Margaret Thatcher was a courageous, iron-willed leader who made history in 1979 by becoming the first female prime minister of Great Britain.
When she won the Conservative leadership in 1975, one of her first actions was to demonstrate her commitment to defence and to Britain’s allies by travelling to Washington. Stopping in Toronto on the way home, Thatcher told a rapt Empire Club audience: “It is often said that politics is the art of the possible. The danger of such a phrase is that we may deem impossible things which would be possible, indeed desirable, if only we had more courage, more insight.” She had plenty of both.
So clear and resolute was Thatcher’s anti-communism that Russia’s Ministry of Defence called her the “Iron Lady” in 1976. That was meant to be an insult, but the name stuck.
She worked to strengthen President Reagan’s resolve. She denounced the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In 1982 she took the major risk of sending an expeditionary force 8,000 miles to defeat Argentina’s military junta and recover the Falkland Islands. She dominated her cabinet. She had the guts to curb the too-powerful British trade unions and to free the markets, increasing opportunity and prosperity without precedent. According to diarist Alan Clark, senior bureaucrats were “all completely terrified of her.”
One of the most incredible facts about Thatcher is that the English Catholic controversialist Hilaire Belloc predicted in 1928 that, 51 years later, there would be a strong woman at the helm of Great Britain. He even guessed the exact year: 1979. Belloc was a brilliant historian and journalist who had served in the French Army (his father was French, his mother English) and later served one term as a member of Britain’s Parliament. In a long life he wrote 150 books: biography, travel, religion, humour, and polemical fiction.
In his political fantasy novel, “But Soft We are Observed,” published 95 years ago, Belloc described a female prime minister named Mary Bullar, whose strong leadership he contrasted with her weak predecessors. “Now under the firm hand of Mary Bullar,” he wrote, “England could repose.” He described her as “A strong capable woman, hardly fifty, with that new style of square jaw”—quite apt as Margaret Thatcher did have a firm jaw. The resemblance continued: “She has a most determined mouth, and steady, deciding eyes which even before she speaks put confidence into the wavering and the fear of God into the weak.” At one point she tells her male colleagues: “It’s no good arguing. Somebody has to give the order, and I have given it.”
Thatcher, too, had a steady, piercing gaze. When she named Alan Clark her minister for trade “her blue eyes flashed,” he wrote in his diary on Jan. 31, 1986. “I got a full dose of personality compulsion.” With few exceptions, male politicians in Thatcher’s time were quite underwhelming and, as the English say, “wet.” Sir Alec Douglas Home, who had been prime minister from 1963 to 1964, said of Thatcher, “Undeniably, she is a bossy woman.”
As David Twiston Davies wrote in The Dorchester Review magazine a few years ago, “the fictional Mary Bullar rises from the Front Bench in her majesty and with her the Ancient Majesty of the Constitution on July 8, 1979,” to denounce her enemies and save Great Britain from an international conspiracy. Lady Thatcher’s presence in person and in the House of Commons, too, was electrifying. Whatever the differences, England’s real-life woman prime minister also did much to save Britain and the West from the international conspiracy of communism.
One difference in Belloc’s fantasy is that the political hue of Mary Bullar’s coalition is communist-anarchist. According to Belloc, British communists are “the spiritual descendants of the old Moderates, themselves the spiritual descendants of the Old Unionists, themselves the spiritual descendants of the old Tories; for, thank heaven, there is no breach of continuity in our institutions.” The parallel may fit after all, since Thatcher was a most radical, libertarian, and transformative Conservative.
Thatcher “had more impact on the world than any woman ruler since Catherine the Great of Russia,” wrote historian Paul Johnson. “Not only did she turn around — decisively — the British economy in the 1980s, she also saw her methods copied in more than 50 countries.”
Her method was to unshackle the British people and economy from socialism and unleash free markets, so that far greater wealth could be generated and benefit the whole society, with people less dependent on, and thus controllable by, the government. Thatcher rejected “the confusion of ‘society’ with ‘the state’ as the helper of first resort.” She said: “No government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then to look after our neighbour.”
We could stand to relearn that lesson in our time.
