1. Introduction

 On the day that the death of Mrs.Thatcher was announced there were comments from Northern Ireland and former mining areas of Britain that blamed her for the pain and suffering that she had caused in these parts of the British Isles.

But the very undeniable pain and suffering associated with these troubled regions surely reached something of an ‘historic’ peak back around the time when Margaret Roberts was born in 1925: and were hardly of her making. In fact these ‘troubles’ can be traced back to the 1760s and the transformation in Britain’s global position that was master-minded by ‘the Elder Pitt’ in the Seven Years War between 1756 and 1763.

In 1919, for example, J.L and Barbara Hammond started their historical study of “The Skilled Labourer” with the a chapter on struggles of the Tyne and Weir Miners in the immediate aftermath of that war: and they went on to describe the whole sequence of struggles in various trades between 1760 and 1832 as tantamount to a “civil war”, often the kind of conflict most likely to produce pain and suffering. And within the British Isles the situation in the years 1919 to 1926 were often tantamount to actual or real Civil War, with many people in Britain after the Second World War more angry that the conflicts had not been pushed on to ultimate victory rather than that they had caused a great deal of pain and suffering.

Back in the aftermath of the Seven Years War in 1763 people could look back of the great ’annus mirabilis-the miraculous year that dramatically transformed Britain’s fortunes from so nearly succumbing to the overwhelming might of France only to emerge as arguably the first truly global power with a major say in the future destiny of the whole world. And in her memoirs about her Downing Street Years Mrs Thatcher quoted the Elder Pitt’s conviction that only he ‘could save England’, confessing frankly that she had come to form something of the same conviction regarding herself, perhaps not so much from vaunted self-confidence, but from having been born into an age of increasing personal and collective disbelief accompanying a sense of ‘Decline and Fall’, that she had refused to share.

It was a time when W.B. Yeats could write “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”. And during her teenage years in the Thirties Margaret Roberts must have heard Winston Churchill’s lone ‘voice in the wilderness’ arguing against policies of military weakness and appeasement. It was a message that Mrs. Thatcher found to be very relevant to the world of the 1970s, when the lost war in Vietnam and new economic uncertainties had undermined the confidence of the USA , while also offering encouragement to global Communism.

And one of the important lessons of the inter-war period for many people was the idea that it had been especially ‘Men of power’ who had created “The Age of Catastrophe” 1914-45. At the time many people sympathized with T.E.Lawrence in the 1930s, when he wrote in “Seven Pillars of Wisdom“, that the problem had been “the Old Men“. “Youth” could win, but it had not learned to keep. “Youth” had dreamed of ‘a new Heaven and a new Earth‘, but the “old men” took over and set about building the ‘new world‘ in the form of the old one.

Vera Brittain, the author of “A Testament of Youth”, who argued that the world should preserve the legacy of “The Lost Generation”, quoted this as one of the favourite passages of Winifred Holtby. Miss Holtby was a dear friend and fellow activist from their days at Oxford just after the First World War, when both had “done their bit”, and they continued to do in vain support of the ‘Brave New World‘ peace settlement.

Both women in their lives and in their writing reflected the emergence of ‘the new woman’. Vera Brittain’ in “Testament of Youth” and “Testament of Friendship”: and Winifred Holtby especially in her most highly acclaimed novel “South Riding”, which was a tribute to Winifred’s mother, Alderman Holtby who was Yorkshire’s first elected female alderman. It was a tribute too to the way that the spirit of “Municipal Socialism“ pioneered by Sidney and Beatrice Webb in Greater London in the decades before 1914 was being used to help to transform life in the large ‘Ridings‘ of Yorkshire through the experience of greater State involvement in the economy and society both during the First World War and its difficult aftermath.

