Margaret thatcher

Thursday

Charles Moore

My memories of Sir David Barclay

Even with its 27 amendments, the US Constitution is only 7,591 words. I keep it beside me, and find in it — as Sir Walter Elliot found in the Baronetage — ‘occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one’. The final part of Section 3 of Article 1 is relevant in this distressed week: ‘Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to Removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of Honor, Trust or Profit under the United States.’ To use, after Donald Trump’s departure, a device designed to remove a president seems strange. Surely there are two important things to

Thursday

Lara King

The politics of handbags

‘Of course, I am obstinate in defending our liberties and our law — that is why I carry a big handbag,’ Margaret Thatcher once told an interviewer. That handbag was part of the Iron Lady’s suit of armour; a fashion accoutrement turned into a political prop. But an accessory that became instantly recognisable on the outside held secrets on the inside. Thatcher referred to it as the only ‘leak-proof’ place in Downing Street, and it was a bag of tricks from which she might conjure pertinent quotes from Abraham Lincoln or Friedrich Hayek, or a crumpled brief from a mysterious source. Norman Tebbit said the art of being a successful

Sunday

Bruce Anderson

What if Thatcher won the 1990 leadership challenge?

Thirty years ago today, Margaret Thatcher was in 10 Downing Street. For almost eleven and a half years, it had been her home and her headquarters. There, she had planned the campaigns which transformed her country, and earned her the right to be ranked with Churchill. He, the greatest war leader: she, the greatest domestic one. But on 23 November 1990, everything was different. The previous day, she had resigned the Leadership of her party. Although she would still be Prime Minister for a few days, until the Tories had chosen a replacement, her principal task in that vestigial interlude was to pack up her possessions and prepare to move

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s proud history of standing up for Hong Kong

This week in 1989, the Chinese authorities massacred protestors in Tiananmen Square, Beijing. I was editing this paper. It struck me that the people of Hong Kong would suffer huge collateral damage. The Spectator should campaign for them, I thought, and draw attention to the dangers of trusting China to honour the 1984 Sino-British Agreement which Mrs Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping had made to provide for the handover to China in 1997. So we turned the leading article into a two-page affair (a thing unheard-of) and devoted the whole cover to a drawing by Nick Garland of Britannia and the British lion, both kowtowing. The headline was ‘Our Betrayal of

Saturday

The Spectator

How much are people eating during lockdown?

People power Boris Johnson said that the reaction to the coronavirus crisis showed ‘There really is such a thing as society’ — an apparent reference to an interview Mrs Thatcher gave to Woman’s Own in 1987. A reminder of what she actually said: ‘I think we have gone through a period when too many people have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the government’s job to cope with it!”… and so they are casting their problems on society, and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people,

Wednesday

Matthew Parris

Labour’s failure isn’t necessarily the Tories’ success

A moment arrives when one does just have to admit defeat. We shall leave the European Union and there isn’t a lot of point going on about it any more. I’m still sure it’s a mistake, but there we are. In a democracy the majority is entitled to make a mistake, just as the minority is entitled to say so. I say so. I’d hoped we could change people’s minds but we haven’t, so enough from me on that. A general election is a different matter. Here too, of course, the majority is entitled to make a mistake, but resistance remains possible and legitimate because there’s always the opportunity at the

Thursday

Taki

My friend Margaret Thatcher

By the time you read this it will all be over, but will it? I’ve had a bad feeling all along about those who opposed the result of the 2016 referendum. When they don’t get what they want, they play dirty — just look what they did to Lady T 29 years or so ago. And speaking of the greatest prime minister ever, Charles Moore’s biography of Maggie, a magnificent achievement, has left me open-mouthed at his scholarship and ability to write 3,000 pages in such a relatively short time. It should be required reading in schools, but that, in turn, would require students to be able to read and

Thursday

Bruce Anderson

Politics of a certain vintage – and wine to match

I wonder how they do things now at Tory headquarters. For the ’79 election, the preparations had been completed weeks in advance. Press conferences had been planned on the basis of a four-week campaign, press releases drafted and shadow ministers told when they would be needed in London to go on the platform. Then the starting gun was fired and von Moltke kicked in. No plan survives the initial contact with the enemy. Some of the material was used, but not in the order that had been expected. There was a lot of improvisation. But it did not seem to matter. Something similar happened in 1992. The first press conference

Friday

James Kirkup

Boris’s ‘Buy British’ plan shows how Brexit has changed the Tories

Where to start with the Conservatives’ “Buy British” promises to end EU state aid rules? The obvious point is that dumping rules that prevent governments subsidising domestic firms will make it much harder to strike a trade deal with the EU after Brexit. Limiting state aid is pretty much fundamental to the EU’s very existence and operations; arguably the story of the EU since the late 1980s is a story of trying to drag European politicians away from protecting favoured sectors and firms and opening their economies up to cross-border competition. Of course, that story isn’t much told in the UK where, thanks not least to the sort of journalism

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: David Cameron’s real referendum mistake

Cameron’s fatal error Sir: Jo Johnson’s otherwise informative review of David Cameron’s For the Record (Books, 12 October) suggests Cameron’s ‘mistake’ was to not call the referendum earlier, and his ‘fatal error’ was his failure to nail down the Leave campaign on how they ‘would actually deliver Brexit’. Not so. Cameron’s mistake was to assume the referendum would produce a Remain result. Cameron’s fatal error was to have taken sides in the referendum. Had he not taken sides, had he not allowed George Osborne to launch ‘Project Fear’, and had he encouraged the dissemination of practical information for both the Leave and the Remain sides, then after the result he

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Nigel Farage had better hurry up and settle for a peerage

