Thatcher’s politics more like Mbeki than Mandela

MARGARET Thatcher famously told her Conservative Party at its conference in Brighton in October 1980: “The lady’s not for turning.” Facing down tremendous pressure to reverse her liberalisation of the British economy, which had already caused unemployment to rise by a third to two million, she signalled, just 18 months into her premiership, what kind of a leader she would be.

Looking back across 23 years to her 11 years in Downing Street that conviction defines her leadership.

Her death on Monday made instant headlines across the world as the pre- written obituaries for the woman who had been ailing for a decade rolled out. But she was not awarded the immediate absolution that is given to so many of the world’s controversial leaders when they die.

As the big television news channels took to the streets to get the commoner’s view, the quotes ranged from “Good riddance” to the tearful accolade of a woman in Thatcher’s home town of Grantham who said: “She was the perfect person.”

The controversy that characterised her term as prime minister was also apparent in the headlines of this week’s British and international media.

l Daily Mirror: “The woman who divided a nation”;

l Daily Mail: “The woman who saved Britain”;

l The Times: “The first lady”;

l International Herald Tribune: “Conservative of enduring impact”;

l Financial Times: “Thatcher: the great transformer”;

l Socialist Worker: “Rejoice”.

High up in most of the analyses is what many regard as her biggest mistake: her handling of the war against apartheid.

Though cited by many significant media, the quote most widely attributed to her turns out to be partly apocryphal.

She did not actually say: “The ANC is a typical terrorist organisation ... Anyone who thinks it’s going to run the government in South Africa is living in cloud cuckoo land.”

According to an analysis published by Politicsweb, she did say that if the ANC had threatened to attack British companies in South Africa that would prove it was “a typical terrorist organisation” and one of her spokesmen did say the idea of the ANC ruling South Africa was “cloud cuckoo land”.

But she certainly did personally and strongly resist sanctions against the apartheid regime and she did befriend PW Botha when no one else would have anything to do with him.

Standing shoulder to shoulder with her good friend Ronald Reagan, Thatcher famously advocated “constructive engagement” with Pretoria, and in doing that she bought apartheid a little more time at the cost of lives lost and lives made miserable by a white government on the ropes.

Looking for parallels and for lessons from her life for this country, I see one significant quality she shared with Nelson Mandela – conviction.

Mandela, in negotiations before 1994 and in his five years as president, was an instinctive politician, little given to self doubt.

He could look at a problem, even one as grave as the assassination of Chris Hani 20 years ago today, mull it over in his own mind and then decide what needed to be done.

Once his mind was made up, the man was not for turning any more than Thatcher when she had set her course.

In their very different ways, each of them used that conviction to break the social mould of the countries they inherited and transform them from one state into something quite different.

But the more comfortable comparison is actually with Thabo Mbeki.

The fiscal discipline that Mbeki entrenched with the help of Trevor Manuel as his finance minister, his aversion to subsidies for capable people and industries and the de-nationalisation he launched as Mandela’s deputy – and continued in his own term – all reflected the same fundamental economic assumptions that underpinned Thatcherism.

His grievous lapse of judgment over Zimbabwe mirrored hers over South Africa. Each saw the problem they faced as one best resolved over the long term and through constructive engagement with the errant regime.

Citing the same defence that sanctions would most harm the people who needed to be helped, each resisted the mechanism that could most quickly have changed the game because they feared not being able to control events after the collapse of the regime in power.

Each was convinced of their own rightness in almost all circumstances and became so estranged from the grassroots of their electorates that they had to be thrown out of office when they tried to stay too long.

On a more trivial level Thatcher and Mbeki were also workaholics while in office. I believe from associates that Mbeki usually slept fairly normally, but he was certainly capable of several all- nighters in a row; Thatcher, I was told by one of her aides during a Nato conference in Brussels, slept no more than four hours and often just three. And when she was awake she wanted to work.

The thing that all three of these leaders demonstrated as government leaders was the courage to proclaim a conviction, explain it and then act upon it.

History will pick all of them apart to some degree, but at least their governments and nations knew what they were about. They knew what to support if they were for it and to oppose if against.

Now we have a leader who proudly confesses to having no political principles of his own, but only those of the collective that elected him.

As a result, we have an economy too uncertain to attract the investments it needs, an elite driven only by its own greed and a defence force doing who knows what or why.

Brendan Boyle is editor of the Daily Dispatch