1956 as a turning point – in her opinion a military victory undermined by ‘political and economic weakness’ because Anthony Eden’s government withdrew the troops that had regained the Canal after a run on the pound encouraged by Washington. ‘Whatever the details’, she continued briskly (and evasively), this defeat ‘entered the British soul and distorted our perspective on Britain’s place in the world.’ Thanks to the ‘Suez syndrome’, as she called it, ‘having previously exaggerated our power, we now exaggerated our impotence.’[18]
Her account of history was not just retrospective wisdom. Reversing decline was almost the leitmotif of Thatcher’s politics. ‘Britain’s prestige in the eyes of the world has gone down and down,’ she had declared during her very first election campaign in 1950, when she was 24: ‘We Conservatives are not afraid to face the future whatever problem it entails, because it is our earnest desire to make Great Britain great again.’[19] Such rhetoric was certainly at the heart of her message in the 1979 campaign. ‘I can’t bear Britain in decline. I just can’t,’ she exclaimed to a BBC interviewer. ‘We who either defeated or rescued half Europe, who kept half Europe free, when otherwise it would be in chains. And look at us now!’[20] She told an audience in Bolton: ‘Unless we change our ways and our direction, our greatness as a nation will soon be a footnote in the history books, a distant memory of an offshore island, lost in the mists of time, like Camelot, remembered kindly for its noble past.’[21] This was her refrain right to the end. ‘Let me give you my vision,’ she declaimed in her final election broadcast. ‘Somewhere ahead lies greatness for our country again; this I know in my heart.’[22]
Thatcher shared with Joseph Chamberlain and Churchill a Napoleonic belief in the capacity of a great leader to transform history through sheer willpower. Indeed, in her memoirs she applied to herself the famous words of William Pitt the Elder, during the Seven Years’ War of 1756–63: ‘I know that I can save the country and that no one else can.’[23] And she employed her formidable will and conviction to cover inner insecurities and get her way in an overwhelmingly male world. Not only did she seem happiest when ‘up against a wall’, biographer Hugo Young observed. But ‘when she wasn’t actually embattled, she needed to imagine or invent the condition: embattled against the cabinet, against Whitehall, against the country, against the world’.[24]
After Margaret Thatcher’s victory in the Falklands War, Cummings in the Daily Express (16 June 1982) shows her waving the Union Jack in triumph while white-flag merchants from the Foreign Office and the Labour party – Tony Benn (middle) and party leader Michael Foot (right) – lie flat on their backs.
Indeed one can say that her grand narrative of those Downing Street years was constructed around two triumphant battles royal against ‘decline’: the Falklands War in the spring of 1982 and the miners’ strike of 1984–5. Argentina’s shock capture of the Falkland Islands, which it claimed as the Malvinas, provoked a cross-party wave of anger in Parliament on 3 April, but Thatcher made the operation to liberate the 1,800 British islanders from Argentine rule into her own personal crusade. And she used the eventual victory over General Leopoldo Galtieri’s military junta to make a larger point. ‘When we started out, there were the waverers and the fainthearts,’ she told a Tory rally in Cheltenham on 3 July 1982. ‘Those who believed that our decline was irreversible – that we could never again be what we were.’ But now, she proclaimed, ‘We have ceased to be a nation in retreat … Britain found herself again in the South Atlantic and will not look back from the victory she has won.’[25] Or more pithily, to a jubilant crowd singing ‘Rule Britannia’ outside 10 Downing Street: ‘Great Britain is great again.’[26] Almost as if the mission she had set herself in 1950 had now been accomplished.
In June 1983 the ‘Falklands Factor’ helped her to win a landslide election victory and in 1984–5 she was ready to take on Arthur Scargill and the striking miners in their last-ditch effort – under the slogan ‘jobs, pits and communities’ – to stop what was effectively the closure of their industry. For Thatcher, however, the miners became the centrepiece of her struggle to break up the unprofitable and bureaucratic state monopolies and she treated Scargill as the domestic equivalent of General Galtieri. Notes for a speech to Tory backbenchers in July 1984 read:
Since Office
Enemy without – beaten him
& strong in defence
Enemy within –
Miners’ leaders …
– just as dangerous
Biographer Charles Moore writes that Downing Street staff prepared for the miners’ strike as if it were another war. ‘Instead of names like Bluff Cove, Goose Green and Mount Longdon, they became familiar with pits like Shirebrook, Manton and Bilston Glen. And once she had vanquished Scargill just like Galtieri, Thatcher won the election of 1987 on the slogan: ‘Britain is Great Again. Don’t Let Labour Wreck It.’[27]
Yet there were limits to Britain’s ‘greatness’. Margaret Thatcher was also the Prime Minister who, having liberated 1,800 British subjects from the Argentine junta, in December 1984 signed over 5.5 million other British subjects in Hong Kong to the rule of China – a communist state to boot. Like Churchill over the Canal Zone, she saw no choice given the realities of power. Under the ‘one nation, two systems’ principle enshrined in the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984, British sovereignty would end in 1997 but Hong Kong was to be a ‘Special Administrative Region’ enjoying ‘a high degree of autonomy’ for another fifty years, with its social and economic system ‘unchanged’ and civil and property rights ‘protected by law’. Even before the handover in 1997, however, these guarantees were called into question by the Chinese government’s brutal repression of the pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square in June 1989. And nothing the British government said or did could influence Beijing.
The rhetoric of reversing ‘decline’ by the assertion of willpower has also been at the heart of the Brexit narrative. Take, for instance, the speech delivered by Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, a leading Brexiter, who took pride in his nickname ‘the Honourable Member for the Eighteenth Century’.[28] That, he claimed, was the century in which ‘the seeds of our greatness, sown long before in our distinguished history, sown conceivably by Alfred the Great, began to grow and to flourish in a way that led to our extended period of good fortune and greatness.’ But Rees-Mogg said that he also wanted to be the ‘Honourable Member for the Twenty-First Century’ because this was the century in which the country would ‘regain its independence’ and ‘rediscover the opportunities of a truly global Britain’.
‘How we came to join the European Union is an important part of understanding our Island story,’ Rees-Mogg explained. ‘We won the war and were full of optimism about our place in the World, but then came Suez.’ In his opinion, the debacle of 1956 had a profound and debilitating effect, permanently undermining the nation’s self-confidence. ‘Margaret Thatcher tried to break away from that, but it was such a strong feeling that once she had gone it seeped back again.’ As a result of Suez, ‘the Nation’s view of itself changed and the Establishment, the Elite, decided that its job was to manage decline, that the best they could do was to soften the blow of descending downwards, soften the effect on the Nation of being less successful than it had been in the past, and recognise that we would not be able to keep up with other countries. This led to the notion that it was Europe or bust.’ But that, he argued, was a false contrast because Britain had ended up with both: in Europe and also bust. The