Women Academics From England

"She reached out...to the provincial England of her childhood, constructing an alternative national epic in which there was a merchant-adventurer in every counting-house, a village Hampden in every store. As many commentators have pointed out, she spoke in the accents not of church but of chapel, and in her radical contempt for paternalism it is not difficult to find echoes of her Northamptonshire shoemaker forbears. Her version of Victorian values was of a piece with this, invoking the plebeian virtues of self-reliance and self-help rather than the more patrician ones of chivalry and noblesse oblige."

"When she trusts her instincts she's almost always right. When she stops to think she's all too often wrong."

"Is the right hon. Lady aware that the report has now been received from the public analyst on a certain substance recently subjected to analysis and that I have obtained a copy of the report? It shows that the substance under test consisted of ferrous matter of the highest quality, that it is of exceptional tensile strength, is highly resistant to wear and tear and to stress, and may be used with advantage for all national purposes?"

"The Prime Minister, shortly after she came into office, received a soubriquet as the "Iron Lady". It arose in the context of remarks which she made about defence against the Soviet Union and its allies; but there was no reason to suppose that the right hon. Lady did not welcome and, indeed, take pride in that description. In the next week or two this House, the nation and the right hon. Lady herself will learn of what metal she is made."

"Margaret Thatcher, when we first became aware of her, was middle class mimsy... What she's done over the years progressively is in fact get sexier, and much more powerful. The fabrics are richer, there's more bulk. She's adopted what most Englishwomen find very frightening, which is a sort of hard-edged French chic...there's a certain sort of unforgivingness to it, a certain arrogance. She has discovered for herself a sort of power dressing... Rather like a Holbein painting of Henry VIII, here was a figure which was saying: "I am powerful." What Margaret Thatcher is doing...is expressing power in dress... I think Margaret Thatcher is a ruler, who thinks of herself as a ruler... This is now expressed with...a complete confidence that this powerful person with an enormous presence is ME."

"The Prime Minister whose social background Wilson's most resembles is not Edward Heath or John Major, still less Jim Callaghan (all Southerners from differing tribes), but Margaret Thatcher. In key respects, the early lives of the two leaders were remarkably similar. Both were brought up in or near middling English industrial towns. Both came from disciplined, Church-based families and had parents who valued learning, while having little formal education themselves... Both were Nonconformists... Both Alfred and Herbert [Wilson] began in the Liberal Party, the characteristic political home of provincial Nonconformity, before moving in contrary directions when the Liberals fell apart in the 1920s... There were, however, two differences which greatly influenced the outcome. First, Harold and Margaret were not contemporaries. Margaret was nine and a half years Harold's junior, and from that gap huge differences in outlook arose. Secondly, Alfred Roberts was a self-employed man, while Herbert was an employee. Harold spent his adolescence and early manhood during the worst years of the depression... By contrast, Margaret entered her teens and became politically conscious only as the depression came to an end. Alfred Roberts suffered during the hard times, but never badly. Where Harold's youthful experience was of financial uncertainty caused by factors outside the family's control, Margaret's memory was of a solid certainty, the product, as she believed, of her father's efforts and prudence."

"Someone once said that Margaret Thatcher satisfied the average Englishman's longing for the perfect dominatrix. No doubt about it, she could deliver pain. The Iron Lady should best be remembered as the Leather Lady. Indeed, today Thatcherism leaves its dreary imprint not only on the Conservative Party but---thanks also to Tony Blair---on a Labor Party that accepts most of her regressive policies."

"When the historians seek parallels for the counter-revolution which took place in Britain under Margaret Thatcher, I think they will compare what happened here with what happened to France under General de Gaulle from 1958–68. Both leaders challenged their countries to do better, to think bigger and to reverse their relative decline. Both leaders drew heavily on a strident nationalism to galvanize their nations. Through their own hubris, both were ignominiously brought down by the people on whom they had relied in order to exert immense and unprecedented power... Both leaders sought regeneration from within, building up national pride and eschewing dilution through a United States of Europe."