Subsequently the Second World War only further advanced and increased the role of women and the role of the State , though once the war was won, as had been the case of T.E. Lawrence‘s male youth, it was now the women who were thanked and ‘demobbed‘ while the Men made a new world in the likeness of the old. With the Labour Party claiming a rightful place as the “progressive“ counterpart to the ‘Conservatives‘ within the British two-party tradition, it seemed more likely that the first female Prime Minister would come from the Labour Party; and it is interesting to speculate on just how much ‘the way’ was prepared for Mrs. Thatcher’s emergence as Britain’s first ever woman Prime Minister by the earlier ministerial career of Vera Brittain’s daughter Shirley Williams.

But after Harold MacMillan’s ‘Wind of Change’ 1960s, by the 1970s there was something of a global tendency to try to see whether ‘women of power’ might be able to see and do things differently than the men. By this time the men vying for power were mostly produced by the Cold War “establishment systems” of either “East“ and “West“: systems that were in many ways designed to “put old heads on young shoulders”, old heads with entrenched views.

Compared with such ‘Men at the top’ the way up the ‘ladder of opportunity‘ was more of a personal struggle for a housewife and mother like Margaret Thatcher, even if she had been a research scientist in Industrial Chemistry and a Barrister at Law. But perhaps no-one expressed better than Maya Angelou how ‘swimming against the stream‘ was a form of “natural selection“ that may have ensured that the women who did make it to the top had been forced to develop more personal ‘thrust’ than their male counterparts and contributed to something of a different understanding of life than their male-rivals. As she chronicled, and exemplified, the African-American experience had often been one in which motherhood triggered a deep and visceral determination to ‘win through’.

In fact, in “The Political Animal” (2003) Jeremy Paxman produced interesting statistics to show that people who ‘made it to the top’ in British politics are much more likely to have had to face deep personal tragedy or trauma in their childhood or adolescence. Well it had often felt like a tragedy to have been born a girl in the paternalistic “Victorian“ world from which the movement for female emancipation spread; and an early ‘lesson‘ for Margaret Roberts was discovering, when she started having ambitions to go to Oxford, that she would need O Level Latin to get in, and Latin was not taught at all in her girls school. Not for the last time in her life, she had to break into a male establishment in order to achieve her goals.

But by the Autumn of 1979 things were changing and Nelson Mandela wrote a letter from prison to his wife, Winnie Mandela, suggesting that this year might well eventually become known as the ‘Year of the Woman’, because all around the world he could see the rise of women of power, ending his list with the most obvious example of Margaret Thatcher , who had led the Tories to victory in May.

It was still true, Mandela wrote, that, though Great Britain had ended the Second World War as a ‘third rate power’ and had subsequently lost its Empire, it was still in some respects ‘the centre of the world’.

It was a fact that was perhaps more obvious in South Africa than in many other places, including within Britain. By the late Seventies Britain could feel itself close to terminal decline, with the Labour Government easing it gently backwards, getting ‘back to the basics’ with a Prime Minister in Jim Callaghan showing the professional skills of the family GP with the quiet reassuring ‘bedside manner’ of those who know to help people to “go quietly” at the inevitable last. But Mrs. Thatcher was not one to “go down without a fight”: and she saw the Cold War very much in the tradition of the Elder Pitt, who had masterminded a successful global strategy that would secure English liberties and rights through Britain’s massive naval power.

And it was that naval power that still fixed South African politics, with its very particular “Apartheid “ policies within the frozen stalemate global strategy of the Cold War. The Royal Navy was crucial to the world order as it had been during the Seven Years War: and it was a military arm that had been developed to frustrate the continuing ambitions of the mightiest European continental State of the time to make use of its ‘overwhelming force’ to achieve a global hegemony that would force obedience to its own will, credo and/or standards on the rest of Humankind.

