00:10:02.720The older you get, the more you see history starting to repeat itself.
00:10:07.200Well, I'm so glad you made that point, because I think, actually,
00:10:09.620one of the reasons that the publishers might have approached you to write a book about Thatcher
00:10:13.400is that her name is becoming repeated again.
00:10:17.320And I think partly it's because people are quite desperate for things to change in a fairly radical way.
00:10:25.000And a lot of people, contrary to what you've just said, they see her as someone who came in and destroyed everything and faced down everybody and broke through.
00:10:33.080But I also, and this is what I was going to ask you about, I hear a lot of quite reasonable, sensible people, particularly sort of on the centre-right,
00:10:41.920who would have been fans of Thatcher back then, who are saying she was a great conservative prime minister, but she is not remotely what we need now.
00:10:51.800Do you know what they're talking about?
00:12:16.580She stole ideas and put them all together and came up with an economic policy that was probably the most free market that we've had in this country.
00:12:36.140And writing a short book is actually much harder than writing a long book.
00:12:40.400And first of all, you have to decide what to leave out.
00:12:42.700But she – the lesson that I drew from writing the whole thing is that she's much more of a pragmatist than she would ever have wanted to admit to.
00:12:55.220Most of her reforms were done quite slowly.
00:14:46.740But, as I say, the image was sometimes different from the reality.
00:14:52.520The most positive thing that happened to her was in 1977 when a Soviet newspaper called her the Iron Lady.
00:14:59.700And she lived off that for the rest of her time in office.
00:15:04.240And I remember a few days after that she was called that, she was making a speech, I think, in Kensington.
00:15:10.000And stood up and said to the audience, well, here I am in my red star chiffon gown, my hair gently coiffed you, the Iron Lady of the Western world.
00:15:36.800Because her economic policies at that time were causing huge amounts of unemployment.
00:15:41.020People, even in the Conservative Party, really wondered whether she would be able to prevail.
00:15:46.640And she had a lot of opposition with her own party.
00:15:48.620And this is where there are lots of parallels with Kemi Bezanoff, that the chapter on her period in opposition from 75 to 79, virtually after every 200 words, I'd be thinking to myself, well, this is what Kemi's facing.
00:16:01.940She had no policy platform at the beginning, nor do the Conservatives now.
00:16:07.520She was the first woman leader, Kemi's first black woman leader.
00:17:27.200So, is it unfounded or does she deserve some of it as well?
00:17:32.080Well, I think it is true to say that one of the failings of the Thatcher period was not to cope with the consequences of deindustrialisation.
00:17:44.220It was quite clear that many of our manufacturing industries or our heavy industries in the 1980s were effectively bankrupt.
00:17:52.220And in her view, well, if they keep having to have taxpayer subsidies, let them weather on the vine.
00:18:14.440Even though she was the first world politician to make a speech on climate change in 1989, they still regard her as the devil incarnate.
00:18:23.980Now, what the Thatcher government tried to do, they introduced lots of employment schemes to try and ameliorate the effects of unemployment.
00:18:33.520But I don't think they quite understood the extent of it and the fact that in some particularly mining communities, but also steel communities, particularly in Scotland and the northeast,
00:18:44.680I don't think they understood that every single male in a particular village would be employed down the mine or in the steelworks.
00:18:54.020And if suddenly everyone loses their job, I mean, that destroys the fabric of society in a particular community.
00:19:01.520And I don't think there was enough recognition of that.
00:19:04.320They did have these schemes, but they were sort of, I was going to say half-hearted.
00:19:11.280But they didn't do what they needed to do.
00:19:13.120And some of these communities do still feel the effects of those industries shutting down.
00:19:20.800And you can't replace everything with call centers.
00:19:24.880And so I think that is why she is still reviled in a lot of those areas.
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00:26:16.860I mean, I remember these privatisation campaigns in the 1980s and massive adverts on television, the Tel-Sid ones for people to buy shares in British gas, British telecom.
00:26:27.180All sorts of different industries were privatised.
00:28:05.580She would have won anyway, but she wouldn't have got the size of majority.
00:28:09.980And her percentage of the vote, I think it was something like 44 and 79, 42 and 42, which compared to other elections, that's a decent performance.
00:28:23.480But she never got over 50% of the vote.
00:28:26.780But in our electoral system, that is pretty difficult to do, right?
00:28:30.740Well, I can't actually remember the last time it happened.
00:28:32.820Yeah, I don't know that that's happened.
00:28:34.600You know what I was also going to ask about?
00:28:36.020I think you alluded to the Iron Lady moniker a while ago.
