Maggie Thatcher as Cromwell Redux : THE IRON LADY: A Biography of Margaret Thatcher <i> by Hugo Young (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $25; 570 pp.; 0-374-22651-2) </i>

There are two aspects of the Margaret Thatcher phenomenon--neither of which is addressed in this splendid British biography--that every thinking American needs to keep in mind when assessing the achievements of this remarkable woman.

First is her contribution to global diplomacy. A quarter of a century after Dean Acheson’s remark that “Great Britain has lost an Empire and has not yet found a role” (as Truman’s secretary of state he would have known), Thatcher has created a noble task for her country: keeping American foreign policy on course.

When the Bush Administration was struggling to acquire its sea legs earlier this year, it was Thatcher who traveled to South Africa to urge reform on P. W. Botha and patience from the front-line states. It was she who went to Germany to try and win Helmut Kohl’s cooperation in the modernization of NATO’s short-range nuclear arsenal. Above all, Thatcher demonstrated that the psychological advantage in the arms-reduction stakes was not the exclusive possession of Mikhail Gorbachev.

Our need for her persists. Never was this more evident than during her recent trip to Japan. As the result of Ronald Reagan’s departure from the White House and Mike Mansfield’s from our embassy in Tokyo, America and Japan have begun to drift toward the Pacific’s worse diplomatic crisis since the autumn of 1941.

At this sensitive hour, the world’s free-trading system and the Western alliance have suffered for lack of an eloquent and forceful voice to speak in defense of that system and that alliance. Here, as elsewhere, the British leader has attempted to fill the breach.

The second feature of the Thatcher revolution that Americans should ponder is how she has exercised power. Contrary to jolly talk by American conservatives about electing Thatcher President here, her reign (the word is not used lightly) demonstrates the profound gap between American and British conceptions of the limits of state power. To the notion of Thatcher as an “elected dictator,” I shall return.

This is a frankly revisionist view. It sees Thatcher as the new Metternich (the 19th-Century master of the diplomatic finesse), as a power-driven politician and as a militant Puritan. In this same revisionist mold, Hugo Young, the distinguished British journalist, has performed a brilliant dissection of the notion of Thatcher as a conservative icon.

In “The Iron Lady,” Young traces the winding staircase of fortune that transformed the younger daughter of a provincial English grocer into the greatest woman political leader since Catherine the Great. It is without question the best of a bevy of new Thatcher biographies that set out the often surprising, always dramatic story of the British political revolution of the 1980s.

It also will leave the thinking conservative scratching his head. To read Young is to discover that certain suspect analogies have informed the American perception of Thatcher as a conservative heroine.

Neither the assumption that Thatcher’s road to Damascus parallels Ronald Reagan’s own timely evolution from New Deal enthusiast to conservative idealogue, nor the thesis that the Iron Lady took the Tory party by storm in a political coup a la Barry Goldwater, survives Young’s analysis.

In ideological terms, the author makes it clear that, her paternal education in conservative sentiment aside, not only did Thatcher come to the true faith much later than Reagan, but that between 1959 (when she first entered Parliament) and her crucial battle with Edward Heath for leadership of the Tory party in 1974, Thatcher had barely two conservative ideas to rub together. No fully armed Athena emerging from the head of F. A. Hayek was she.

Young makes a persuasive case for the view that Thatcher’s less-than-true-blue ideology was mirrored in her policies. As minister of education in the 1970-74 Heath government, she was not only a vigorous abolisher of private schools but also one of the great spenders of taxpayers’ money. Later, as shadow environment secretary, her ideas were distinctly interventionist.

Even after Thatcher became party leader in 1975--almost by accident--realism and power politics, not conservative ideals, defined her program. The Tory campaign manifesto drawn up for the 1979 election that made Thatcher prime minister, in Young’s words, “openly contemplated the perpetuation of the comfortable welfare state.” The only company nominated by Thatcher’s team for denationalization was the National Freight Corp., and this from the people who much later made “privatization” one of the household words of the age.

What transformed Thatcher into a conservative revolutionary was the capture of power. Cunningly seized, then almost lost in the run-up to the 1982 Falklands war, it was only finally secured in the triumphant aftermath of her smashing 1983 victory at the polls.

In this twilight struggle for domination, it was not only the party’s influential “wets” who stood in Thatcher’s way but also Britain’s formidable higher bureaucracy. Young observes that “There was a genuine clash of cultures, between an almost Cromwellian impatience with the status quo (on the part of the Thatcherites) and the mandarin world of Whitehall, in which skepticism and rumination were more highly rated habits of mind than zeal or blind conviction.”

The motif of “Cromwellian impatience” bears brooding on. Cromwell was the 17th-Century Puritan general who shattered royal power in Britain. By spilling the blood of Charles I, Cromwell hammered home the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy. He helped make Britain a “more perfect” unitary state: a nation with but a single supreme unit of government.

For American conservatives, this is more than a lesson in foreign history. It was against Cromwell’s legacy of centralized power that our forefathers revolted in 1776, but this same Cromwellian inheritance, adapted to modern circumstance, has been a crucial instrument in Thatcher’s drive to force the British to be free.

Thatcher’s achievement of almost dictatorial powers since 1983 forms the key chapter in the secret history of her reign. The implied paradox has been nicely captured by a recent British assessment of the last six years titled “The Free Economy and the Strong State: The Politics of Thatcherism” by Andrew Gamble. Pace our conservative-minded pundits, this is not the American way.

More to the point, it may not be the British way much longer. Despite Thatcher’s own ambition to go “on and on,” Young argues that in fact her era has come and gone. The most revisionist thesis of all holds that Thatcher’s place in the history books is gloriously secure, but that it also is time for Britain to look elsewhere for leadership.