Margaret Thatcher on Leadership

Lessons for American Conservatives Today

Nile Gardiner, Stephen Thompson

• Publisher: Regnery
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781621571643
• eBook ISBN: 9781621571797
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This inspirational and practical guide for conservatives combines stories from Lady Thatcher's life with principles and strategies conservatives can apply to their challenges today. Nile Gardiner and Stephen Thompson outline the critical lessons conservatives can learn from Lady Thatcher on articulating conservative principles to a broader audience, cutting through bureaucratic messes to achieve goals, and standing up to aggressive regimes.

CHAPTER ONE

THE IRON LADY

“I do not believe that history is writ clear and unchallengeable. It doesn’t just happen. History is made by people: its movement depends on small currents as well as great tides, on ideas, perceptions, will and courage, the ability to sense a trend, the will to act on understanding and intuition.”

—MARGARET THATCHER, “THE NEW RENAISSANCE,” SPEECH TO THE ZURICH ECONOMIC SOCIETY, MARCH 14, 1977¹

Farewell to a Champion of Liberty

In St. Paul’s Cathedral on April 17, 2013, Great Britain mourned its first woman prime minister with the most solemn and splendid funeral for a politician since Winston Churchill’s in 1965. The world leaders in attendance included a former vice president and three secretaries of state from America, Lech Walesa of Poland, and F. W. de Klerk, the South African president who brought the apartheid era to an end. Tens of thousands of her countrymen lined the streets for her funeral procession, and millions more watched on television. Nearly a quarter century after her political career had ended, Margaret Thatcher could still command the attention of a country whose decline she had refused to accept: “For we believed passionately that decline and surrender were just not good enough for Britain. We were confident that the values of the British people, their work ethic, their love of freedom and sense of natural justice could once more be harnessed to promote liberty and make Britain more prosperous and more influential.”²

A Speech That Shaped History

The leader laid to rest that day in the cemetery of the Royal Hospital Chelsea was known to friend and foe as the “Iron Lady,” a title bestowed on her in 1976, three years before she became prime minister, by a Russian army officer and journalist. The Tory leader had delivered a speech titled “Britain Awake” at Kensington Town Hall, forcefully warning of the danger the Soviet Union posed to her country and the West. Yury Gavrilov reported on the speech for the newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda (“Red Star”).

Struck by her determined tone, Gavrilov wanted to compare Thatcher to Otto von Bismarck, the “Iron Chancellor” who unified Germany, so he dubbed her the “Iron Lady.”

“It was my idea,” Gavrilov told a British newspaper in 2007. “I didn’t go to anyone higher up. I put those two words in a headline on January 24, 1976. At the time it seemed that everyone liked the label. Her opponents thought it reflected her stubbornness and inflexibility. But her supporters took it as a sign of strength.”³

Old Soviet leaders, schooled in the murderous politics of communism, had contempt for what Lenin called “useful idiots”—those in the West who believed they were working for peace, but were merely doing the bidding of the Soviet Union. Gavrilov saw immediately that Thatcher would be no useful idiot: “. . . I did have the feeling that the Soviet Union would soon face a tough opponent. She would not be bullied into endless talks about peace and friendship, she would ignore the anti-war movement in Britain and she would also be a strong ally to the U.S.”⁴

Though Gavrilov was impressed by the speech, Russian leaders were upset and protested. Thatcher recalled that a “stream of crude invective flowed from the different Soviet propaganda organs.”⁵ The reaction in Moscow to the “Iron Lady” speech foreshadowed the hostile response to President Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech seven years later, when he famously predicted that the Soviet Union would collapse. Gavrilov recalled that until the Iron Lady speech, “Soviet cartoonists had portrayed Britain as a toothless lion. But after my headline and despite our countries’ not very good relations and the ideological confrontation, Thatcher was always respected in the USSR.”⁶

Thatcher delivered that speech at the height of 1970s détente, when there was a supposed “thaw” in the Cold War between the West and the Soviet Union after nearly three decades of a divided Europe, conflict in Asia, and fears of nuclear war. Many in the West naively thought an end to the Cold War was in sight. Some were even revising history, saying the Soviet Union was not so bad after all. The thinking behind détente was that Communist and democratic countries could coexist in peace and mutual respect. Large defense budgets, the Left supposed, were no longer necessary. “The Socialists [in Britain], in fact, seem to regard defence as almost infinitely cuttable,” Thatcher cautioned. “If there are further cuts, perhaps the Defence Secretary should change his title, for the sake of accuracy, to the Secretary for Insecurity.”⁷

“The Russians are bent on world dominance,” Thatcher declared, “and they are rapidly acquiring the means to become the most powerful imperial nation the world has seen.”⁸ The Soviet Union was increasing its military spending, she warned, and seizing every opportunity to expand communism after decades of containment. Communism was spreading in Southeast Asia in the wake of the Vietnam War, and decolonization and civil war were creating opportunities for Communist insurgents in Mozambique, Angola, and elsewhere in Africa. In Europe, Portugal and Italy were in danger of falling to the Communists through the ballot box. “Euro-communism,” it was imagined, could be democratic, different from the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union.

