How new Prime Minister Theresa May compares to Margaret Thatcher, the first woman to lead the U.K.
Theresa May has now succeeded David Cameron as U.K. prime minister, becoming only the second female prime minister in British history. The first, of course, was the legendary Margaret Thatcher, who led the country from 1979 to 1990. Thatcher yanked Britain from its trajectory of decline and won the argument, at least temporarily, for free markets over socialism. In doing so she changed not only the course of British history, but that of world history to a degree rivaled by few other woman, and no other British figure in the past century save Winston Churchill. In the process, she also permanently changed what we believe about women, power and women in power.
“May takes power in Britain at a moment of crisis, division and national doubt, as Thatcher did.”
It is far too soon to say whether Theresa May is made of similar stuff, but comparisons are inevitable, and in some aspects, they are warranted. Like Thatcher, who died in 2013, Theresa May is an experienced veteran of Conservative Party politics; she takes a pro-market stance and a no-nonsense approach to law and order. Like Thatcher, she enters the nation's highest political office with a reputation for intelligence, hard work, competence and mastery of her brief. Home Secretary for six years, she emerged from the position politically unscathed, an achievement in its own right: The job tends to be a political graveyard, and has led many of her predecessors to failure or scandal. May managed, to the contrary, to be the longest-serving Home Secretary for more than half a century.
Like Thatcher, May keeps a distance from Parliament's Old Boy networks. She has steered clear of Cameron's so-called "chumocracy." Thatcher, according to her intimates, was almost awkwardly un-clubbable; her chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, told me she had few interests beyond politics: If you were looking for a good game of snooker, Thatcher wasn't your woman. Like Thatcher, May comes from the middle class and made her money the old-fashioned way: She married it. Denis Thatcher was already a millionaire when he met Thatcher, his second wife, and financed her training as a barrister. May's husband is a well-off investment banker.
Thatcher's rise to power was assisted by good luck and the folly of her rivals. Thatcher kept her nose clean, escaping the financial and economic wreckage of the disastrous Ted Heath government. It is far too early to say whether May's tenure in power will likewise be so lucky, but in her rise to power she has certainly benefited exceedingly from her rivals' genius for self-destruction. Thatcher could not have hoped for better opponents than the leaders of the weak and bickering Labour Party under James Callaghan, Michael Foot and then Neil Kinnock, and so long as the Labour Party remains a shambles under the mad Jeremy Corbyn, May, too, will face no serious challenge to her power from Britain's main opposition party.
Both women won the competition to lead their party almost by default when all of their party rivals in one way or another blundered their way out of the running. Keith Joseph, for example, was widely considered the source of Margaret Thatcher's ideas. But he destroyed his career with an ill-considered speech that sounded to many like a call for eugenics. The hapless Andrea Leadsom, telling The Times of London that she didn't want to sound "really horrible" in stressing that she had children and May had not, managed to torpedo herself by sounding precisely the way she didn't wish to sound – really horrible.
May takes power in Britain at a moment of crisis, division and national doubt, as Thatcher did. Thatcher entered 10 Downing Street in the wake of the Winter of Discontent, when labor unrest shut down public services, paralyzing the nation for months on end and resulting in rubbish piled high on the street. So dire was Britain's economic predicament that it had been humiliatingly obliged to supplicate for a loan from the International Monetary Fund. Even the Soviet trade minister told his British counterpart, "We don't want to increase our trade with you. Your goods are unreliable, you're always on strike, you never deliver."
Britain before Thatcher was a pessimistic, defeated, passive and depressed country. Tax rates were not merely high; they were – at 98 percent on some "unearned" income – confiscatory. The unions seemed immune to government challenge. Work stoppages strangled industry. Inflation seemed impossible to tame. But by the time Thatcher left power, Britain was optimistic, victorious and active. This was in no small measure thanks to Thatcher's singular force of will and determination.
May takes power at a moment of similar gloom. Britain is now deeply divided over its decision to leave the European Union; its economy is at risk, its place in the world unsure, and its unity threatened by calls for Scottish independence. Although it was enjoying a relatively strong economic recovery, this looks set rapidly to deteriorate. Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, warns of a grave shock to the economy from the Brexit vote. Consumer confidence has taken a massive hit and businesses are unsure whether to invest or hire. Homeowners don't know whether to sell or buy; foreign investors have been spooked. Britain's debt now exceeds 1 trillion pounds, some 90 percent of GDP, and the country has lost its top ratings with the major credit agencies.
What's more, Europe is facing an aggressive and hostile Russia and its biggest terrorist threat in a generation. The EU nations may reconsider sharing intelligence with Britain in the wake of its withdrawal. It remains to be seen if May has Thatcher's ability to restore confidence and right the sinking ship of state.
