Source: The Guardian
Translation: Telegrafi.com

You had to be in your mid-fifties or older to be of voting age during Margaret Thatcher's time as prime minister. Only a third of us alive today were adults when she finally left Downing Street in November 1990. Even smaller is the proportion who remember the 11 years Thatcher spent as prime minister.

For at least two-thirds of Britons, Thatcher is a name from the past and nothing more. The fact that she would have turned 100 next Monday only highlights the vast gulf that already separates her era from the present. But this centenary could also be a salutary moment. It could offer a contemporary opportunity to reflect on what she really represents – and does not represent – ​​for modern Britain.

This seems more difficult in some ways for those of us who remember her. We were inclined to take sides. Supporters thought Thatcher could do no wrong. Opponents thought she could do no good. Not surprisingly, the truth is more nuanced, complex and interesting - as I can attest from the two times I briefly interviewed her (once, oddly enough, at the Kiev opera).

As a subject of study, Thatcher has not been much favored by either her admirers or her fierce critics. In listening to both sides, it is useful to remember that the lady who in public refused to make a U-turn was also the lady who in private thought long and hard about making major changes to her leadership. For example, the warrior queen who refused to compromise with the IRA hunger strikers in the early 1980s was also the Thatcher who authorized secret talks with the IRA and allowed her cabinet to debate Irish unification.

But the individual struggles Thatcher waged in the 80s are now largely a thing of the past. The world has moved on. From this distance, what matters is not Thatcher herself, extraordinary as she was, but rather her impact.

Her impact is hard to forget, but rarely fully acknowledged. Each of us lives in a country marked more deeply by Thatcher than by any other politician of the post-war era. Even today she is part of the reason why we cannot balance the national finances and why politicians are so afraid of tax changes. She is part of the reason why we are still so divided and so damaging to Europe. Yet she is also part of the reason why we take the climate crisis seriously, while, at the same time, it is part of the reason why our rivers and lakes are so polluted.

The most important aspect of her legacy was always a determination to speak on behalf of business – big and small – against the state. She saw entrepreneurship and low taxes as the foundation of a successful society, and during her years in power, she never wavered from that conviction. She wanted to cut government spending and reduce its role in all areas except national security. It’s easy to forget that when she came to power in 1979, her outlook was almost insurrectionary. By the time she left in 1990, she had become a scoundrel. In many ways, she still is.

Other parts of her legacy also help to confirm Hugo Young's view (who has written about her better than anyone else) that her career provides clear evidence that individuals matter in history. Thatcher was not a libertarian, but she left an individualist legacy. She believed that the family knew better than the official in Whitehall - and in city and county councils too - what was best for them. She changed the housing system to encourage home ownership in ways that still shape housing markets and planning decisions today - as well as electoral politics.

However, in the years following Thatcher’s fall in 1990, until her death in 2013, many of her admirers believed she was a guiding light for what was to come. She had not just done radical great things, these followers believed. She had also set the agenda for those who would come after. Thatcher’s funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral, which I attended, was an attempt to present her as a second Churchill. She was never one. But it was also an attempt to pretend that the Thatcherite revolution was now the accepted reality of modern Britain.

This was not true either. What was true was that Thatcher and Thatcherism had offered a set of answers at a certain time - at the end of a period filled with crises - to endemic problems facing all modern states. Among the greatest of these problems were the reform of public sector efficiency and cost-effectiveness, and the search for a balance of social virtues and creative economics between the private and public sectors.

Yet Thatcher did not solve any of these problems. In some ways, she made them more difficult. Young Labour had to quickly confront them in new ways. When she died in 2013, David Cameron’s coalition government was already confronting them again. The same problems have proved just as intractable, and the answers remain just as elusive. Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and now Keir Starmer have all faced them.

So the lesson from Thatcher on her 100th birthday is not that everything from her legacy should be undone until we rediscover the “sunny hills” of the pre-Thatcher years. That would end in tears. But neither is it that she somehow holds the key to solving Britain’s problems. Her form of leadership is inimitable.

Nor can she solve the Conservative Party's problems. Thatcher's iconic status has prompted Kemi Badenoch to recall her legacy. But Badenoch is just the latest Conservative leader to fail to see what is plainly before her eyes for the party - and also for the country. Thatcher is not the solution. In many ways, she is still the problem. /Telegraph/

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