The diarist Horace Walpole described how the young William Pitt had been singled out for patronage by Sarah Churchill, the widow of John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough. Very much a ‘woman of power’ in her own right, Lady Marlborough had helped the political career of this young man in whom she no doubt saw someone who might emulate her husband “cometh the hour” and “save England“. William Pitt the Elder was the saviour of England in the Seven Years War, and, though his son William Pitt the Younger was less successful as a war leader, it was the “Tory Revolution” that he had effected in the years of peace that made it possible for Great Britain and Ireland to defeat France in the great wars from 1793 to 1815.

It was in the midst of these wars that Britain seized on the chance to take over the Dutch bases at the Cape, which in future would make it possible for the Royal Navy to ‘police’ the vast oceans of the Southern Hemisphere. And in 1979, even as a “third rate power” the British Naval bases in South Africa were still crucially important to NATO defence in the ongoing Cold War ‘stalemate’, a stalemate that both militated against progress and enshrined and perpetuated ideological difference.

It was a stalemate that meant that Nelson Mandela’s “Long Walk to Freedom” would involve 27 years of pacing the confines of a prison cell, still consciously trying to achieve the kind of personal “progress” that would prepare him for a new leadership role once the world could finally “move on”. And, as “Conversations With Myself” shows, it was a personal progress that involved a great effort to understand that to some extent the whole situation was one in which everyone was to some extent a prisoner of historical circumstance with some people ‘doing their best‘ and others ‘doing their worst‘.

Thus in a letter written to Winnie Mandela in 1970 Mandela summed up what he remembered of a novel he had read years before: a novel about Jesus of Nazareth written by an Afrikaans author in 1924. Writing the story in the person of Pontius Pilate, with all his won professional insight as a barrister accustomed to working within the ‘due process‘ of Law, Mandela could see that Pontius Pilate had no choice in accordance both with Roman and Jewish law and the great Roman attempt at that time to impose the ’Peace of Augustus’ all around the Mediterranean world.

Lawyers like Nelson Mandela and Margaret Thatcher, or indeed Sir Thomas More know that ’the Law’ is full of human imperfections and inadequacies for all the awesome powers and responsibilities that have become accrued to legitimate authority. As Robert Bolt put it in dialogue based upon Will Roper’s biography, by Tudor times England was thickly planted with laws and with law enforcers all of whom were in bad need of ‘reformation’: but in the meantime they are the best defence that the people have against the Devil and all his works.

But perhaps nothing in the History of legitimate authority has been more awesome that the responsibility that devolved to political leadership during the Cold War. As as Jeremy Paxman pointed out, the first task faced by any British Prime Minister on entering 10 Downing Street is to write out by hand the instructions to be handed to the commanders of Britain’s nuclear deterrent in sealed envelopes, orders that are only to be opened and acted upon in the event of Britain having apparently been subject to a nuclear strike which had wiped out all effective command and control.

A “Third World War” using nuclear weapons might destroy all life on Earth; so those hand-written orders were, and to some extent still are, a terrifying ‘blank cheque’ authorising the escalation of a conflict that could mean the end of the world, a ‘blank cheque’ waiting to be ‘cashed in’ if the political processes fail once more. It was something that the Labour Party were honest enough to refuse to countenance when Unilateral Disarmament became party policy. But, in effect, by so doing the Labour Party ruled itself out of office. The defence of Great Britain is the first responsibility of any government and while the Cold War endured Mrs. Thatcher was able to win three General Elections, and even a Thatcher-less Conservative Party still kept the Labour Party out of office.

But the Cold War did come to an end, and it did so in great part due to Mrs. Thatcher’s crucial role as a “Hooker”- rugby style.

Traditionally the Hooker in Rugby is the smaller, more dynamic and often more aggressive member of the Rugby “Front Row” binding together two ‘monster’ props whose ’forte’ is just standing firm and refusing to give ground in the common cause, a role that calls for more brawn than brain. But precisely because they operate right at the heart of the action in set-piece and open-play, Hookers often make good team captains and often are able to see when the muscle-bound pack “animals”, to quote a former Welsh colleague, are busily ‘fighting it out” brutally amongst themselves’, while actually the ball is elsewhere and the “game” is carrying on without them.

