Before acquiring power, Margaret Thatcher was nothing. She was trained as a chemist. Her career in politics was marked by doggedness, but no one, before her accession to office, would have noted her as a distinctive British personality, a woman who for a time could embody the national will. It was power that established her importance, and power that brought into being all of her now-immortal incarnations—diva, mother of the nation, coy flirt, hissing serpent, stern headmistress, eyes of Caligula, mouth of Bardot, screeching harridan, frugal housewife, Boadicea the Warrior Queen, and Iron Lady, all in one.
Whether admired or reviled, Thatcher provokes a question that anyone who has traced her life and her time in office must inevitably ask: Why her? It is, in some ways, the most interesting question about her; it is also the least answerable. It would be tempting to say that this is an irony that Thatcher herself would have appreciated, but of all the qualities attributed to her, a sense of irony is least among them.
She didn’t belong to the constellation of English political leaders who, even without power, would have compelled the interest and curiosity of the time in which they lived. Had William Gladstone or Benjamin Disraeli never climbed to the top of the greasy pole, as Disraeli once put it, both men—by the force of their character, their literary abilities, their culture, and their capacity conspicuously to glitter—would have been a part of the historical drama of the nineteenth century. It is not in their company that Margaret Thatcher should be placed. Failing to command the obedience of her cultural superiors, she would have been uninterested in their company, anyway. Like the proverbial hedgehog in Isaiah Berlin’s parable (itself based on Greek myth), she was meant to do one thing: accumulate and exercise political power. It was power that established her importance, not her importance that established her power.
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