By 1976, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were challenging détente, warning that the West faced grave danger if it did not strengthen its defenses and fight the spread of communism. At best, détente bought the West time before the final push against the Soviet Union under Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s. It achieved modest success in the hands of clear-eyed leaders like Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, but the strategy required a toughness that few Western leaders possessed. As practiced by the naïve and posturing President Jimmy Carter and other liberal and socialist leaders after 1976, détente came to be viewed as a sign of weakness in Moscow. The Russians were convinced that they faced an adversary with no stomach for the fight. Carter, after all, worried about Americans’ “inordinate fear of communism.” As he hugged and kissed the Kremlin bosses, he assured them, “We want to be friends with the Soviets.”⁹

The Soviet response was to become more aggressive and brutal around the world, invading Afghanistan and supporting Communist dictatorships and guerilla movements in Central America, expanding its geopolitical reach beyond anything imagined in the days of Stalin. Russian archives opened since the collapse of the Soviet Union have revealed that the Communists in Moscow and their global allies feared Western strength and clinically took advantage of any weakness. The old heirs of Stalin thought they had the upper hand in the 1970s, but their confidence was shaken by the ascent of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

In her Iron Lady speech, Thatcher posed some devastating questions: “Has détente induced the Russians to cut back on their defence programme? Has it dissuaded them from brazen intervention in Angola? Has it led to any improvement in the conditions of Soviet citizens, or the subject populations of Eastern Europe? We know the answers.” Surveying the record of Soviet aggression around the globe, she insisted, “We must remember that there are no Queensberry rules in the contest that is now going on. And the Russians are playing to win.”¹⁰ These were fighting words, strikingly different from the usual naïve rhetoric the Soviet leaders were used to hearing at the height of détente. They preferred to be kissed and hugged by Jimmy Carter.

The young army officer reporting for the Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper was insightful. Among other things, Gavrilov concluded that Thatcher would not be “bullied” by the Soviets. This was a leader. Like Reagan, she recognized that the Soviet Union was a failure: “They know that they are a super power in only one sense—the military sense,” she said. “They are a failure in human and economic terms.”¹¹ Communists in Moscow were quickly learning that they would face a formidable opponent if Thatcher became prime minister. And it worried them, for they knew, better than many intelligence agencies around the world, that their system was also doomed to fail. But the end of Communist dominance was still fifteen years away, and very few leaders other than Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan could see beyond détente.

Thatcher reacted to her new moniker of the Iron Lady with a mixture of amusement and pride: “I quickly saw that they had inadvertently put me on a pedestal as their strongest European opponent.”¹²

A week after Krasnaya Zvezda’s “Iron Lady” headline, Thatcher addressed some 250 fellow Conservatives at a formal dinner in her constituency of Finchley, London. Her remarks revealed her ultimate pleasure with the new nickname, for it could be used as a weapon for freedom:

I stand before you tonight in my Red Star chiffon evening gown. [Laughter, Applause], my face softly made up and my fair hair gently waved [Laughter], the Iron Lady of the Western world. A cold war warrior, an amazon philistine, even a Peking plotter. Well, am I any of these things?

(“No!”. . . .)

Well yes, if that’s how they . . . [Laughter]. Yes I am an iron lady, after all it wasn’t a bad thing to be an iron duke [as Wellington was known], yes if that’s how they wish to interpret my defence of values and freedoms fundamental to our way of life.¹³

Margaret Thatcher’s courage and conviction would soon lead her to 10 Downing Street, where she would stay for eleven years. Her enemies feared her. Her supporters worshipped her. Her country warmed to her. And the world began to take note of a new kind of British leader.

“The Greatest Conservative of All Time”

On April 19, 1979, two weeks before the election that would make her prime minister, Margaret Thatcher addressed a rally in Birmingham. Buffeted by inflation, unemployment, crime, and union unrest, Britain was being called the “sick man of Europe.” Thatcher appealed for the revival of a great nation, rejecting Dean Acheson’s infamous 1962 jibe that Britain “has lost an empire and has not yet found a role.” Nowhere in the world had the values of democracy and civilization been “more treasured, more jealously guarded, more subtly protected than on this island of ours,” she reminded her audience.

I believe that those who read our destiny this way are utterly and profoundly wrong. They understand neither why we acquired our Empire, nor why we disengaged from our Imperial responsibilities with a skill and a readiness which no Empire in history ever showed before. We remain as we always have been, a force for freedom, muted, even weakened these last few years, but still with the fires burning deep within us, ready to be kindled and go forward again.

This is the difference between us and the other imperial powers in our history books. Our vitality comes not from our possessions but from our unquenchable belief in freedom, and that is why, whatever lies ahead, we shall be there. We shall always be there in the forefront of the struggle to resist tyranny and to hold freedom high. This is our heritage and our destiny. For that heritage and for that destiny we Conservatives have always stood. Let us not forsake it now.¹⁴

The Conservatives’ rivals in 1979 were the Labour and Liberal Parties, which had ruled in a coalition government under Labour’s James Callaghan until the previous summer. Notable for the backroom deals that held it together, the “Lib-Lab” pact had prolonged Britain’s economic decline. “The experiences of the last two or three years have been utterly abhorrent,” Thatcher declared. “It reduced the whole standard of public life and Parliamentary democracy to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Why Margaret Thatcher’s Leadership Matters Today
• Chapter One: The Iron Lady
• Chapter Two: Thatcherism
• Chapter Three: The Twilight of Socialist Britain
• Chapter Four: The Thatcher Revolution
• Chapter Five: America Must Avoid European-Style Decline
• Chapter Six: Rejecting Appeasement: Lessons from the Cold War
• Chapter Seven: The Leadership Lessons of the Falklands War
• Chapter Eight: Keeping America Secure and Confronting Terrorism
• Chapter Nine: America Must Lead
• Chapter Ten: The Ten Principles of Successful Conservative Leadership
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index