Mrs T’s unfinished business

Soon after Margaret Thatcher was elected leader of the Conservative party she came for lunch at The Spectator and our then proprietor, Henry Keswick, wanted to offer his congratulations — and his advice. It was time to crush the trades unions, he told her. ‘Mr Keswick,’ she replied. ‘You have spent the past 14 years in Hong Kong, where such things may be doable. I have spent them in Britain, where things are very different.’ She was advocating a simple principle: practicality comes before ideology. The only point in fighting battles is to win them.

Her victories were so decisive and spectacular that it is possible — as we have seen in the last few days — to dwell almost entirely on them (and those who didn’t like them). But another part of the Thatcher story is the battles she regarded as unwinn-able. She knew, for example, that the welfare state had started to ensnare the very people it was designed to help, that the National Health Service was being slowly captured by a bureaucratic elite, and that state schools were being made into the playthings of local government politicians.