The Iron Lady
Young, Hugo
M rs. Thatcher could have done a lot worse than Hugo Young if she herself had gone trolling for a biographer in the polluted waters of the British intelligentsia. He really does make an effort to be...
...Happily, the cliched "you are there" atmospherics from someone who obviously wasn't there—the_ sun-drenched quadrangles, the clatter of marching troops—and the historical banalities are dropped as a bad idea once he gets on with the part of his story where he really was there: his subject's astonishing rise to dominance of the British political scene...
...Above all, any suggestion that social problems have anything to do with individual moral responsibility really makes this writer cross...
...C o much for the good stuff about 1.3 this book...
...Moreover, in spite of a leftish bias to which I shall return presently, Young is the sort of contemporary historian who must agonize over whether or not he should put the word "peace," as in "peace movement," in quotation marks—but who puts it in quotation marks...
...In particular, his account of the Westland affair, which almost, and almost incomprehensibly, brought about the primeminister's downfall, is exemplary...
...Hugo Young has given us Mrs...
...And Mrs...
...Thatcher in spite of himself...
...Sun-drenched quadrangles and lazy days on the river formed a smaller part of the undergraduate experience than fire-watching and the clatter of marching troops...
...Francis (which he inevitably informs us is in fact from the nineteenth century) ready to read off a card...
...What he is really saying is that his mental picture of her anti-Communism had been such a caricature that her willingness to deal with Gorbachev forced him into revising it—only he projected the change in himself onto her...
...Not to recognize this is the more to be regretted in one whose principal charge against Mrs...
...He has so often heard it said that she is the product of a small, narrow-minded, moralistic background and that she needed to cling to simple verities, like monetarism—and then has so often said it himself—that he can't see her in any other way...
...In the pre-Tiananmen Square perspective, he censures her for her initial reluctance to "give in" to Chinese demands for return of the colony...
...For, besides his biases, another factor working to limit his understanding is frequent preference for a more journalistic than historical point of view...
...To Young, however, "she seemed [that word again!] to place herself behind the very doctrine which previously she had challenged...
...Hers is that of small-town provincial, shop-keeping, Methodist, lower-middle class municipal worthies and his is that of the upper-middle class business, professional, and intellectual community which habitually sneers at such people...
...Thatcher's own religious beliefs "reduced to simple issues of personal morality highly complex questions of social and economic behavior...
...In fact, the complexity of most political realities is such that they require different sorts of responses at different times...
...Thatcher's attitude toward Gorbachev, for example, juxtaposes her saying that "we can do business together" with her background of anti-Communism and comes up with something which he calls "the new realism...
...Thatcher is of hers...
...Rather let it be "the mundane miracle...
...Cutting the top rate of tax from 83 to 60 percent in her first term was "the first of many massive gifts to the rich...
...All credit to him for so far transcending the limitations which his James Bowman is the Washington correspondent for the Spectator of London...
...Words like "suggested," "seemed," and "apparently" are useful fig leaves to adorn the business end of the unbiased historian...
...For however hard he tries to escape it, Young is still far more the prisoner of his background than he manages to persuade us Mrs...
...In other words, the little moral drama in which the righteous journalist exposes political duplicity or chicanery is so in command of his imagination that he is incapable of seeing that sometimes neither error nor duplicity and chicanery are the best explanations...
...In fact, it is precisely "complexity" that Young himself has trouble with...
...Many of the young men who should have been there were either fighting or dead...
...In addition, the book is well constructed, marshals its facts impressively, is jargon-free, and mostly well written—though occasionally it tries a little too hard for effect: Oxford in 1943 was a university in the middle of a war...
...Her initial concerns about feasibility and the credibility of deterrence gave way to a greater concern for the strength of the alliance with the THE IRON LADY: A BIOGRAPHY OF MARGARET THATCHER Hugo Young/Farrar, Straus & Giroux/570 pp...
...Now that she is being faulted for the same "giving in," it is hard to believe that Young's voice would not be added to the chorus of disapproval of her "inflexibility" on this issue...