In some key ways, Thatcher and May would seem to be women of quite different temperaments and beliefs. Although both women's fathers were clergymen, and both were profoundly shaped by their Christian upbringings, they appear to understand the political implications of their faith in dissimilar ways. Margaret Thatcher derived from her Christian upbringing an abiding loathing of the sin of socialism. She viewed collectivism and state economic planning not merely as bad, failed economic policy, but as an evil in its corrosive effects on the human spirit. Thatcher, more than any other postwar politician, was driven by ideology. Only her name, alone among postwar prime ministers, has become synonymous with a political ideology. The core principles of that ideology – Thatcherism -- were the superiority of free markets to government solutions, popular capitalism, property ownership, privatization, firm control over public expenditure, low taxation and individualism. She deplored welfare spending and collective bargaining. Her faith in the morally redemptive power of free markets went well beyond standard economic claims. "Economics are the method," she once said, "The object is to change the soul."
According to her friends, Theresa May has drawn different lessons from her religious upbringing. It has, they say, committed her to bettering the circumstances of the poor and disadvantaged. If Thatcher was known as an ideologue – "She's not your ordinary, worldweary, pompous, self-important, thinking-inside-the-box, slightly defeatist, pragmatic, cautious, Tory politician," her close adviser, John Hoskyns, said to me – May's reputation is the opposite. She is known as a pragmatist. In this sense, comparisons with another female politician, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, may be more apt.
At times, May even sounds like a traditional Labour politician. In 2002, she attacked her party for failing to counter its reputation for hard-heartedness – a reputation in large measure owed to Thatcher. "Twice we went to the country unchanged, unrepentant, just plain unattractive … twice we got slaughtered," she said. Conservatives, she said, were "the nasty party." Recently, she deplored the "unhealthy and growing gap" between bosses and workers, and called for workers' representatives to be placed on the boards of large corporations. "It is not anti-business to suggest that big business needs to change," she said. "We must make Britain a country that works not for a privileged few but for every single one of us."
She has likewise vowed, in words very unlikely ever to have been uttered by Thatcher, to fight "burning injustice" of an unprivileged birth rank, pointing out that someone born poor in Britain will "die on average nine years earlier than others." In the same sentence she pointed out that "If you're black, you're treated more harshly by the criminal justice system than if you are white. If you're a white, working-class boy, you're less likely than anyone else in Britain to go to university. If you're at a state school, you're less likely to reach the top professions than if you were educated privately. If you are a woman, you will earn less than a man."
The only sense in which this speech evoked Thatcher is that it was, probably, politically shrewd.
Although comparisons to Thatcher may be inevitable, it might be more apt to compare May to a previous Conservative prime minister, Harold MacMillan. He too took power when his predecessor fell from grace having suffered a terrible, self-inflicted political wound. In 1956, Sir Anthony Eden conspired with France and Israel in order to retake the Suez Canal. Although a military success, the invasion led to condemnation from the United Nations, the Soviet Union, the Commonwealth and the threat of sanctions from the United States. Eden was forced into a humiliating retreat, after which he tendered his resignation. Macmillan emerged from the wreckage to lead a demoralized and divided Conservative Party. He was much less a doctrinal champion of the free market than a planner and modernizer – and May is in that way more a second MacMillan than a second Thatcher.
Whatever the points of similarity and difference between the women, however, there is one way in which they cannot be alike. Only one of them could be the first female prime minister of Britain, and that woman was Thatcher. She achieved things no woman before her had ever achieved, in doing so simultaneously exploited every aspect of her femininity and turned every conventional expectation about women upside down. It was Thatcher who normalized the idea of women holding one of the world's most powerful offices, and Thatcher who proved that a woman could indeed wield that power, to devastating effect. Between Thatcher and Merkel, perhaps soon to be followed by Hillary Clinton, modern electorates are so used to women in charge that no one now seriously asks whether such a thing is even possible. Thatcher made of herself a rebuttal to several millennia's worth of assumptions about women, power, and women in power. For women who aspire to power, there is history before Thatcher and history after; and no woman in politics will ever escape the comparison.
Indeed, Thatcher used her femininity to advantage in ways that May probably cannot, because times have changed – in no small part thanks to Thatcher. Thatcher, for example, masterfully exploited the novelty of her position and the discombobulation this inspired in Neil Kinnock, who led the Labour Party for the larger part of the Thatcher era. Kinnock subsequently told me how disadvantaged he felt by this: "The public would see fellows my age standing toe-to-toe and knocking the hell out of each other and think, 'Well, that's what happens,' but if I did it to a woman, a whole segment of society, for understandable reasons, would say, 'That's so disrespectful.'" May's opponents will no doubt feel less constrained by the public's chivalry, real or imagined.
Thatcher's press secretary, Bernard Ingham, told me that Thatcher was elected as an insult and a rebuke to the political class: The men had made such a hash of it, he said, that the electorate expressed its contempt by voting for a woman. They had no idea what a consequential figure Thatcher would prove to be, and no idea that a woman could be such a consequential figure.
The acquisition of power brought into being all of Thatcher's now-immortal incarnations – diva, mother of the nation, coy flirt, hissing serpent, stern headmistress, eyes of Caligula, mouth of Bardot, screeching harridan, frugal housewife, Boadicea the Warrior Queen, and Iron Lady, all in one.
It remains to be seen how power shapes Theresa May.
This piece originally appeared at U.S. News & World Report
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Claire Berlinski is a contributing editor of City Journal.
Photo by Pool / Getty Images
This piece originally appeared in U.S. News and World Report