Mrs Thatcher's self-awareness

Julian Barnes, discussing Margaret Thatcher's The Downing Street Years:

'She can see, for instance, that she was the most feted and fetishised of modern Prime Ministers but not that she was also the most loathed. She was loathed in a personal as well as in a political way, since her perceived character - domineering, mean-spirited, divisive, unheeding - seemed to inform and infect her policies. That character is amply on display here. She is contemptuous of Tory wets and Tory grandees. She is contemptuous of the Tory tradition that she supplanted, referring at one point to the "thirty-year experiment" of "socialism" in postwar Britain: as far as one can follow her chronology, this clearly includes the Conservative governments of Heath, Douglas-Home, Macmillan, and Eden, and possibly that of Churchill. Special spite is reserved for two of her main adjutants, Nigel Lawson and Geoffrey Howe, neither of whom could finally stomach her. Howe's resignation speech prompted a challenge to her leadership, ensuring, to her eyes, that "from this point on [he] would be remembered not for his staunchness as Chancellor, nor for his skillful diplomacy as Foreign Secretary, but for this final act of bile and treachery. The very brilliance with which he wielded the dagger ensured that the character he assassinated was in the end his own". As for the real Opposition, try this for superciliousness: "Mr Kinnock, in all his years as Opposition leader, never let me down. Right to the end, he struck every wrong note".

Monocularity at home, cecity abroad. Alan Clark reports a comment that Mrs Thatcher made to civil servant Frank Cooper two years after she had been made leader of the Opposition. "Must I do all this international stuff?" she asked, and when he replied, "You can't avoid it," she pulled a face. Cooper also recalled that '"during that period she and [Cooper] had met Reagan and Carter, and she was astonished at how stupid they were. "Can they really dispose of all that power?", etc.' She grew to enjoy motorcade acclaim, of course, and the banquets chez Mitterand, while never seeming to suspect that when you are applauded in Eastern Europe it does not necessarily mean more than a public snub to the local leaders. She is sure that "the beliefs and policies which I ... pioneered in Britain" have helped "to remould world affairs". She cannot conceive that the Falklands expedition might be viewed elsewhere not as an early start on the new world order but as the last twitch of an imperial past. She is much happier with distant sheikhs than with European democrats. She imagines that her obstructive, nagging, bullying attitude to Europe was taken as a sign that Britain was walking tall once more. She thinks that if you insult people you gain their respect'.

- Julian Barnes, 'Mrs Thatcher Remembers', from The New Yorker, November 1993, quoted in Barnes, Letters from London, 1995, 227-8.  

See also:
Blog: Thatcher in office, 10 June 2013
Blog: Anticipating the funeral of Margaret Hilda Thatcher, 14 April 2013
Blog: 'This Monty Python, is he one of us?', 8 October 2010