Prime Minister Driving for a 3rd Term, Maybe a 4th : Thatcher: Crusader With Subtlety of Buzz Saw

Those present will never forget the day Margaret Thatcher silenced President Jimmy Carter.

Searching for ways to counter the impact of sharply rising oil prices at the 1979 Tokyo economic summit, the British prime minister, then newly elected, and other Western leaders had already presented succinct statements when Carter launched a rambling discourse on the American commitment to the automobile.

While her more experienced colleagues sat quietly, Thatcher suddenly cut him off.

“Mr. President, we didn’t come to hear about your problems,” she said as jaws around the table dropped. “We came to listen to what you are going to do about them.”

Eight years later and running hard for her third term as prime minister, Thatcher’s impatience is undiminished. Head thrust forward, purse in hand, she marches on, pursuing her crusade to put the “great” back into Great Britain. With all the subtlety of a buzz saw, she has trampled tradition, declared war on socialism and imposed her unique brand of popular capitalism to lift Britain up by its bootstraps.

Contentious Leader

Her blunt style as much as her policies have made her easily the most contentious British prime minister in this century.

“Her impact has been tremendous,” one of Britain’s leading social commentators, Anthony Sampson, summed up. “You have to go back to the populist conservatives like (Benjamin) Disraeli or Napoleon III to find such a powerful mixture of capitalism with an authoritarian strain.”

As the campaign builds toward Britain’s June 11 general election--an election that she called a year before her term expires, to capitalize on her Conservative Party’s current high standing in the opinion polls--it is no surprise that Thatcher herself is the dominant issue.

As expressed in recent interviews, her sense of personal mission seems to extend toward the millennium. Opinion polls indicate that she will win at least another five-year term, a development that would make her the longest-serving prime minister since Lord Liverpool, who served 15 years beginning in 1812. She hints at running for a fourth term.

“I hope to go on and on,” she said. “There is so much still to do.”

At 61 and exuding the vigor of someone half her age, she leaves few doubters about her capacity to do just that.

The views that she champions, dubbed “Thatcherism” by pundits, belong to no deeply thought-out political ideology. They come instead from an apparently unsophisticated mixture of lessons from her own personal struggle and the bedrock values of hard work, duty, patriotism and freedom of the individual.

Her apparent belief that socialism is oppressive and incompatible with the British character, her driving work ethic, her conservative monetary policies--all spring from a strict Methodist upbringing around her father’s grocery store in the Midlands town of Grantham, not in the lecture rooms of Oxford University, where she was educated, nor in the halls of Parliament.

“She’s not a political sophisticate; she’s part of that England that went to the equivalent of the little red schoolhouse,” a longtime associate said. “She learned the three Rs, the Old Testament stories and that success comes to those who work hard and are deserving. That’s the fundamental ground on which she stands.”

At Oxford, she studied first chemistry, then law, but not politics, and her world view remains essentially uncluttered by complexities. To her, the choices are between right and wrong, truth and falsehood, good and evil.

U.S. Fiscal Policy Criticized

She has chided Reagan Administration officials that no household could survive the way they have managed U.S. fiscal policy, and she refers to her father’s shop as if it provided lessons for running an industrialized economy. Few doubt that Britain’s conservative fiscal policy during her years as leader stems, at least in principle, from the Grantham store.

“You never buy anything you can’t afford to buy,” Thatcher said in a recent television interview. “Never.”

Her habit of distilling complex economic questions into simple family homilies frustrates economists but enables her to reach an electorate that relates easily to her message.

“Those parables would have saved many a financier from failure and many a country from crisis,” she said unrepentantly.

The policies born of those parables have already brought the greatest change to Britain since Clement Attlee’s 1945 Labor government erected the Welfare State.

The so-called Thatcher Revolution is marked by the ascendancy of the individual, the decline of institutions and a gradual centralization of power.

New Class of Capitalists

The prime minister’s policies have led to the selling of nearly 40% of the country’s state-owned industry, mainly to first-time shareholders, creating a whole new class of capitalists. Her policies have enabled public housing tenants to buy their homes, raising the number of British home-owning families from one-half to two-thirds. And they have encouraged a record number of new business starts.

She has pledged, if reelected, to apply private enterprise to revive dying inner cities and enlist parents to help solve an education crisis. The Thatcher years have also ended decades of trade union dominance, halted a century-long decline in Britain’s share of world trade and given the country economic growth over the past six years that has been among the fastest in the West.

It is all heady stuff for a nation whose economic malaise once made the term “the British Disease” synonymous with industrial inefficiency. But the gains have come at a price.

They have left vast areas of urban deprivation in the industrial north, record high unemployment and an array of understaffed, demoralized government services, including education and health.

The much-criticized National Health Service seems overwhelmed. A recent report noted that there are now waiting lists to get on hospital waiting lists, and it cited cases of patients turning up for their appointments on the right day--one year too early.

Ignored Traditions

She has ignored traditions that have protected the independence of such respected institutions as the British Broadcasting Corp. Her government applied unprecedented pressure on the BBC to drop one program and sent the police in to confiscate material relating to another.

Thatcher seems to display a special contempt for large bureaucracies, whose repeated pleas for additional funds she sees more as confessions of inefficiency than expressions of need. She has even cut funding for university research.

“She’s never seen an institution she doesn’t want to bash with her handbag,” said political commentator Anthony Bevins.

Her lack of doubt at times unsettles even those closest to her.

“She is the only person I know who I don’t think I’ve ever heard say ‘I wonder whether,’ ” recalled William Pile, who worked with Thatcher when she was education secretary in the early 1970s.

