Tomorrow, Mrs Thatcher becomes the longest-serving prime minister since Asquith. Not, strictly speaking the longest of the 20th century. There is Salisbury still to beat. When he retired in 1902 he╒d held the job, off and on, for 13 and a half years. Mrs T will need to win another election and carry on until Christmas 1992 to pass Salisbury.
Considering that even by the year 2000 she will still be younger than the Golda Meir who led Israel, one should remember that only the final milestone is definitive.
The surpassing of Asquith, however, is a moment worth noting. The leader certainly notes it herself. She delayed her journey to Africa so as to drink a toast under a British roof. Although highly selective in her attitude to history, she has never been less than fully attuned to her own part in making it.
Such longevity in office is a very large fact. Eight years and eight months. It╒s an achievement on its own, separate from its consequences. The consequences matter greatly. But the sheer length of it, in the friendless world of political leadership, deserves serious remark. A generation of opponents routed: a generation of rivals eclipsed: half a generation of voters upon whose consciousness no other prime minister has impinged. To my children, a male leader, royal or political, will come as an offence against nature.
So this has been an extraordinary story. But we should disentangle the remarkable from the banal. In the Thatcher mythology, the fawning astonishment usually starts too early.
It was not extraordinary that she became a politician. On the contrary, this is what she was born to be. Her lineage and formation allowed of few other possibilities. Politics infused the atmosphere in which she was reared by her father, alderman and leading citizen of Grantham. The political life, with its parallel attractions of service and of power, was the only life set before her as a model superior to that of shopkeeping.
Her origins accorded closely with those of the majority of Conservative leaders. Unlike some of her contemporaries, she may never have exactly imagined she was born to rule, or at least to be prime minister. But her father laid out the path of duty just as clearly as any grandee who placed his sons on
the road to Parliament. Through Oxford and beyond his child never deviated from this ambition.
Nor was it extraordinary that, once at Westminster, she should do well. Women had before. Ambition, diligence and her husband╒s wealth were duly rewarded. She was an opportunist who took her opportunities, and ascended the greasy pole unencumbered by obstacles of her own making, such as blind faith or awkward conviction. In Macmillan╒s government she did what she was told, in Heath╒s she acquiesced in every twist that circumstance made necessary.
Although the mythology allots her the part of affronted critic, silently fuming at Heath╒s corporatist and inflationary errors, the truth is more congruent with the normal pattern of ambition. She swallowed it all. A prudent careerist could do no other. Her mentor, Keith Joseph, has said that he ╥only become a Conservative in April 1974╙. He meant, of course, a 19th-century liberal. The timing of the Thatcher conversion, the prelude to leadership, was identical.
This is where the story at last became extraordinary. She was elected leader, in circumstances well known. It happened at a time when the Conservative Party needed careerist pragmatism to be supplanted by something else. She had no difficulty in adapting. So began 13 years at the head of the party, and the eight years, eight months, which have ensured her, as nobody anywhere will dispute, a dominent place in any history of 20th-century Britain.
That history will not be written for many years. The effect of the Thatcher era, for good and bad, will be a matter of argument never resolved to general satisfaction. And in explaining why it lasted so long, much must be attributed to highly adventitious factors such as the state of other people╒s politics and the state of the world, not to mention large doses of plain good fortune. But the personal contribution remains, massively visible in the three relevant organisms: the country, the party, and herself.
No leader can last this long unless she speaks for some deep national sentiments. Three seem particularly conspicuous in her case. British masochism saw her through the unemployment crisis. British bloody-mindedness took on and won the Falklands war. A shared Little Englandism has been the reliable guide to most foreign crises. These are enduring British traits which this leader has tapped more simply and openly than any predecessor in any party. She has done the same thing in more particular ways. It is hard to think of a single important issue on which, whatever her government may actually have done, her personal attitudes are not populist and universally known to be so. On Europe, on the Bomb, on South Africa, on hanging, on culture, on intellectual life, on welfare scroungers, on union bosses, Maggie could rarely be accused of failing to speak, alas, for Britain.
