Ordinarily, this sort of political squabble would quickly fade away. But Thatcher is no ordinary politician, and for her these are not ordinary times. On the eve of her 74th birthday, nine years out of power, and 20 years after she first became prime minister, Britons are reassessing the Iron Lady. On the one hand, she is the person whose enduring political influence is unequaled in postwar Britain, the recipient of solicitous phone calls from Prime Minister Tony Blair, leader of the Labour Party she has long despised. On the other hand, she is the prime minister turned baroness in decline, a “grande dame who is seen as slightly batty,” says her onetime biographer, Hugo Young.
Britain is coming to terms with what one of her friends calls “the Thatcher paradox.” Thatcher herself is an increasingly less visible ex-politician in her declining years. “She has almost disappeared off the radar screen,” says Maurice Fraser of the London School of Economics. She gave more than 100 speeches in 1997, earning over $100,000 apiece for some. This year she will give 20 or so, and only three in Britain. She is also not the room-electrifying life force she once was. Nor should she be expected to be, argue her admirers candidly. “She’s not 58 anymore,” says a friend. “She gets tired. She has become a pastiche of herself in some ways, it’s true. When she’s invited somewhere, she feels she has to deliver the image that people want to see.” And yet Thatcherism, her legacy as the prime minister who revolutionized the British economy, is robust and durable. In that sense, says her longtime associate Lord Tim Bell, Thatcher “today has a presence [in British political life] much larger than her personal presence.”
Blair is living proof of that. Particularly in economic matters, his government is Thatcherism without Thatcher. Even in the run-up to the 1997 election, Labour spin doctors spread stories about how she was confiding to friends that she liked Blair’s politics. Blair plainly admires Thatcher’s leadership style. During the war in Kosovo, he invited her to see him–not necessarily to plot strategy, but to wrap himself in the mantle of Thatcherite resolve.
Given the way her legacy survives on Downing Street, Thatcher may have gotten more than she bargained for when her own party forced her into retirement. A year ago, in the only interview of any consequence that she has given in at least three years, Thatcher spoke to Saga (“the UK’s magazine for mature people”). After formally notifying the queen of her resignation in 1990, Thatcher recalled, “I thought I’d go back just one more time to my room at Number 10, to make sure that I’d left nothing and left it tidy. But apparently I’d already taken the door key off my key-ring and when I looked for it, it had been taken away. So I couldn’t go back in.” Her great consolation must be that, in so many other ways, she never left.