...The Toxteth and Brixton riots of 1981 were "apparently . a consequence of her economic policy...
...Thatcher is that she is hidebound by a narrow, constricting moralism...
...Gee whiz...
...For instance, the suggestion by Britain's chief rabbi that blacks might work themselves out of poverty, as Jews had done, is treated as an example of "racialism...
...In his eagerness to chase the little dramas of day to day and year to year political life, he misses the larger, more complex dramas of political movements and ideas...
...The last sentence also shows that there are occasional lapses in the quality of the prose—and yet, if taken out, dusted off, and turned into a deliberate oxymoron it might well serve as a better summing up of Mrs...
...Young isn't as shameless about it as Jonathan Miller, but he can't help sneering too...
...Thatcher than "the iron lady...
...Such a critique of her economic policies, made repeatedly, is a constant irritant in Young's book, as is his repeated reassertion of the failure of monetarism, to which he resolutely refuses to lend any sympathetic understanding...
...He loves, for instance, to detect his subject in the "subterfuge" of trying to look good on television or arriving at Downing Street with the Prayer of St...
...It would be interesting to see how he would treat the situation that has developed in Hong Kong since the book was written...
...He provides some samples of the venom...
...The level of his economic idiocy may be judged from the following summing up of "the Thatcher miracle": At 2.9 percent a year between 1981 and 1987, the growth in gross domestic product per head put Britain second only to Japan in the international league...
...For American readers he also performs a valuable service by clearing a way through some of the tangled undergrowth of British political infighting which must appear all but impenetrable to transatlantic eyes...
...If there was a miracle in the 1980s, it was of a relatively mundane dimension...
...25 James Bowman THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1990 41 U.S.—and without giving up the reassertion of the strategic importance of deterrence...
...Young correctly identifies in this both the snobbery of his own class and the howls of "the new class" being deprived of a few of its cushy subsidies...
...In the same way, her change from critic to backer of SDI took place within the context of a hierarchy of values...
...He is always on the alert for people who say something different one day from what they had said the day before and takes a childish delight in describing these as "conversions" or "somersaults"—radical changes of mind which betoken the guilt either of those who have had to admit error or of those who have changed for discreditable reasons...
...The firm anti-Communism which gave her her sobriquet "suggested a one-dimensional approach to foreign policy" and "seemed to lack sophistication...
...But 2.9 percent was also the growth figure between 1968 and 1973, when it left Britain close to the bottom of the league, and was regarded as a dismal performance...
...The use of a per annum growth rate percentage as if it were an absolute index to economic well-being quite unconnected to international conditions and competitiveness is a wonderfully demagogic bit of sophistry...
...Thatcher and the political phenomenon she represents...
...Young's account of Mrs...
...If we can't understand why a dispute between two cabinet ministers over who should own a helicopter company was such a big deal, it's largely because our political arrangements have so far degenerated into squalid and self-serving legalism, that we need Young's careful untangling of the affair as an introduction to a system still largely based on honor and unwritten codes of behavior...
...social and intellectual background has placed upon the scope of his sympathies...
...His standard liberal political biases are clearly enough on display...
...Jonathan Miller, theatrical and operatic director and impresario, finds the, lady "loathsome, repulsive in almost every way" and despises "her odious suburban gentility and sentimental, saccharine patriotism, catering to the worst elements of commuter idiocy...
...This might not be so bad if it were confined to the little sneers often to be found in chapter headings and picture captions which he seems to think are frightfully sophisticated put-downs—La Fille d'Epicier, Those Poor Shopkeepers...
...He really does make an effort to be dispassionate and even-handed about a politician who routinely inspires the most appallingly bitter hatred among the members of the left-leaning intellectual class to which he himself belongs...
...Vanquishing Lucifer, Gloriana Imperatrix, the Tsarina meets the peasants—but it goes far beyond such disfiguring snobbery into a habit of mind and outlook which makes it finally impossible for him to understand Mrs...
...Along with the greater productivity, this helped create the impression of a new Britain...
Vol. 23 • February 1990 • No. 2
