There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters PDF
Preview There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters
0465002315-Berlinski:Layout 1 7/23/08 2:26 PM Page i “There Is No Alternative” 0465002315-Berlinski:Layout 1 7/23/08 2:26 PM Page ii This page intentionally left blank 0465002315-Berlinski:Layout 1 7/23/08 2:26 PM Page iii “There Is No Alternative” WHY MARGARET THATCHER MATTERS j h i Claire Berlinski A MEMBER OF THE PERSEUS BOOKS GROUP NEW YORK 0465002315-Berlinski:Layout 1 7/23/08 2:26 PM Page iv Copyright © 2008 by Claire Berlinski Published by Basic Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 387 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016-8810. Books published by Basic Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail [email protected]. Designed by Timm Bryson Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Berlinski, Claire. “There is no alternative” : why Margaret Thatcher matters / Claire Berlinski. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-465-00231-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Thatcher, Margaret. 2. Great Britain—Politics and government—1979–1997. 3. Conservatism—Great Britain. I. Title. DA589.7.B47 2008 941.085’8092—dc22 2008024595 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0465002315-Berlinski:Layout 1 7/23/08 2:26 PM Page v FOR MISCHA and CRISTINA 0465002315-Berlinski:Layout 1 7/23/08 2:26 PM Page vi Boudicea, with her daughters before her in a chariot, went up to tribe after tribe, protesting that it was indeed usual for Britons to fight un- der the leadership of women. “But now,” she said, “it is not as a woman descended from noble ancestry, but as one of the people that I am avenging lost freedom, my scourged body, the outraged chastity of my daughters. Roman lust has gone so far that not our very persons, nor even age or virginity, are left unpolluted. But heaven is on the side of a righteous vengeance; a legion which dared to fight has perished; the rest are hiding themselves in their camp, or are think- ing anxiously of flight. They will not sustain even the din and the shout of so many thousands, much less our charge and our blows. If you weigh well the strength of the armies, and the causes of the war, you will see that in this battle you must conquer or die. This is a woman’s re- solve; as for men, they may live and be slaves.” —ANNALS OF TACITUS, BOOK XIV 0465002315-Berlinski:Layout 1 7/23/08 2:26 PM Page vii C O N T E N T S A Note on Style and Sources ix Preface xi one The Shrine of Mother Margaret 1 La Pasionaria of two 15 Middle-Class Privilege three “I Hate Communists” 47 four Diva, Matron, Housewife, Shrew 71 five The Sledgehammer 113 six For Strategic Sheep Purposes 157 seven Coal and Iron 183 eight Miners Is Miners 237 nine The Triumvirate 263 ten No! No! No! 307 conclusion Why Margaret Thatcher Matters 343 Epilogue 361 Photograph Acknowledgments 364 Acknowledgments 365 A Guide to Further Reading 369 Index 373 vii 0465002315-Berlinski:Layout 1 7/23/08 2:26 PM Page viii This page intentionally left blank 0465002315-Berlinski:Layout 1 7/23/08 2:26 PM Page ix A N O T E O N S T Y L E A N D S O U R C E S Thanks to the Margaret Thatcher Foundation—to whom every scholar of Thatcher is indebted—much of the archival material to which I refer in this book is now online. Many of the speeches and interviews I describe are on YouTube. Where possible, I have tried to guide the reader to original documents, video clips, au- dio files, and photographs on the Internet. On my Web site, www.berlinski.com, you may listen to samples of my interviews with Thatcher’s friends and enemies. I encourage the reader to think of this as a multimedia book and to treat my notes as hyper- links. This is why I have used footnotes, not endnotes. I don’t want to hunt and rifle through endnotes while I’m reading. I don’t know why anyone else would. The use of ellipses in quoted text indicates that I have short- ened a quotation, but readers who wish to consult my unedited interviews will be able to do so. Following the paperback publica- tion of this book, I will donate my recordings and transcripts to the Margaret Thatcher Foundation. I will also give them to the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge, where they will join the Thatcher Papers. For consistency, I have changed British to American spelling, even when quoting British source material, although I have not changed proper names (such as the “British Labour Party”). For brevity, and because British honorifics are generally meaningless ix
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