So signal was the Iron Lady’s character that she would have been a giant in any age - Many years have passed since Margaret Thatcher left Downing Street, and yet the full scale of her achievement is still surprisingly hard to set out. So completely has her legacy shaped modern Britain, so fully have she and her ideas been woven into its fabric, that it can be hard to appreciate the depth of our debt to this most extraordinary of individuals. For she was not one of those politicians who had the good fortune to go with the grain of her times. She was a leader who wrenched this nation from the path of demoralization, diminishment and decline so decisively, so self-evidently successfully, that her victory seems, in hindsight, to be almost an inevitability.
First and foremost, Baroness Thatcher was Britain’s leading champion of economic and individual liberty. She preached the virtues of a state that gave people the freedom to make their own choices and prove themselves responsible. She drew on great thinkers – Gladstone, Hayek, Keith Joseph, Adam Smith – but in the service of a philosophy that had as its irreducible core the ancient English values and virtues she learnt from her father, a grocer and alderman. Thatcherism in its original form was a creed of thrift, of self-reliance, of aspiration, of liberty in the purest sense. It was also one of unswerving, ironclad patriotism – seen most obviously in her decision to launch a task force to reclaim the Falkland Islands, when so many siren voices suggested she let the junta’s aggression stand.
It was her principles that made her congenitally incapable of taking the course of least resistance, and which also informed her personal integrity and incorruptibility. As a result, she provoked turbulent emotions – as do all truly great figures. Despite the widespread tributes on her passing yesterday, Lady Thatcher, of all people, would not have expected her enemies to wipe the slate clean in death. To paraphrase the words of St Francis of Assisi which she quoted on entering Downing Street, she certainly brought truth where there was error, but to deliver harmony was never her fate.
Indeed, throughout her career, she thrived on her enemies’ scorn. This was not from a love of confrontation for its own sake, but because she knew – knew in a way that those without such a sense of calling, of mission, never can – that nothing was more important than the changes she needed to bring about. The damage that her opponents in the Labour Party, or the trade unions, or behind the Iron Curtain would cause if left unchecked was so severe, their error so great, that they could not be brought to heel by tacking and accommodation: it would take the iron application of coherent and compelling principle.
