’s fault’. In his latest, his particular target was the Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss, after her visit to Moscow. He said she ‘might usefully recall Margaret Thatcher’s wise message to Mikhail Gorbachev sent in 1985 as perestroika began to take off: “We know that you have as much right to

Thursday

Allan Mallinson

What I really said to Gordon Brown: Field Marshal Lord Guthrie sets the record straight

A headline in the Mail on Sunday, taken up eagerly by the BBC’s Today programme, claimed recently: ‘The SAS is getting worried that not enough posh officers are applying for jobs.’ Having hooked those shocked by the thought that the SAS should draw such distinctions, as well as those appalled that oiks are applying at all, the piece actually went on to explain that one officer failed the selection because he ‘lacked the sophistication’ to be able to brief cabinet ministers on operations. No lack of sophistication ever attached to Charles Guthrie. When, as head of school at Harrow, you’ve had tea with Winston Churchill in the headmaster’s study, planned

Thursday

Chloë Ashby

Wrapped up in satire, a serious lesson about the fine line between success and scandal

Have you heard of champing? Neither had I. Turns out it’s camping in a field beside a deserted church. When it rains, you abandon your flimsy tent and instead bed down in the hushed aisles. At the beginning of Ferdinand Mount’s new novel, Making Nice, Dickie Pentecost and his wife Jane, together with their daughters Flo and Lucy, are doing just that. In the morning they meet fellow champer Ethel, short for Ethelbert, a bewitching man with stony eyes and sticking-up hair. ‘Ethel,’ says Dickie. ‘I suppose they could have shortened it to Bert instead.’ After losing his job as the diplomatic editor of a national newspaper (‘Who needs diplomatic

Thursday

Philip Hensher

A dutiful exercise carried out in a rush

Like department stores, empires and encyclopaedias, the multi-volume narrative national history is an invention of the later 18th century. It reaches its apogee, promising to bring everything important within a single enclosure, in the 19th and early 20th century. After that, ambitious examples appear to be fighting against a general lack of enthusiasm. Most of these works are little read now, from David Hume’s 1750s The History of England all the way through to Winston Churchill’s idiosyncratic A History of the English-Speaking Peoples in the 1950s. The grand sweep has a tendency to define the significant in advance. Many of these histories can explain a sequence of legislation, such as

Thursday

Charles Moore

Margaret Thatcher vs everyone else: the making of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement

Diplomatic negotiations are rarely fully described by their participants in books, for two reasons. They are usually secret until much later, and their intricacies can be boring. Politicians often include brief accounts in their memoirs, but these seldom reveal much about the process as a whole because, as I discovered by interviewing scores of them for my biography of Margaret Thatcher, they cannot avoid focussing almost exclusivelyon what they did and said (or think they did and said). This book, however, overcomes the secrecy rule, because it is published nearly 40 years after the events described; and it overcomes the boredom problem because of the literary skill and intellectual grasp

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

This play is a wonder: Bach & Sons at the Bridge Theatre reviewed

Bach & Sons opens with the great composer tinkling away on a harpsichord while a toddler screeches his head off in the nursery. The script becomes a broader portrait of a richly creative and competitive family where everyone is bright, loud, witty, inventive, good-natured and affectionate. Bach teaches the elements of composition to his gifted sons. ‘Rules provoke expression. They challenge your ingenuity.’ And the audience is unobtrusively schooled in the elements of counterpoint by four actors singing ‘Frère Jacques’. Bach considers Carl’s work good but workmanlike. Wilhelm is better, a wayward, inspired and anarchic talent. When Carl hears this verdict he falls into a jealous rage but it doesn’t

Thursday

Matthew Parris

My voyage back through the landmarks of my life

I was looking forward to my dinner at Daquise in South Kensington, a Polish restaurant that’s been there for ever yet feels curiously up-to-date; but that wasn’t until 7.30. I’d finished my afternoon’s work, I’d brought in the washing and written two thank-you cards, and it was still only five o’clock. I hate hanging around. By Tube to South Ken is only half an hour — so what to do? ‘Why not go the long way, on foot and by river?’ I thought. My flat is by the Thames in east London, so I could walk along the river to the Canary Wharf jetty and hope for a river bus

Thursday

Julie Burchill

Confessions of a lifelong bitch

As I watched the Duchess of Sussex give her extended acceptance speech for Best Performance As A Victim — played as a cross between Bambi and Beth from Little Women — my overwhelming feeling was of disappointment. Readers may recall that I once wrote long and loopy love letters to her in this very magazine, embarrassing in their unctuousness — ‘Meghan Markle has rescued her prince!’ — but I went off her when her bid for secular sainthood started. The allegations of tiara tantrums brought me fresh hope. Could it be that behind that innocent face, all damp eyes and trembling lips, lurked a superannuated Mean Girl? She’d have made

Sunday

Patrick O’Flynn

The greatest threat to Boris’s legacy

The government is starting to have an opinion poll problem, but it has nothing to do with any great threat from Keir Starmer or the Labour party. While the Tory ratings have gone from high to low 40s and Boris Johnson is not as extraordinarily popular as he was in January last year before the advent of the first dry cough of coronavirus, that’s not the issue of concern at all. On the contrary, the problem is that the Prime Minister may be getting addicted to favourable ratings and increasingly unwilling to put them in jeopardy by taking difficult or unpopular decisions. The latest evidence for this view came in

