Next year will be the 30th anniversary of Mrs Thatcher’s first election victory and the onset of the demented world as we know it in this country. No doubt books and TV programmes are being prepared.
The most striking account of the first part of the Thatcher events is John Hoskyn’s Just In Time: inside the Thatcher revolution (London: Aurum Press, 2000). Hoskyns was an army officer who became a businessman. He is a recognisable type: the clever alpha male, used to being in charge and intolerant of fools, who looked at Britain in the early 1970s and saw chaos, stupidity and systems failure, and wanted to do something about it. He retired, selling the business he had built up and set about ‘saving Britain’. He created a plan – a kind of flow diagram – of how to solve the British economic problem and got it into the Tory Party leadership group, then in opposition under new leader Thatcher. The power of the British trade unions was the central problem he saw and he devised a strategy to reduce it. This was a popular message in the Tory Party of 1977/8 who perceived, or found it useful to claim, that the unions had brought down the Heath government (they hadn’t, of course, the electorate did) and were the cause of the 25% inflation of the mid 1970s (they weren’t the major cause). Hoskyns joined the little group round Thatcher and describes the experience in his book which is based round his dairy. Two entries are very striking.
31 May 1979
‘I have been concerned since before the election that the pound was too high. Margaret seemed to he convinced that “the higher the pound, the better for the economy”, and that complaints from industry were invariably “just whinging”.’ (p. 107)
18 February 1980 Hoskyns met Anthony Barber, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Heath government, and then Chair of the Standard Chartered Bank.
‘Barber v. nice indeed but seemed to think that it was the strong Deutschmark that had helped Germany to prosper, rather than the other way round. The more I see of people generally and especially those who run or have run the country, the more amazed I feel. He [Barber] seemed to think that the high pound was going to do the same for us.’ (p. 159)
It would be difficult to overstate how startling this is. A prime minister and a former chancellor of the exchequer had simply not understood something absolutely basic. This is a bit like not understanding that increased demand for a good increases its price. If they didn’t understand something as simple as this, what could they understand of the economic advice they were getting? Nothing, in effect.
I always thought Mrs Thatcher was a nitwit and the tales of her great intellect were coming from those around her who were unwilling or unable to acknowledge that she was the dummy she appeared to be. (Something similar has happened with Reagan and Bush junior.)
RR