Added Roy Hattersley, the deputy leader of the main opposition Labor Party: “The idea that she may be wrong doesn’t cross her mind. It’s a formidable asset.”

Rapport with Reagan

In foreign affairs, her directness has ruffled feathers, but she has forged an unusual rapport with both President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev that has helped make her the most important British leader since Winston Churchill.

One U.S. government official recently referred to Thatcher as “easily the most influential (foreign) politician at the White House.”

Although she gets along well with Reagan, she also knows what she wants. In December, 1984, she traveled to Washington determined to get an American commitment not to abandon the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty but to renegotiate with the Soviets if it got in the way of development of the President’s Strategic Defense Initiative, the space-based missile defense system known as “Star Wars.”

“At lunch she rolled out a piece of paper with four points and announced, ‘Well, here it is,’ ” an Administration official recalled.

The document, eventually agreed upon with little change, contained the assurance that Thatcher was after.

Mark of Political Life

It was this directness, often combined with risk, that has marked her political life since she was first elected to Parliament in 1959.

Her challenge to unseat Edward Heath as Conservative Party leader in 1974 was regarded at the time as a rash gamble and succeeded mainly because no one else, including more likely candidates, dared to try.

Only she, many political observers argue, could have dispatched the British fleet 8,000 miles to the Falkland Islands and the very real prospect of a military debacle in 1982.

“Fear?” she exclaimed recently, visibly taken aback at being asked if she were afraid of losing the election. “I don’t fear.”

Her ability to concentrate on policy goals while ignoring all else has hardened her image and led many to accuse her of splitting the country between haves and have-nots. Once, touring an area of the country where unemployment ran 20%, she dismissed local reporters who asked her about the problem as “moaning Minnies.”

“I don’t feel sorry for people,” she explained later. “Feeling sorry for someone does nothing.”

Westminister Ripper

Because of such comments, she is judged by many Britons as uncaring, bossy and humorless--images that have spawned a string of epithets such as the Westminister Ripper, the Plutonium Blonde or Catherine the Great of Finchley, the last a reference to her North London parliamentary constituency.

It was the Soviet propaganda machine several years ago that coined her best-known nickname, the Iron Lady.

Her purse has become a symbol of aggression somewhat equivalent in potency to the country’s nuclear deterrent, and it has given the language a new form of assault, “handbagging.”

Her main political opponent, Labor leader Neil Kinnock, describes her as “lethal.”

But those who know her say she does have a softer side, although it rarely hits the public eye. When 18 British paratroopers were killed in an Irish Republican Army ambush in Northern Ireland in August, 1979, she immediately canceled appointments and wrote handwritten letters to their families.

Her ability to memorize the names of spouses and children of most of her party’s 390 members of Parliament and to show concern and acknowledge personal tragedy with similar personal notes has helped to cement her support within her own party.

Concern Over Son

At least once, by her own admission, her toughness cracked, when her 33-year-old son, Mark, was lost for six days in the Sahara while driving in the 1982 Paris-to-Dakar rally. But at the time, she hid that carefully from the public and Cabinet colleagues.

Despite her long tenure in office, Thatcher has rarely been popular. Polls typically show that 60% of the British public dislike her but admire her determination and personal integrity. Her apparent lack of interest in high living has helped to prevent even a whiff of personal corruption despite her many years in power.

Her punishing pace leaves little time for anything but work. She usually rises at 6 a.m., breakfasts on black coffee and two vitamin C pills, then packs as many as 10 engagements into a day. When most of her exhausted staff head for home, she starts to tackle government papers, often working until 2 or 3 a.m.

Her knowledge, even on important issues, can be sketchy, but she quickly devours background material.

“She has a disciplined mind that absorbs detail at an amazing rate,” commented a Conservative member of Parliament who has worked with her.

Read Gorbachev’s Speeches

Preparing for her recent talks with Gorbachev in Moscow, she reportedly read every major speech the Soviet leader had made, in addition to schooling herself on arms control details and Anglo-Soviet issues. A trio of hapless Soviet journalists who tried to trip her up during an hourlong television interview on arms control found themselves steamrollered by Thatcher’s mastery of the subject. Then she lectured them on Soviet nuclear superiority.

Tales of her endurance are told by those who have served her with the air of veteran soldiers recalling combat engagements.

“One night about midnight, two of us began helping her with an important speech,” a former senior aide recalled. “The drafts kept getting revised until about 3 o’clock; when we began to droop, Margaret popped into the kitchen and knocked up a quiche. She came back into the room carrying the quiche and a bottle of wine for the three of us and declared, ‘Right, now where were we?’ ”

She displays little patience for those who cannot keep her pace and little interest beyond work. While several politicians have become close advisers during her years in power, none could be described as cronies.

“She is incapable of distinguishing between leisure and idleness,” one aide said.

Family Duties

But not even the pressures of high office have deterred her from what she perceives as her family duties. Some say her husband of 38 years, Denis, is her only really close friend.

Pile, her former chief aide during her years as education secretary, recalled her interrupting an important budget meeting to rush out before the stores closed to buy bacon for Denis’ breakfast. She waved aside a suggestion that an aide be sent instead.

“They won’t know what kind he likes,” she said.

When her daughter Carol was running a late-night radio talk show a few years ago and callers dried up, Thatcher phoned to keep the program going.

Feminists have criticized Thatcher for an apparent lack of interest in promoting women’s rights, and indeed the subject seems to be far from the top of her priority list. For her, the challenge is nothing less than transforming Britain itself.

As Hugo Young, a columnist for the Guardian newspaper, wrote in his book on Thatcher:

“She has surveyed the past and found it wanting. She has scanned the future and been seized by a sense of destiny.”