Thursday

David Kynaston

Social mobility has become a meaningless mantra

‘Whatever your background,’ Margaret Thatcher told the Sun’s readers in 1983, she was determined that ‘you have a chance to climb to the top’. So, too, Tony Blair in 2004 (‘I want to see social mobility a dominant factor of British life’), David Cameron in 2015 (‘Britain has the lowest social mobility in the developed world — we cannot accept that’) and Theresa May in 2016 (‘I want Britain to be a place where advantage is based on merit not privilege’). Put another way, for the best part of four decades equality of outcome was largely on the back burner; equality of opportunity was, at least in theory, the name

Thursday

Charles Moore

My memories of Sir David Barclay

Even with its 27 amendments, the US Constitution is only 7,591 words. I keep it beside me, and find in it — as Sir Walter Elliot found in the Baronetage — ‘occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one’. The final part of Section 3 of Article 1 is relevant in this distressed week: ‘Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to Removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of Honor, Trust or Profit under the United States.’ To use, after Donald Trump’s departure, a device designed to remove a president seems strange. Surely there are two important things to

Thursday

Lara King

The politics of handbags

‘Of course, I am obstinate in defending our liberties and our law — that is why I carry a big handbag,’ Margaret Thatcher once told an interviewer. That handbag was part of the Iron Lady’s suit of armour; a fashion accoutrement turned into a political prop. But an accessory that became instantly recognisable on the outside held secrets on the inside. Thatcher referred to it as the only ‘leak-proof’ place in Downing Street, and it was a bag of tricks from which she might conjure pertinent quotes from Abraham Lincoln or Friedrich Hayek, or a crumpled brief from a mysterious source. Norman Tebbit said the art of being a successful

Sunday

Bruce Anderson

What if Thatcher won the 1990 leadership challenge?

Thirty years ago today, Margaret Thatcher was in 10 Downing Street. For almost eleven and a half years, it had been her home and her headquarters. There, she had planned the campaigns which transformed her country, and earned her the right to be ranked with Churchill. He, the greatest war leader: she, the greatest domestic one. But on 23 November 1990, everything was different. The previous day, she had resigned the Leadership of her party. Although she would still be Prime Minister for a few days, until the Tories had chosen a replacement, her principal task in that vestigial interlude was to pack up her possessions and prepare to move

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s proud history of standing up for Hong Kong

This week in 1989, the Chinese authorities massacred protestors in Tiananmen Square, Beijing. I was editing this paper. It struck me that the people of Hong Kong would suffer huge collateral damage. The Spectator should campaign for them, I thought, and draw attention to the dangers of trusting China to honour the 1984 Sino-British Agreement which Mrs Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping had made to provide for the handover to China in 1997. So we turned the leading article into a two-page affair (a thing unheard-of) and devoted the whole cover to a drawing by Nick Garland of Britannia and the British lion, both kowtowing. The headline was ‘Our Betrayal of

Saturday

The Spectator

How much are people eating during lockdown?

People power Boris Johnson said that the reaction to the coronavirus crisis showed ‘There really is such a thing as society’ — an apparent reference to an interview Mrs Thatcher gave to Woman’s Own in 1987. A reminder of what she actually said: ‘I think we have gone through a period when too many people have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the government’s job to cope with it!”… and so they are casting their problems on society, and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people,

Wednesday

Matthew Parris

Labour’s failure isn’t necessarily the Tories’ success

A moment arrives when one does just have to admit defeat. We shall leave the European Union and there isn’t a lot of point going on about it any more. I’m still sure it’s a mistake, but there we are. In a democracy the majority is entitled to make a mistake, just as the minority is entitled to say so. I say so. I’d hoped we could change people’s minds but we haven’t, so enough from me on that. A general election is a different matter. Here too, of course, the majority is entitled to make a mistake, but resistance remains possible and legitimate because there’s always the opportunity at the

Thursday

Taki

My friend Margaret Thatcher

By the time you read this it will all be over, but will it? I’ve had a bad feeling all along about those who opposed the result of the 2016 referendum. When they don’t get what they want, they play dirty — just look what they did to Lady T 29 years or so ago. And speaking of the greatest prime minister ever, Charles Moore’s biography of Maggie, a magnificent achievement, has left me open-mouthed at his scholarship and ability to write 3,000 pages in such a relatively short time. It should be required reading in schools, but that, in turn, would require students to be able to read and

Thursday

Bruce Anderson

Politics of a certain vintage – and wine to match

I wonder how they do things now at Tory headquarters. For the ’79 election, the preparations had been completed weeks in advance. Press conferences had been planned on the basis of a four-week campaign, press releases drafted and shadow ministers told when they would be needed in London to go on the platform. Then the starting gun was fired and von Moltke kicked in. No plan survives the initial contact with the enemy. Some of the material was used, but not in the order that had been expected. There was a lot of improvisation. But it did not seem to matter. Something similar happened in 1992. The first press conference