Last week, an angry Telegraph reader asked me why I had got through a whole column on Brexit without mentioning Nigel Farage. My exact answer is that the column was about MPs in relation to Brexit and Mr Farage and his Brexit party have no MPs. But there is a more general answer too. It is that the Brexit party’s irreducible core is now clearly shown to be small. The rest of its vote is entirely dependent on the behaviour of whoever is the Conservative leader. Mrs May’s behaviour swelled its ranks; Boris Johnson’s has reduced them. It really is as simple as that. Now that Boris has actually got

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: Shoots should be about quality, not quantity

Bad sport Sir: At last a respected member of the shooting community has popped his head above the parapet. Patrick Galbraith has had the courage to express the view that many of us from the ‘bygone sporting era’ hold, but have either been too afraid of the commercial consequences, or too idle, to go public (‘Dangerous game’, 12 October). The shooting fraternity has done an awful job of educating newcomers about what constitutes a great day out. It has allowed quantity to prevail over quality. It has failed to ensure that appreciation of the ‘craic’ and the environment are an essential element of the experience. Like all activities, when you do

Thursday

Charles Moore

We selfish gits must wear the name with pride

I walked down Villiers Street to Embankment Tube station. In front of me were two Extinction Rebels, a mother and daughter. Strapped to the little girl’s back was a white teddy bear. Strapped to the bear’s back was the handwritten slogan: ‘You selfish gits. Stop burning down my house.’ I wonder how they knew I was a selfish git, since I wore no emblem to announce the fact. Luckily they did not know I was off to a large party of fellow selfish gits to launch volume III of my biography of Mrs Thatcher. It was taking place in the Banqueting House, Whitehall, yards from XR’s encampment, and was eloquently addressed

Bruce Anderson

A vintage tale of Thatcher, Reagan and some truly great wines

Poor Old Girl. The final act may not have been sanglante, but as the third volume of Charles Moore’s life of Margaret Thatcher makes clear, it was sad. It may seem unwise to expend great praise on a contemporary book before time has had a chance to lend perspective: not in this case. Time’s verdict can be anticipated with confidence. Boswell apart — sui generis — this might be the finest biography in the language. Alas, the final volume is also a story of decline. It did not help that the Lady was sacked with as little ceremony as a cleaning woman guilty of plundering the gin bottle. But a

Thursday

Charles Moore

Why didn’t Cameron realise the ‘strength of feeling’ about Brexit?

In his memoirs, David Cameron admits that he ‘did not fully appreciate the strength of feeling’ in favour of Brexit, before and during the referendum. The fascinating question is, ‘Why?’ The issue of Europe had been dividing his party from at least 1988 (and had earlier roots). It was part of his modernisation not to ‘bang on’ about Europe, but this was an evasion, not a policy. If a leader does not address a vital question, others will, if he gives them the chance. You cross a windswept plaza, go down a steepish stair and then descend three floors below the ground. You are entering the astonishing, 21st-century Museum of

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

The PPI scandal ends at last – but the nuisance calls will keep coming

Of all the stains on the reputation of UK banks, the PPI scandal is surely the most shameful, the most revealing of low human behaviour and the one with the most far-reaching consequences. Between 1990 and 2010, some 30 million customers were sold Payment Protection Insurance, supposedly designed to cover them if they became unable to make debt repayments; no one knows what proportion of those policies were ‘mis-sold’, but compensation has so far amounted to more than £36 billion, plus £12 billion of admin costs for the banks. As the final claims deadline approached last Thursday, Lloyds — the worst offender, with RBS in second place — was still

Thursday

Michael Sheridan

Will the next prime minister betray Hong Kong again?

For many years, a framed cover of The Spectator looked down, like a silent reproach, on the drinkers in the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents’ Club. Its cartoon showed Britannia and the British lion on a barren rock, bent in a kowtow towards a distant, unseen overlord. The title read: Our Betrayal of Hong Kong. It was published when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister and the Tiananmen Square massacre had just taken place in Beijing. The editorial, two whole pages of eloquent indictment, did not please the woman who had signed the Joint Declaration with China by which the rights of Hong Kong were to be guaranteed for fifty years after

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Men in suits

After he invented the term young fogey (in The Spectator in 1984), the much lamented journalist Alan Watkins coined the term men in suits. Of course other people before him had used the phrases young fogey and men in suits as nonce formations. Watkins identified both as what has since been denominated ‘a thing’. By his own account, even before Margaret Thatcher had been dislodged by them in 1990, the men in suits (identified as a group by the definite article) had been transformed into the men in grey suits. This, he observed, was inaccurate: ‘The typical Conservative grandee tends to wear a dark blue or black suit, with chalk-

Thursday

Nick Lezard

Grave meditations

In 2012 OUP published Geoffrey Hill’s Collected Poems; they could have waited, because they’re now going to need another edition. Between 2012 and his death, aged 84, in 2016, Hill wrote another 271 poems, and here they are — although, given his productivity since the mid-1990s, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were plenty more. But the poems in The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin look as though they are part of a deliberate and ordered sequence, all of them using the same form, of irregular lines, occasional internal rhymes and Hill’s characteristic style, hopping over centuries with semi-cryptic allusions, barks of rage and mordant humour. I say

Thursday

The Spectator

Backing Mrs Thatcher

From ‘Be brave’, 28 April 1979: We can think of a number of reasons why voters might feel reluctant to vote for Mrs Thatcher. But this reluctance should be set aside. We must be brave. Only time can tell whether the Tories possess the necessary qualities of resolution and ability which are needed to deal with the nation’s problems. What we do know is that Labour entirely lacks them… The problems are familiar: a State which spends an ever-increasing proportion of ever diminishing national wealth; the atrophy of those traditions and mores which have supported British social life, resulting in growing lawlessness; a deplorable industrial record which may reasonably be