"[D]uring the [Falklands] war her leadership had been superb... Mrs Thatcher started off as terribly vulnerable. At home her political position was weak. A bad reverse in the early days and her leadership might have had to be terminated. An actual naval defeat down in the Southern Atlantic would have toppled her and possibly even the whole government. She knew she was playing for enormous stakes. But once she faced them, she behaved outstandingly well. Some potential Prime Ministers might have accepted the invasion, decided not to throw the Argentines out, and worked out some compromise. I have never doubted that such a course would have been absolutely devastating for this country. Mrs Thatcher recognised that from the start, instinctively, and deserves credit for it."

"Europe was less distracted and divided by disinformation campaigns from fossil fuel companies and emerged early on as a global leader on the climate issue. UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, a former research chemist, respected the scientific warnings and, also driven by her determination to break the power of the coal-mining unions, lent her support in 1989 to the concept of negotiating the UN Framework Convention...Thus, when the US stepped back from leadership on the climate issue, the European Union, led by the UK and Germany as well as the Netherlands and its Scandinavian member states, partly filled the void and pushed for global action to address the problem. Benefitting from German reunification and the collapse of the former East Germany's emissions, and those from other former Soviet states, the EU achieved the target it agreed to at Kyoto."

"Whenever I am asked which famous person dead or alive I would want to meet if I could, my answer is always without fail Margaret Thatcher. It surprises people that the leader of Britain's Conservative Party is my greatest shero. While her politics aren't mine, she was also a first-the first female prime minister of Britain. Thatcher was a self-starter in the grandest of ways. Without any kind of special invitation or connections, time and time again she showed up in rooms filled with men and didn't have to do much to lead them to decide that she should be in charge. That she held office for eleven years, longer than any other British politician in the twentieth century, proves her level of confidence and intellect. It was her fearlessness and internal sense of equality, however, which made her able to pull off being a first."

"The world has lost one of the great champions of freedom and liberty, and America has lost a true friend. As a grocer's daughter who rose to become Britain's first female prime minister, she stands as an example to our daughters that there is no glass ceiling that can't be shattered. As prime minister, she helped restore the confidence and pride that has always been the hallmark of Britain at its best. And as an unapologetic supporter of our transatlantic alliance, she knew that with strength and resolve we could win the Cold War and extend freedom's promise."

"[Television interviewers] simply lack the guts or resourcefulness to stand up to a politician who combines the hauteur of Trollope's Mrs Proudie with the jugular instincts of a fishwife."

"She's the Prime Minister who really wanted to be Queen. Major's boring, the Prime Minister who wanted to be a train spotter."

"She's the biggest bastard we have ever known."

"Margaret Thatcher is the greatest living Englishwoman."

"She has the eyes of Stalin and the voice of Marilyn Monroe."

"Personally I think that she has the qualities of a very great politician. I believe she has tremendous conviction, she has drive, she has commitment, she is totally genuine. On the other side I think she has a certain tunnel vision, she is uncompromising, she goes over the top too much – she did over the miners, she tried to make out that Arthur Scargill was Galtieri and that the miners were the Argies. I think that view does not go down well in the country. And I think she's deeply lacking in compassion and sensitivity."

"I think Margaret Thatcher started it, the greed thing, people just wanting more and more."

"She is an enemy of apartheid... We have much to thank her for."

"If you fight a war, you want a great general. She was a great general."

"From the military man's point of view she was an ideal Prime Minister... One wanted a decision and she gave it."

"The greatest Prime Minister this century toppled for no good reason, by pygmies."

"Of all the prime ministers, I thought she offered the best hope for Britain. Her strengths were her passionate belief in her country and her iron will to turn it around. She was convinced that free enterprise and the free market led to a free society. Her basic political instincts were sound though she tended to be too self-confident and self-righteous. Her disadvantage, in a class-conscious Britain, was her background as "the grocer's daughter". It was a pity that the British establishment still labored under these prejudices. By the time she left office, Britons had become less class-ridden."

"Margaret was unusual, for a Tory leader, in actually warming to the Conservative Party – that is to say, the party in the country, rather than its Members of Parliament... Harold Macmillan had a contempt for the party, Alec Home tolerated it, Ted Heath loathed it. Margaret genuinely liked it. She felt a communion with it, one which later expanded to embrace the silent majority of the British people as a whole."

