II. Read and translate the text.

1 There, the perception of Britain undoubtedly changed.It is a universal law of international politics that foreigners prefer to deal with strong governments than with weak ones. Diplomacy is rendered somewhat simpler if the government is in charge of the country,and the leader in charge of the government. [For all the perils which put Mrs. Thatcher's position at riskfrom time to time, this situation was widely seen to obtain in Britain for most of the 1980s, and it brought forth a certain respect.]

Three components were important. The first, in all probability,was the Falklands war. Here, as into so much of the political life of this leader, the war reached deep. Although foreigners wereoften disposed tosee the operation as a piece of British eccentricity, which they thought led nowhere, its very improbability enhanced the reputation of the countrythat won it. This is an age when few industrialised countries have known war, and all their leaders look forward only to maintaining the peace.But the fact of a clean victory in war appeals to the atavistic instincts of many who are placed in charge of their nation's destiny.It is the task which, were their country faced with it, they would have the awful responsibility of undertaking. That Britain should have stood up for a principleso far from home, and returned victorious, gave her a special standing in the club of nations, which the years did not erase.

Second, economic recovery, with all its limitations, caused an important revision in the way Britain was seen. This was now a country rising in the recovery league, and even though it now stood sixth in the free world's order of prosperity,having been overtaken by Italy under Mrs. Thatcher's leadership, it was a sounder economy, and London survived deregulation to remain one of the three leading financial capitals. With less debt and more growth, and with the curse of trade union power apparently exorcised, Britain was no longer a supplicant for the world's attention. [It was seen to have entered the concert of modern nations.

2 A third positive element was supplied by the leader of this nation herself. Again her very strength and long political life excited the admiration of the club, where all the members had a special appreciation of what these qualities entailed. In her person, she became unmistakable. Amazement at hersex evolved into astonishment at her survival.In many of the countries she visited, she fascinated the peopleas much as she mesmerised the politicians. She acquired, therefore, a reputation which any other British leader would find hard to replicate. In 1984, Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, called her the «Iron Man» on British politics. In 1986, the Singapore leader, Lee Kuan Yew, said, «She had guts and stands up for what she believes in», and added that she deserved the thanks of the British people «for teaching Mr. Scargill a lesson».In 1988, the Polish leader, General Jarazelski, on the eve of a visit she was making to his country,presumed to judge her «one of the outstanding figures in British history». Even in Western Europe, which most often felt the sharpness of her tongue, initial detestation grew into watchful respect.

Having such a visible leader achieved, of itself, some improvement in Britain's standing. Coupled with economic growth, it added quite a lot to the balance sheet. A big question remained, however, about how this credit was put to work. Did Britain deploy its new and burgeoning assets to best advantage?Here the record was flawed by the narrowness of vision at the top,and the tendency, not diminished as time passed, to apply to all international questions an overriding test of the British national interest — and almost always in the short term.

Thus, the Falklands war was fought and won, but seven years later no hint of an initiative to make a settlement with Argentina had appeared on the Foreign Office agenda.The Foreign Office, indeed, was a somewhat emaciated force, its instincts for diplomacy continually whittled down from the other side of Downing Street. [The Falklands garrison continued to eat into the defense budget: an untouchable element, and likely to remain so for as long as Mrs. Thatcher was prime minister.]

3 In Europe, this narrow determination was still more public and much more important. Winning the battle over Britain's contribution to the Community budgetdid not herald a new era of Euro-minded leadership. The country remained hooked on its special relationship with the United States, and a combative relationship all points east of Dover. In June 1988, President Reagan paid Ms last visit to Britain,and the occasion was dominated not by the future but by the past, with president and prime minister drenching each other in sentiment about the Second World War. At no point did Britain position itself in concerted fashion to intervene as West Germany continued to grow closer to France.[Britain, instead, appeared not to want to lead.] With the single European market beckoning in 1992, Britain's role was to spoil the party and set a firm limit to the measure of unification it would tolerate.

