The notion that she was callous is simply false, as tributes in the Lords and Commons yesterday made clear; attestations to her personal kindness were striking and numerous.
Lord Young, for example, recalled a dinner at which Thatcher implored his wife not to complain about a lapse in service (a hapless waiter had spilled something on her dress). When it happened, "Margaret grabbed her arm and said 'don't say a word -- if you complain he'll lose his job'." Young, like many others, observed that Thatcher was kindest to the least important people, and harshest to the most important, like her cabinet ministers.
She wept, inconsolable, when the Sheffield was sunk in the Falklands, and although grimly determined to win the war, bore the weight and responsibility for those casualties heavily. She would work feverishly and without sleep, discharging the grave duty of hand writing letters to the parents of servicemen who had died.
She did what had to be done, but was ever mindful of the human cost. On the eve of the conflict, she wrote to Galtieri: "In a few days . . . your eyes and mine will be reading the casualty lists. On my side, grief will be tempered by the knowledge that these men died for freedom, justice, and the rule of law. And on your side? Only you can answer the question."
Callous? No. She was never more distraught.
Suggestions that she was divisive are also overwrought: she upended the post-war policy consensus and shifted it to the right, where it remains. No one wants to go back to the immiserated '70s. Britain post-Thatcher was unquestionably better off, on the whole, than Britain pre-Thatcher. Lamenting the passing of unsustainable mining communities in the north doesn't alter that salient fact.
The Nordics never had militant unions and sclerotic state control over most of the means of production, nor did they have a divisive, reactionary left opposed tooth and claw to reform. There was broad consensus for change. So they could make the transition relatively painlessly.
Not so in Britain, where resistant factions had to be brought to heel. The apposite comparison is France during Mitterrand (failure followed by austerity), not the Nordics.
Her successes, viewed in context, are even more extraordinary: she did it all at a time when women leaders were a comparative rarity, when the establishment was chauvinistically male, when the glass ceiling was oppressively real, and she did it against the grain of class, that peculiar British affliction.
She was a a trailblazer. A grocer's daughter who died in the Ritz a baroness, having saved the country. Her grit, guts, and conviction, and her ferocious capacity for work -- the most hardworking Prime Minister in modern memory -- altered the course of history for the better.
If anyone merits hagiography, she does.
