John Vincent on Margaret Thatcher

“It was because she offered ‘earnest and practical dissent’ to progressive orthodoxy. Mrs Thatcher is the point at which all snobberies meet: intellectual snobbery, social snobbery, the snobbery of Brooks's, the snobbery about scientists among those educated in the arts, the snobbery of the metropolis about the provincial, the snobbery of the South about the North, and the snobbery of men about women.”

“In 1980 and 1981 Mrs Thatcher's team (but not the Cabinet) wrestled with the question of how to stop inflation. The new ingredient was courage. Other governments had enforced restraint or cut proposed spending increases. What was wholly exceptional was a government willing to persevere with, indeed intensify, deflationary measures while the bottom fell out of the market. Austerity in prosperity is merely prudent; austerity in adversity requires the courage to put all ordinary political considerations in temporary abeyance. It was this courage of economic liberalism of 1979, which marked out a new determination by government to govern. The new regime of 1979 had not involved any real test of political will, for economic liberalism was and is as uncontentious as any great reversal of assumptions can be. Few, in 1986, were still sighing for the price, wage, dividend and exchange controls of the 1970s. Changing the economic culture was the easy bit. Reducing inflation by a mixture of fiscal and monetary measures, a problem in financial technology, was a far more desperate business... If 1981 was crucial, which it was, it was as a triumph of political will, not of economic doctrine.”

“Mrs Thatcher fits the rule that there are no bad Prime Ministers. She may lack Heath's architectonic sense, but more than makes up for it in persuasiveness and electioneering flair. She lacks Callaghan's fatalism, most certainly, but not his caution. She has Eden's wish to meddle, but with the energy to support it. If in many ways she is under-read, her appetite for official papers exceeds that of almost all her predecessors. Had she lost the 1987 election, she would have looked like a curious aberration; since she won, she will be seen as marking a change of epochs, whatever her individual qualities. Whatever the future holds, she will go down as one of history's great improbabilities. For the present, it is perhaps safest to assert that she is the only Prime Minister to cook for her private secretaries when they are working late. She may have slain yesterday's dragon, not today's: her battle was with an archaic union-based socialism, not a pervasive middle-class liberalism. Still, the dragon looked anything but slayable in 1975, and the work had to be done, with but few helpers in her own party. She may outlive the context which made her relevant, but in the process bequeath a broad national governing party. The measure of her achievement is that she has made Thatcherism unnecessary.”