[Into the changing scenery of the later eighties, in short, Britain did not easily fit.] As Washington looked west, and the signs multiplied of a remorseless shift in the shape of the continents, a stronger Britain nonetheless fought to resist the inescapable consequence: that Europe must draw closer.

How much leaders matter, as compared with such shifts in the structure, whether on the world plane or the national, is a matter of perennial discussion.In the case of Mrs. Thatcher's leadership of a decade of Conservative government in Britain, there are those who have contended that the leader was more an accident than an instru­ment of the political environment in which she found herself. Others, not far distant from this, have depicted her as the agent of a force so much larger than she was as to render her personal contribution little more than incidental to the project that came to bear her name. This was an opinion throughout die decade, and with increasing fervour,on the far left. Although the left reviled Mrs. Thatcher personally, deploying her as a totemic hate-object to rally their devotees, they also allowed a sneaking admiration for one whom they perceived as being engaged on as massive a revolutionary task as they set themselves. They tended to represent Thatcherism as a bold, organised, sometimes «hegemonic» initiative in the class war, to which the personalityof its eponymous heroine did not greatly matter.

4 This was not the view generally transmitted to the British people. Nor was it correct. Whatever qualities she lacked, dominance was not one of them.One had only to cast an eye over the newspapers any day of any week of any year to understand the measure of her domination, as perceived not only by editors but by the politicians, the information men, the lobbyists and the imagemakers who supplied the material for their headlines. There was no corner of British society to which «Maggie» could not sooner or later turn her hand; no problem which she could not solve, no governmental triumph that failed to be peculiarly hers. On the upper scale, Maggie would order Europe, instruct Reagan, see off the Russians, direct the Commonwealth. On the lower she took charge of problems large and small,from football hooliganism to the drugs crisis, from a detailed sub-clause in the Law of the Sea treaty to the precise configuration of the customs hall at the British end of the Channel Tunnel. She was portrayed as the person without whom nothing could be decided, and nothing was decided. More often than with any of her predecessors, this was true. She wanted to take charge. She did take charge.

Nor was she modest about it. She became ever more aware of her own importance.After three elections, she spoke of herself as a venerable part of the furniture of British life and, more optimistically, as one who would be missed if she went. «I think I have become a bit of an institution», she told an interviewer. «And the place wouldn't be quite the same without this old institution. People seem to think, 'She isn't so bad is she, this Maggie?' They wanted their children to meet you. Americans, of course, are absolutely amazed. They say, 'We've never had a chance to meet a person like this'.»

This was not a false estimation. Her presence came to overshadow the whole of public life, and a fair amount of private conversation. Along with dominance went the same extinction of rival forcesin the cabinet as was applied to rival centres of influence outside it. It was one of her shortcomingsas a prime minister that all around her were close to being pygmies. Over nine years she kept only three cabinet members who were there from the start, and none who might constitute a source of countervailing advice, let alone power,to her own. In terms of broad quality among its members, her ministry was not distinguished.It wasn't the equal of Attlee's, with whose impact on Britain Mrs. Thatcher's was often compared. After the first two years, it was a case of Maggie first and the rest nowhere. Add to this a power of patronage exercised with more meticulous personal attentionfrom Downing Street than ever happened before, reaching out from the civil service into the entire public world up and down the country, and becomes difficult to withhold from her die greatest share of responsibility for what happened.

5 How, in sum, did she exercise it? What was her personal contribution? What was the peculiar quality she brought, and what, if anything, was the dark side of that quality? Two particular characteristics, which infused most of what she did, suggest themselves.

The first quality was a sense of moral rectitude, which accounted for the single main achievement that would not have happened without her. This was the attachment to fiscal rigour in the early years, which, whatever analysis is made of its consequences, was an extraordinary exercise in political will. As the famous cabinet of 23 July 1981 showed, the pressure for retreat was almost universal among her colleagues.And a retreat of sorts was performed. But the determination to pursue the economics of sound housekeeping,preached at the knee of the father she constantly invoked, and elevated above the merely political to the moral level, came from within hermore than anybody else. It was her special contribution. All leaders lay claim to higher purposes,but most of them experience at least a portion of private cynicism. She was not burdened with such a feeling, at least about herself or what she was doing.

