One of Us

"I’ve recommended it on the know-thine-enemy principle. Charles is quite even-handed, despite being very pro-Mrs T. And, obviously, Robin is pro-Mrs T. But this shows you what the North London intelligentsia really thought of her and why they hated her. And if anyone wanted to understand—years later—the failings of anti-Thatcherism, this book brings them out absolutely perfectly. Hugo did know her; I’ve been at press conferences with him when he was talking to her. But he didn’t know her well. She wouldn’t have trusted or liked him. But, in this book, he never really comes up with what the alternative was to Thatcher’s programme. One thing that really motivated me to be a supporter of hers is that I will never forget this country on its knees in three feet of snow and six feet of rubbish in February 1979. It was just completely paralysed. I went up to Cambridge that October. It’s amazing how my generation was affected by it. Of course, there was a Fabian Society and a Labour Club at Cambridge in my day. There was even a little Liberal Club in those days. But the Conservative Association was the most active and powerful political association in the university. And most of the people who ran the Cambridge Union were Conservatives. Our generation had been so profoundly affected by the incompetence of governments and the tyranny of trade unions that we knew something had to change. “Hugo’s view of Britain was the direct opposite of Mrs Thatcher’s. Hugo thought it was all over for Britain and that we were completely finished” People like Hugo just didn’t seem to get that. They lived in great splendour in Islington and would go down to the Guardian in their sedan chairs and live an existence in which many of the realities of life didn’t really impinge upon them. It’s very easy to be grand and idealistic and say, ‘Oh, the poor miners.’ Yes, the poor miners. I was very sorry for them. I’m sorry for anybody who loses his job. Mrs Thatcher offered re-training schemes. There were regeneration schemes. There were enterprise zones. She did make an attempt to do things better. But she encountered the same problem that the national government encountered in the 1930s; the economic revival had to start somewhere. After 1931, after the slump, it started around London and in car factories in the West Midlands. It didn’t start in the places where the old industries had lost their export markets and their products were no longer required. Her revival of the economy obviously started in London. I remember being a young man in London in the 1980s, going home at the weekends from Liverpool Street station to see my mother, and tripping over very drunk young traders lying in the gutter, with empty bottles of champagne next to them. I’m not exaggerating. The train home on a Friday from Liverpool Street to Essex was called ‘The Vomit Comet’ because that’s what it was. You had endless numbers of very young men whose capacity for alcohol did not exceed their income and they were blowing it all on booze. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter There was a boom in wealth, and a very ostentatious boom, in the south of England and it took a long time to go north. But that wasn’t her fault. That happened in the 1930s as well, when Ramsay MacDonald was prime minister. Anyway, Hugo Young constructs the typical anti-Thatcher argument. I never thought much of his stuff at the time and, looking back now, I just think he was monumentally wrong. But, if you want to understand the whole phenomenon of Thatcherism, which is not just what she did but also what everyone tried to prevent her from doing, you have to read Hugo’s book. He had terrific contacts in the Conservative Party. He was very good at portraying her absolutism and the way that her relationships with colleagues would degenerate if those colleagues didn’t accept, not her word, but what she believed was the will of the people. That’s why she fell out with Geoffrey Howe. And, of course, Hugo got Europe monumentally wrong. He rejoiced in our membership of the EU. But what he didn’t understand was that she became part of a 47-year campaign to get us out of the European Union . She understood that a lot of people in the country didn’t like being in Europe and were not benefiting from it and didn’t like being told what to do. And she didn’t like being told what to do. That was fine for Hugo because Hugo’s view of Britain was the direct opposite of Mrs Thatcher’s. Hugo thought it was all over for Britain and that we were completely finished. That, if you like, has been the argument between Remainers and Leavers ever since. You either believe in this country or you don’t. She did and he didn’t. I think what she instinctively knew was that all empires fail. There was evidence of that during her reign because the Soviet bloc collapsed. Hugo was taking a very ahistorical point of view by saying that this empire, uniquely, was inevitably going to be a thousand-year Reich—my words, not his. And it was balls. It was never going to happen. Inevitably, the same will happen one day with America. When you’ve got 71 million people voting for Trump, the idea that Joe Biden is going to sow sweetness and light with unimpeded ease, is rubbish. There’s something about very big polities that have different cultures in them, that means they don’t last. It was true of our empire, it was true of the Soviet Union, and of all those empires that fell in 1918, and it will be true of America."