"What a superb creature she is – right and beautiful – few prime ministers are either. But the country will let her down, too idle and selfish."

"Her great virtue is saying that two and two makes four, which is unpopular nowadays as it always has been. I adore Mrs Thatcher. At last politics make sense to me, which it hasn't since Stafford Cripps."

"Margaret Thatcher always gave me headaches."

""Economics are the method," Margaret Thatcher said, "the object is to change the heart and soul." It was a mission largely accomplished."

"I found her totally different from other politicians. Every other politician I knew said that in order to win elections you had to win the centre. Her position was that you had to articulate your position as clearly as you can and the centre will come over to you... I was always very taken with her. You could say she seduced me... But I thought she might never get elected with those views."

"If Margaret Thatcher wins on Thursday, I warn you not to be ordinary. I warn you not to be young. I warn you not to fall ill. And I warn you not to grow old."

"[The British armed forces responded to Mrs. Thatcher as war leader] in a way that hasn't been known since the time of Elizabeth I, with a passion and loyalty that few male generals have ever inspired or commanded."

"While I would not go so far as to say that Mrs. Thatcher had a coherent ideological agenda, she most certainly harbored dogmatic prejudices to which radical policies could be appended according to convenience and opportunity. Although anything but an intellectual herself, Margaret Thatcher was unusually attracted to intellectual men who could assist her in justifying and describing her own instincts—so long as they were themselves outsiders and not tarred with the brush of convention. Unlike the more moderate conservatives whose policies and ambitions she so devastatingly thwarted, Mrs. Thatcher was quite unprejudiced against Jews, showing something of a predilection for them in her choice of private advisors. Finally, and once again in contrast to her conservative predecessors, she was rather sympathetic to the writings of economists—but only and egregiously those from one particular school: Hayek and the Austrians."

"She seems to me to have been gripped since before she won the leadership of the Tory party by a clear understanding, a passionately clear understanding, of the interacting causes of our relative economic decline. She saw it, as it seems to me, partly stemming from successive governments which by increasing the money supply kept on rescuing managements and labour from having to become more competitive. She saw it therefore as primarily a failure of government in creating the climate which enabled inefficiencies to continue to the point where all our neighbours soared past us in competitiveness, in prosperity, in social services, in standard of living and in purchasing power for all their people. She saw it infecting management which was allowed to be flabby. And she saw it as intensified or made worse and more difficult by the uncomprehending approach of trade unions who don't seem to realise where their members' interests lie."

"History will surely recognise her achievements as Britain's first woman Prime Minister, a leader with the courage of her convictions who assailed the conventional wisdom of her day, challenged and overthrew the existing order, changed the political map, and put the country on its feet again. She did all this with ruthlessness and much injustice and at a high cost in human misery, but she did it."

"Thatcherism was still wreaking, and had wrought for the previous decade, the most heinous social, economic and spiritual damage upon this country... We were told that everything I had been taught to regard as a vice—and I still regard them as vices—was, in fact, under Thatcherism, a virtue: greed, selfishness, no care for the weaker, sharp elbows, sharp knees, all these were the way forward."

"Whenever feminists have complained in my presence about neglect of female high-achievers, other than rock singers and courtesans, I always like to mention brilliant Margaret Thatcher. It always makes them furious. They can't bear to think of her as one of the most successful women of the 20th century."

"Margaret Thatcher was beyond argument a great Prime Minister. Her tragedy is that she may be remembered less for the brilliance of her many achievements than for the recklessness with which she later sought to impose her own increasingly uncompromising views."

"Oh yes, she is dramatically exciting! She has an openness, a frankness, an enthusiasm and an unwillingness to be cowed and overcome by tiredness which makes her enormous fun to work with. You can never be quite sure on issues you have never discussed with her what her instinctive reaction will be, but it's bound to be interesting. She is as willing as any politician to be pre-occupied with the difficulties of the situation. Britain has not been winning for many years and the business of turning us round so that we begin to become winners again instead of losers is very difficult and there are many days when you go into the office and yet again the cards seem to fall in the wrong way. In politics as in any other walk of life, you just wonder when your lucky breaks are going to come back again. Now Margaret is quite undaunted by that. She is willing to be pre-occupied with the difficulties and discuss them because they have to be discussed, but you never feel that she is being overborne by them and she is able to show that even on the days when it isn't fun, she thinks it's well worth while having a try!"