The appeal to righteousness stretched much further than economic management. It could be said without exaggerationto have been what, in her own mind, drove her on. It fed the sheer energy and enthusiasm which she continued to bring to political leadership in the tenth year of the decade just as plentifully as in the first. Some said her zeal now was even greater, as her ambitions at last looked unlikely to be frustrated by any otter politician.The grey men who preceded her surrendered to despair after less than half the span of her time in office. But among the advantages they lacked was the kind of inspirational certainty which was the political equivalent of hormone replacement therapy.

This was not, however, a trait without faults and shadows. It carried its own risks, which emerged at moments that can hardly be forgotten. Such a pious belief in the higher lightness of what a leader is about, not to mention the infamy of what her opponents propose, may induce in her the belief that she can do no wrong.Because it was simply inconceivable,to a politician with Mrs. Thatcher's image of herself, that she could have behaved basely duringthe Westland affair or at any other time, she felt entirely justified in conspiring with her staff to prevent the whole truth coming out. Equally, this driving sense of mission induced in her a greater willingness to learn from her successes than her failures. The defeats of Galtieri and Scargill were forher the instructive events, not the mishandling of affairs in Europe, or the futile chaos produced by public sector strikes from the civil servants in 1981 to the teachers in 1986, or the repeated farces produced by her attitude to security matters. The moral dimension, while a key to her dynamism, also made her blind.

6 Beside this need for rectitude was her pragmatism. That was the second all-pervasive quality. She had to a fine degree the political leader's sense of what would play well with the voters,and, very often, where to compromise with her own instincts in order to secure the greater political good.She was a consummate populist. Whether on union reform, or the nuclear bomb, or South Africa, or hanging, or censorship, or selling council houses, or attitudes to money, she invariably touched the majority nerve. Furthermore, where, as was sometimes the case, prudence dictated a more cautious approachthan she would personally have preferred, she developed a rare capacity to disclaim responsibility for what had occurred.This was not really her government, she managed to imply when it suited her: for example, when Jim Prior was running policies she did not approve of, first over the unions and then in Ulster. More extraordinarily, this was a facility she continued to deploy after many years in power. In this way, she could retain populist support without taking unnecessary risks to gratify it. Equally, as in her attitude to the National Health Service, she could identify an issue on which not even she would have been prepared to affront entrenched opinion.

However, this populism,too, was marked by a disabling paradox.It hung ambiguously over her relations with the nation she led for ten years. She might be a populist, but at another level she had a narrow understanding of the people.

7 It was an abrasive not a smooth relationship. Little evidence could ever be produced that many people liked her, still less loved her. [For her part, she did not seem to like them. She was not perceived as understanding them.Did not the polls continuously find, from the beginning to the end,that she was held to be out of touch with how ordinary people lived?] In particular, she omitted to understand those who were not like her, or who neglected to play their part in the historic mission which she reckoned she had set under way. She understood successes, but not failures: the leaders not the followers, the elite and not the masses. Although a populist, she was the ultimate argument against the contention that a political leader needs, in her person, to be popular.

For a leader who lasted so long, this was an odd state of affairs. She was one of us. By now, indeed, she was arguably our supreme representative: the complete personification of what we were. And yet, after ten years, she remained different. In an important sense, she wasn't one of us at all. She was altogether too superior.

But she intended to remain. «I hang on», she told an interviewer after nine years as prime minister, «until I believe there are people who can take the banner forward with the same commitment, belief, vision, strength and singleness of purpose».

NOTE

Westland Affair — (the) a disagreement in 1986 among members of the British government about the sale of a company called Westland, which made helicopters, to non-British owners, and also about secret government information being made public. Michael Heseltine, an important minister, left the government over this affair.

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 920