00:28:40.740And I think it's fair to say that it was also foreign policy and geopolitics that really helped to establish her as a great stateswoman on the world stage, as someone who was really a significant figure, not just in Britain, but around the world.
00:28:56.060And on that, was her reputation of being strong and bold, et cetera, was that a fair characterization of her approach to foreign policy and world-related affairs?
00:29:10.880And as you know, the last chapter in the book is all about the myths around her culture, and I tried to explode some of them.
00:29:18.760The biggest myth was that she was somehow America's poodle, Ronald Reagan's poodle.
00:29:25.240Now, she was a great ally of Reagan, but they had some quite heated disagreements, not least on the Falklands War.
00:29:31.900Also, the invasion of Grenada, which the Queen was head of state of Grenada, and Reagan didn't give her any prior warning of what he was about to do.
00:29:42.340And he was in the middle of a cabinet meeting when she phoned him to remonstrate, and he took the phone call while the cabinet ministers were around the table.
00:29:52.120And at one point, and this is actually on film, I think, at one point, he took the phone from his ear, and he just allowed the rest of the cabinet to hear.
00:30:03.800And she was ranting, and he goes, isn't she magnificent?
00:30:07.700And there were disagreements on policy regarding the Soviet Union, and that Reagan at the Reykjavik summit wanted to effectively have a nuclear-free world.
00:30:20.180She thought that was absolute madness and told him so.
00:30:24.220So, again, the myth that she was just in hot to Reagan all the time.
00:30:28.840In fairness, I'm sure that myth exists.
00:30:32.160In fact, what I thought that she was known for is the fact that, unlike most British prime ministers that I've lived under, she was actually, while being very, very friendly and willing to work together with our American partners, was very clear about the British national interest.
00:30:48.600And it's one of the reasons quite a lot of us would like some more of that, actually, because we want to work extremely constructively with America, I think.
00:30:57.520But we've also got to remember Britain has its own interest.
00:31:02.160And she had a bottom line, and she would never go below that.
00:31:05.460I mean, she would not have negotiated the Chagos deal that Starmer did.
00:31:10.160And, I mean, we're talking on the day that apparently there's been a deal with France, where instead of one in, one out for illegal migrants, it's 17 in and one out.
00:31:21.580Now, how he's going to sell that to the British people, I do not know.
00:31:26.420That would never have happened under Thatcher.
00:31:27.740And you look at her negotiating style with the EEC, where she felt that we were paying far too much in.
00:31:35.300And she was sort of, well, she was like thumped the table and said, I want my money back.
00:31:41.300So she was quite, she was very trenchant in international affairs.
00:31:46.160You look at sanctions on South Africa, where she was the only prime minister or president in the Commonwealth who refused to impose sanctions on South Africa.
00:31:57.540So this is yet another one of these myths that the left have been able to propagate, that she was somehow in support of apartheid or even a racist.
00:32:06.460You look at the papers, you look at all of the records, and there is nothing to substantiate that.
00:32:11.760In fact, the direct opposite, where all of her letters to the South African leadership would demand the release of Nelson Mandela.
00:32:20.080She would talk about how to gradually dismantle apartheid.
00:32:25.740The meetings that she had with them, all the records of those meetings demonstrate the same thing.
00:32:31.680And you look at the memoirs of Sir Robin Rennick, who was our ambassador to South Africa at the time.
00:32:36.940And he lays out in graphic detail exactly what she did to help bring about the end of apartheid.
00:32:43.240And yet she's got this reputation of somehow being sympathetic to it.
00:32:47.580And Nelson Mandela thanked her for her role in this when he visited her.
00:32:51.160It was only a few months before she left office.
00:32:53.880And he came to Downing Street, and Robin Rennick had had a pre-meeting with the prime minister and basically said to him,
00:33:00.580look, prime minister, he's waited 30 years to say what he's got to say to you.
00:33:05.340She goes, oh, you mean I should shut up?
00:33:07.520Because she did have a reputation for dominating meetings.
00:33:10.260And she did shut up for an hour to the extent that the meeting went on so long
00:33:16.340that the waiting press outside were chanting, free Nelson Mandela.
00:33:21.420So I think it's things like that where you've got to try and look through the conventional wisdom
00:33:28.660and actually try and look at the facts.
00:33:30.720And when you do that, you get a very different point.
00:33:32.580So perhaps you should explain then what was the nature of her opposition to the sanctioning of South Africa?
00:33:38.020Because she thought that sanctions would hurt the very people that everyone else was trying to help.
00:33:44.300And if you think about it, she was probably right on that.