In the same vein, she has changed some conventional assumptions: again, one may hazard, in conformity with deep national prejudices. In the old order, fairness, equality, the benign State and the dispersal of power were common shibboleths. Fairness has been displaced by success, social justice by the business imperative. This has not been without benefits. But the key quote, a shocking but truthful epitome, was delivered to Woman╒s Own a couple of months ago: ╥There is no such thing as society.╙ It followed hard on a snort at people who drivel about caring, a phrase hastily withdrawn on the eve of the election, but immediately validated nonetheless.
So that is a first contribution to this long survival. To produce a stronger economy, she has appealed to some of the worst instincts of the British. She articulated something new, but also stayed close to something already there. If Baldwin personified a national mood of quietism and complacency in the 1930s, Mrs Thatcher spoke with utmost eloquence for the materialism and self-interest of the 1980s.
Next there was the party. In eight years, age has not withered it nor custom staled its capacity to unite. Quite the opposite. Conservatives are more united after eight years than they were before. A whole series of radical initiatives, highly offensive to old-fashioned Conservatives of both town and country, elicits only the spluttering of a few extinct volcanoes. The first victory was achieved with a totally split cabinet, most of whom thought Thatcherism only a temporary phenomenon: the third by men with hardly an inch of difference between them, and none of whom view their leader with anything but the most respectful apprehension.
And then there was herself. Many people, looking at her eight years ago, doubted whether she could survive half the distance, not least because she was a woman, her one undoubted claim to historic uniqueness. Instead, one can see more clearly that her sex has been a key to much that she has got away with, a positive aid to durability.
It has made policies easier to sell. A woman found it easier than many men might have done to persuade the country to take its medicine, to talk her way through social outrage, to present her economic policy as a simple exercise in household management, running a balanced budget, not spending what you haven╒t earned etc etc.
It has made people easier to sack. No leader has sacked more ministers with less cause. Such ruthlessness was necessary, as she saw it, for the accomplishment of her mission. It has been visited upon scores of inconvenient presences, and somehow made more palatable by the lady╒s simpering complaints about how much she detests wielding the hatchet.
Finally, her sex has greatly helped the artifice of presentation. She does not mind being made up, and will do anything for the camera. Her reputation for honesty and directness, which is not false, masks an apparently artless guile. It complements the more admirable personal qualities: the forensic skill, the mastery of detail, above all else the inexhaustible enthusiasm for work which few men wanted to do for eight years (see Wilson and Macmillan) even when they had the chance.
Groping beyond Asquith for her place in Conservative history you can soon make some connections. But the resemblances seem much thinner than the differences.
Like Peel she was a provincial, but quite unlike him she despised consensus politics. Like Joe Chamberlain she hated her party aristos. But he would surely have scorned the narrowness of her nationalism.
She is interested in science, like Balfour, but hardly a ruminant philosopher. She would like to be Churchillian, but the embarrassing frequency with which she stakes this claim disqualifies her from the league. Besides, the nation has never loved her, nor ever will.
With Macmillan it is hard to see any similarities of either character or outlook. Heath, of course, ought to supply the umbilical connection. But apart from all their other ruptures, the very thing which seems to bind them, their humble origins, in fact most signally divides them. Where Heath spent his adult life escaping from his past, hers has been presented as the source of all political wisdom.
In his history of the party, Robert Blake writes of Disraeli: ╥At least there must be agreement that he remains the most extraordinary, incongruous, fascinating, fresh and timeless figure ever to have led the Conservative Party.╙ One day it may seem right to withdraw at least some of those adjectives and reallocate them to Margaret Thatcher. But meanwhile another effect of her record tenure is more obvious.
Such endurance, while a matter of just pride, carries its penalty. After eight years and eight months, any other government seems to belong to some remote museum. The old alibis slip over the horizon. What Labour did or did not do, long, long ago, makes an ever more empty argument with which to teach the senators wisdom. The state of the country is hers to explain and justify: hers and nobody else╒s.
