Leaders Who Swim Against The Tide: One Wonders What Thatcher Might Have Thought Of That
03 May 2013
By Amir Taheri
"A voice in the desert!" was the phrase that came to
mind after I interviewed Margaret Thatcher in Tehran
in April 1978. The new leader of the British
Conservative Party was visiting as part of a foreign
policy exploratory tour that included Washington,
Paris and Bonn.
The interview got off to a dicey start because of a
brief elevator failure at the Hilton Hotel where the
future "Iron Lady" was staying.
What caught my attention was not the tone but the
substance of Mrs. Thatcher's discourse. She had
adopted a vocabulary made up of words and phrases long
bequeathed to the dust by common consent. She talked
of free enterprise, the market economy, individual
responsibility and a strong currency. On international
affairs she sounded like Radio Free Europe, the
propaganda arm of the CIA in the heyday of the Cold
War. In 1978, even the US, thanks to Henry Kissinger's
doctrine of engagement, was far from waging
ideological war against Communism: it was subsidizing
the Soviet empire with cheap loans and handouts.
Thatcher spoke of "defeating Communism," which, it was
clear, she also took to include other forms of
collectivism such as socialism in Western Europe.
In the preceding years, I had interviewed several
British leaders either in Tehran or in London. They
included prime ministers Edward Heath and James
Callaghan—not to mention Defense Secretary Lord
Carrington and a string of foreign secretaries from
Sir Alec Douglas Home to Dick Crossland, Michael
Stewart and David Owen. Although from parties opposed
to each other, on key issues of domestic and foreign
policy, all had sung from the same hymn sheet.
They were consensus politicians with a managerial,
rather than ideological, view of the role of the
government.
I had been impressed by Callaghan's emphasis on
patience as a high virtue for politicians in a
democracy.
One of his phrases still rings in my ear: "Though it
might take a society to the edge of un-governability,
democracy remains the most efficient form of
government."
At that time, of course, Britain was on the edge of
un-governability, with endless strikes and a
plummeting currency.
Heath had won my sympathy because, he had fallen
asleep for about 15 seconds during the
interview—proving that he was human after all.
For both Heath and Callaghan, the subtext was that the
government was a problem-solving machine. Now, here
was Thatcher pretending that government itself could
become a problem.
The woman really looked like a bolt of the blue, an
impression emphasized by the blue dress she was
wearing. Here was a woman who did not wish to sound
like a bluestocking and who cast herself as a
street-fighter ready to take on all the bullies of the
neighborhood and beyond.
At the end of the conversation, I was sure of one
thing: she would not be able to lead her party to
election victory with a discourse that challenged the
received wisdom. A tired and deeply conservative
society such as Britain would not take risks with
radical ideas from a revolutionary of the right.
During the week she spent in Iran, including tourism
in Isfahan and Shiraz, Thatcher met a range of Iranian
officials, including the shah. But she also insisted
on meeting "citizens" such as university teachers,
factory workers and shopkeepers. At the elite level,
Thatcher did not leave a good impression. Foreign
Minister Abbas-Ali Khalatbari found her "rather
tiresome." The chairman of the National Iranian Oil
Company, Hushang Ansary, had a bit of an ideological
back-and-forth with her on the role of government in
modern societies. Thatcher claimed that Iran had "a
half-socialist regime" because of the size of the
public sector and the role of government in economic
planning. Ansary retorted that a country could not be
run like a shop and that government had to intervene
in support of the weaker members of society.
Well, soon we were all proved wrong. A year after her
visit, Thatcher was prime minister of Great Britain,
starting a revolution designed to transform the hybrid
model of society developed in Western Europe under
different labels. In Britain it was called the welfare
state. Germans knew it as the social market economy,
and the French labeled it acquired rights.
The Thatcher revolution wanted to pull Western
European social democracy towards the center,
distancing it from Marxism. She succeeded beyond her
wildest dreams.
The British Labour Party severed its last links with
Marxism and adopted Thatcherism-lite under Tony Blair.
The German Social Democratic Party (SDP) found the
courage to push the reforms it had started in its Bad
Godesberg conference to their logical conclusion. Even
the French Socialist Party, though singularly
reluctant to reform, had to change aspects of its
overall strategy. In time, the British experience
under Thatcher also led to reforms in Spanish
socialism, while Italian socialism went further and
disappeared altogether.
Thatcher also wanted to defeat the Soviets on the
ideological battlefield, helping the West win the Cold
War. Again, though the fall of the Soviet Empire was
due to a wider range of causes, she ended up on the
winning side. By the mid-1980s, basking in the sun of
her victory over the Marxists who controlled parts of
the British trade union movement, and having scalped
Argentina's military despots, Thatcher was at the peak
of her glory. Once again, the Newtonian law that "what
goes up comes down" started to operate.
By the end of the decade, the limelight of history had
shifted away from Thatcher. Soon, she was forced to
retire as the longest-serving British Prime Minister
in the 20th century.
By all accounts, Thatcher succeeded as much as any
conviction politician could in a modern democracy. She
could attenuate some of society's ills without curing
them—perhaps no one can. Her genius was in the
judicious use of the powers at her disposal. Unlike
most other politicians in Western democracies, she did
not want to be in office without power. Where most
Western politicians were content to float—often on the
surface—she wanted to swim, even against the tide.
It is hard not to admire her achievements. And yet, it
would be wrong to exaggerate them. In human societies
nothing is decided once and for all; the pendulum does
not stay on one side forever.
The day Thatcher died, Britain's largest trade union
announced it was planning a general strike, the first
since 1926. One wonders what Thatcher might have
thought of that.
Amir Taheri was born in Ahvaz, southwest
Iran, and educated in Tehran, London and Paris. He was
Executive Editor-in-Chief of the daily Kayhan in Iran
(1972-79). In 1980-84, he was Middle East Editor for
the Sunday Times. In 1984-92, he served as member of
the Executive Board of the International Press
Institute (IPI). Between 1980 and 2004, he was a
contributor to the International Herald Tribune. He
has written for the Wall Street Journal, the New York
Post, the New York Times, the London Times, the French
magazine Politique Internationale, and the German
weekly Focus. Between 1989 and 2005, he was editorial
writer for the German daily Die Welt. Taheri has
published 11 books, some of which have been translated
into 20 languages. He has been a columnist for Asharq
Alawsat since 1987. Taheri's latest book "The Persian
Night" is published by Encounter Books in London and
New York.
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