How Thatcher’s legacy endures, 30 years after her dethroning

Wonderful as Gillian Anderson’s portrayal of Margaret Thatcher is in The Crown, I’m not sure even she is able to fully render the way Thatcher dominated politics and indeed most aspects of British life for an entire decade. Or, indeed, how the legacy of a woman who left office 30 years ago and who died in 2013 still hangs over us.

I can vividly remember where I was when I heard the news that Thatcher has finally quit. It wasn’t, I’m afraid, a suitably grand location but the Shell petrol station on the Fulham Palace Road. I’d just filled up the Mini (original proper Austin Mini), and went in to pay and the news was on the radio. It was a moment. Then I went into work at the BBC, and it wasn’t difficult to know what the story would be.

It was certainly dramatic, more than when Blair or Cameron quit, say. Maggie was pushed out a little over two years after she’d delivered the Tories an historic hat trick of election victories and had transformed the economy and Britain’s place in the world. But her MPs, many of whom owed their careers to her, had had enough of her.

The deeply unpopular poll tax was killing their chances of re-election; the economy was in recession; her militant hostility to the federalist ambitions of the European Community, as it still was, her senior colleagues found embarrassing; and regal style confirmed to many of them that she was “off her trolley”, in the popular phrase of the time. She had to go. They moved on her; Geoffrey Howe made the speech of his life, Michael Heseltine wielded the dagger, and John Major, who no one much rated, inherited the crown.

The great irony was that that act of regicide was designed to unite the Tory party and straighten out its European policy, but for the next three decades the manner of her going haunted the party and exacerbated its divisions. All of her successors as prime minister have tried and failed to placate the Tories’ vicious factions; only now has Brexit itself made the arguments finally redundant.

The trauma and portent of events was clear at the time, and soon enough recorded in her memoirs and in her increasingly strident opposition to the EU (opinions differ as to how she might have voted in 2016). In the 1990s, she rebelled against a Conservative government, over the Maastricht treaty, and made no secret of her disappointment in Major. In her autobiography the bitterness was palpable, the contempt for the men around her complete, and expressed better than any Netflix scriptwriter could manage. Her cabinet (who’d all been appointed by her and owed everything to her) had seen her, one by one, and most had the same friendly but hypocritical message - that obviously they supported her etc, but she’d lose the vote amongst MPs and it’d best all things considered, if she went with dignity. She called it “treachery with a smile on its face”, writing in her 1993 memoir: “I was sick at heart. I could have resisted the opposition of opponents and potential rivals and even respected them for it; what grieved me was the desertion of those I had always considered friends and allies and the weasel words whereby they had transmitted their betrayal into frank advice and concern for my fate...

“Normally, in the cabinet anteroom ministers would be standing around in groups, arguing and joking. On this occasion there was silence. They stood with their backs to the wall looking in every direction except mine... Most of that day and the next few days, I felt as if I were sleepwalking rather than experiencing and feeling everything that happened. Every now and then, however, I would be overcome by the emotion of the occasion and give way to tears.”

It’s a funny old world, as Thatcher said then, but her reforms to the economy still look mostly secure, even though her current successor takes a cavalier approach to public money and borrowing. She once said that “Tony Blair” was her greatest achievement, meaning the abolition of socialism, and with Keir Starmer in charge, that is mostly intact too. Now that her hardline euro scepticism, adopted late in her career, has at last prevailed in the Conservative party, the civil war it has waged on and off since her fall is also coming to an end. They may not all be Thatcherites in the Tory party these days, and you don’t often hear the word Thatcherism, but they are all certainly eurosceptics. There is no alternative.