The Last Retreat of Fame: Mrs Thatcher as History
| Date | 01 July 1991 |
| Author | Peter Hennessy |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1991.tb00901.x |
| Published date | 01 July 1991 |
The
Last Retreat
of
Fame: Mrs Thatcher as History
Peter
Hennessy
*
Names which hoped
to
range over kingdoms and continents shrink at last into cloisters and
colleges. Nor
is
it
ccrtain that even
of
these dark and narrow habitations, these last retreats
of
fame, the possession will long be kept.’
Time, even a short span of it, can be very cruel to the once-mesmeric. Margaret
Thatcher, like David Lloyd George (the twentieth century premier to whom she
is most comparable), seemed to pass almost
in
a trice from titanic colossus to the
‘Where are They Now?’ column. Come with me to the House of Commons on
Tuesday
19
March
1991
-
Budget Day
-
the first for
11
years not to bear the
imprint
of
the most celebrated cornershop
in
economic history (surely her father,
Alderman Roberts of Grantham, had more influence on her thought than Friedman
or Hayek?).
There she sat,
fie
Economist’s
‘Bagehot’ noted, ‘a few rows behind Mr Lamont’s
right shoulder, clad
in
puritan black and muttering a running commentary on his
speech.
It
was not complimentary. Hardly surprising really: the budget, with its
return to deficits and its U-turns on the
poll
tax, child benefit and higher-rate mortgage
tax relief, was described by one senior Treasury person as “the end of Thatcherism”.
After it, she hurried away, looking dismayed and confL1sed.’z
And how this paragraph of Alan Watkins’ a few weeks later must have hurt
(if
she read it), a woman who liked to say she had ‘changed everything’: ‘Large claims
were made for Mrs Margaret Thatcher as a great Prime Minister: but they are melting
before our eyes like the snows of spring. My prediction is that history will judge
her as just above average, below
C.R.
Attlee and H.H. Asquith, who has better
claims than she to being a great peacetime Prime Minister, but above Harold
Macmillan and Harold Wilson.
’3
Such instant revisionism, the Ozymandias syndrome of reducing the once-mighty
to
a
pair of decaying pillars of stone in the pitiless desert, is,
I
think, as misguided
as those who placed her on a permanent, weatherproof plinth
in
the years of her
ascendancy and as those who thought the Department of Education and Science
in
the early
1970s
would be the pinnacle of her career.
Mind you, the early detractors can be more easily forgiven. If in, say, early
1973
you had taken the most sophisticated political observer on one side and afforded
him
or her the following insights as ‘givens’
in
the future:
(a) that Edward Heath would be deposed from the Conservative Leadership within
(b)
that his successor would be Prime Minister
in
another four and that eleven
two years;
*Visiting Professor
of
Government, University
of
Strathclyde.
I
an1 grateful
to
the History Society
of
Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and
to
Janet Kim and the organisers of
thc
Undergraduate Lecture Program at Georgetown University, Washington, for the opportunity
to
undertake
dry-runs
of
this paper on
18
October and
27
November
1990.
I
2
3
Saniuel Johnson. Quoted in Jonathan Steinberg,
A//
or
Norking
(Routledge,
1990,
p xv).
Bagchot, ‘June’s budgct,
in
March.’
7Vw
Ecottotttisf
(23
March
1991).
Alan Watkins, ‘Political Diary,’ ‘Our Prime Ministers have been a funny
lot,’
771e
Observer
(7
April
1991).
492
Tltc
Modcrtt
1.m~
Hevicw
54:4
July
1991
0026-7961
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