"She was motivated by a real sense of shame at what her country had become, and a manic sense of mission that never left her. She showed phenomenal energy and stamina, a readiness to fight rather than compromise, and, once engaged, an absolute refusal to haul up the white flag. Her achievements, judged simply in terms of what faced her in 1979, were truly astonishing. She knew what was happening to the country, but, unlike most of her contemporaries, she believed it could be saved. Ten years later she had been proved right about the country, the unions, the 1981 Budget, the Falklands, the miners, and right – in my view – about Europe and the single currency. She had transformed Britain's prospects where other politicians who had appeared cleverer, more experienced and more sophisticated had failed."

"You've got to put her in the same category as Bloody Mary, Queen Elizabeth I, Queen Anne and Queen Victoria. However, she reminds me most of Queen Elizabeth I out of these four. Her handling of men is not dissimilar. I mean, if you had been a courtier of Queen Elizabeth I you would never have known quite whether you were going to get the treatment of an admired friend, or a poke in the eye with an umbrella."

"She comes from a certain social background, one step up the ladder of economic success, with it, a lot of the characteristics that you associate with people who've just made it. A certain intolerance of those who haven't, a certain suspicion of those who are further up the ladder, a certain bigotry. Slightly over-simplistic solutions about the nature of the society in which they live. And then she went to university and got a fantastic degree and she had a fine mind."

"I have always admired you, because you are a true commitment politician, as I trust I am... Politically, I cannot be sorry that you are no longer PM. Yet in a personal sense I am terribly sorry as although I disagreed with you, no one could say you were not honest, courageous and with great integrity."

"A mixture of a matron at a minor public school and a guard in a concentration camp."

"It is Mrs Thatcher's great merit that she has broken with the Keynesian immorality of 'in the long run we are all dead' and to have concentrated on the long run future of the country irrespective of possible effects on the electors. Keynesian irresponsibility naturally appeals to the timid wets... Mrs Thatcher's courage makes her put the long run future of the country first. After being much too long restrained by the believers in the Muddle of the Middle, her new stature ought to enable her to guide us by her true vision."

"Margaret Thatcher was the hardest-working head of Government I ever met. Her application was prodigious and she was always extraordinarily well briefed for every meeting. Whatever the subject, she could press her sometimes jarring and belligerent viewpoints with great authority, and for that I deeply respected her."

"[N]o British Prime Minister for whom I worked would have got a better deal than Margaret Thatcher and several would probably have settled for something inferior."

"She does have a very natural understanding of what the people, the majority, the good hearted, the people who really care about the country, think... She doesn't actually have that superior feeling about ordinary people's views. She does have a real belief that they are worthwhile. She isn't in any way snooty, intellectually snooty, she has a simplicity which enables her to feel for people who say, "I don't want old ladies mugged on the street. If we hanged the muggers then they wouldn't be mugged on the street." She managed to disentangle herself from the rather artificial reactions of the House of Commons, of government, of metropolitan man. She can react as ordinary people do to a series of events, and that's tremendous strength."

"I found our conversation startling. She had a level of understanding of the way the world worked that most people in the political realm are unable to acquire. And it was a view that I would agree with. She believed in free-market discipline."

"Fortunately Hayek never had any influence on Thatcher's policies. (Her chief economic adviser in these years was Alan Walters, a Friedman-style monetarist.) Equally, and perhaps also happily, Thatcher had no understanding of Hayek's ideas. If it was true that she carried about with her for a time a copy of Hayek's magnum opus, The Constitution of Liberty (1960), she cannot have read its postscript, "Why I am not a Conservative", in which Hayek explains that he rejects conservatism because it lacks a vision of human progress. A case can be made that Thatcher was no conservative, either – at least if being conservative includes an aversion to policies that impose deep changes on inherited social institutions. But this is a view that goes only so far. Unlike Hayek, Thatcher understood and accepted the political limits of market economics."