Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [5]
And there was a more personal factor. Chatham* famously remarked: ‘I know that I can save this country and that no one else can.’ It would have been presumptuous of me to have compared myself to Chatham. But if I am honest, I must admit that my exhilaration came from a similar inner conviction.
My background and experience were not those of a traditional Conservative prime minister. I was less able to depend on automatic deference, but I was also perhaps less intimidated by the risks of change. My senior colleagues, growing to political maturity in the slump of the 1930s, had a more resigned and pessimistic view of political possibilities. They were perhaps too ready to accept the Labour Party and union leaders as authentic interpreters of the wishes of the people. I did not feel I needed an interpreter to address people who spoke the same language. And I felt it was a real advantage that we had lived the same sort of life.** I felt that the experiences I had lived through had fitted me curiously well for the coming struggle.
I had grown up in a household that was neither poor nor rich. We had to economize each day in order to enjoy the occasional luxury. My father’s background as a grocer is sometimes cited as the basis for my economic philosophy. So it was — and is — but his original philosophy encompassed more than simply ensuring that incomings showed a small surplus over outgoings at the end of the week. My father was both a practical man and a man of theory. He liked to connect the progress of our corner shop with the great complex romance of international trade which recruited people all over the world to ensure that a family in Grantham could have on its table rice from India, coffee from Kenya, sugar from the West Indies and spices from five continents. Before I read a line from the great liberal economists, I knew from my father’s accounts that the free market was like a vast sensitive nervous system, responding to events and signals all over the world to meet the ever-changing needs of peoples in different countries, from different classes, of different religions, with a kind of benign indifference to their status. Governments acted on a much smaller store of conscious information and, by contrast, were themselves ‘blind forces’ blundering about in the dark, and obstructing the operations of markets rather than improving them. The economic history of Britain for the next forty years confirmed and amplified almost every item of my father’s practical economics. In effect, I had been equipped at an early age with the ideal mental outlook and tools of analysis for reconstructing an economy ravaged by state socialism.
My life, like those of most people on the planet, was transformed by the Second World War. In my case, because I was at school and university for its duration, the transformation was an intellectual rather than a physical one. I drew from the failure of appeasement the lesson that aggression must always be firmly resisted. But how? The ultimate victory of the Allies persuaded me that nations must co-operate in defence of agreed international rules if they are either to resist great evils or to achieve great benefits. That is merely a platitude, however, if political leaders lack the courage and farsightedness, or — what is equally important — if nations lack strong bonds of common loyalty. Weak nations could not have resisted Hitler effectively — indeed, those nations that were weak did not stand up to him. So