It’s difficult to remember how surprising it was for the Conservatives to elect a woman leader in 1975 – and sometimes forgotten that one of the four men she defeated in the final ballot was Geoffrey Howe, who died on Saturday. ‘At 49 she [Margaret Thatcher] is attractive in the way good looking women become as they get older’, a column in The Scotsman could observe without any seeming embarrassment in January 1975. Her ‘skin is pale and smooth, her hair a pretty blond, if not entirely as nature intended it, and she wears little make up’.
In 1981, the business of government had become more serious that Mrs Thatcher’s beauty regime. By March of that year, unemployment was hitting record post-war highs; interest rates were at 13 per cent; inflation was in double digits. The country faced a big budget deficit, and members of Thatcher’s cabinet were openly briefing against her. The Thatcher experiment seemed unlikely to last long.
Thatcher went back to first principles. Her biggest influence had been the certainties of her father’s Methodism, and the economic life of the small town, Grantham, where she grew up. Her self-belief through 1981 was sustained by a Manichaean world view, most often associated with religious fundamentalism. To someone of this frame of mind, the world is a place of simple contrasts, of black and white, of right and wrong, of good and evil......
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