And , in many ways, Mrs. Thatcher’s role in the Reagan-Thatcher-Gorbachev ’triumvirate’ was very much like Churchill’s in the wartime “Big Three” of Roosevelt-Churchill-Stalin. They had shaped the post-war world through the decisions taken at Yalta, where ideological differences between these Allies were still of secondary importance to the challenge posed by the right-wing extremism of the Axis Powers that seemed to many to have caught a “Wave of the Future”.

Then, the “Future” was claimed by American Capitalism and Soviet Communism, only for USA to lose lost much of its self-belief in the 1970s, with the Soviet Union subsequently experiencing its own ’Vietnam’ in Afghanistan and suffering from a stalling of its own economy.

At the same time ‘The Wave of the Future’ was very obviously no longer confined within a Eurocentric world. But the Eurocentric World “Made in Britain” as Niall Ferguson explained was the only truly global reality that has existed: and the new reality was once more that described by W.B.Yeats just after the First World War.

“Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the World”.

It was an anarchy that Nation States had sought to counter, catching a ‘Wave of the Future’ during the Nineteenth Century, promoting ‘them’ and ‘us’ nationalism that often tried to find some ‘dyed in the wool’/biological and ‘racial’ basis for National identity. Such nationalism helped to create both new German and Italian nation states and empires, anxious to find “lebensraum“ inspired by historical precedent.

But, at the same time, small-scale nationalism also found its historical inspirations and undermined the ramshackle Old Empires, many of which had brought some kind of stability to life on Earth for centuries, some since Ancient times.

Most of these empires were in their own way multi-racial, multi-cultural and multi-ethnic, and from his prison cell Nelson Mandela saw the dangers that were inherent in the fissiparous tendencies of the age in post-imperial Africa. The existing States were mostly alien constructs imposed during the era of European Imperialism that had thrown different peoples together by means of what were obviously mere straight lines drawn on the maps made by the European powers. As alien constructs that cut across national, religious, tribal and other historical divisions, too often independence resulted in civil war or civil strife.

But Mandela told Richard Stegel, “We have never accepted really multiracialism…because when you talk of multi-racialism, you are multiplying races”:

Nevertheless part of the “New Dawn” that broke at the end of the Cold War elevated once again the importance of different nations, races, creeds and religions. Woodrow Wilson’s principle “Self-determination” issued in his Fourteen Points in 1917 had been a great inspiration to peoples around the world who were living under old or new imperial rule: and the Versailles Settlement re-drew the political map of Europe and much of the Middle East in a way that accommodated or encouraged nationalist aspirations. The break-up of the Communist blocs at the end of the Cold War allowed many of those old states and dreams to re-emerge, and, just as the Versailles Settlement led to the World Economic Chaos 1932-3, so this new world order led to the financial crisis of 2008, when governments suddenly found themselves looking once more into “the Abyss“.

But even Nelson Mandela was not immune to the mood that spread abroad with the end of the Cold War , especially the idea that somehow the collapse of Communism meant “The end of History” with the all lessons that “Old Men” like Lord Acton drew from it, like his famous dictum “All power corrupts but absolute power corrupts absolutely”, no longer relevant. Once Mandela had finally been released and a new democratic South Africa was being created, he suggested to the ANC that he should not stand for the Presidency arguing it was a task for someone younger and more “up with the times”, someone without his wealth of wisdom, experience and depth of thought.

Back in the Thirties it seemed that the ‘Axis Powers’ had managed to “steal a march” on the rest of the world because the latest Science and Technology could be exploited by authoritarian regimes, and now newer technologies were speeding up the pace of change and evolution even more, not least by means of the “artificial intelligence” of computers. So, if 1979 was “The Year of the Woman” , the Fall of the Berlin Wall encouraged a search for the “Whizz Kids” of the “New Age” with something like a ‘Domino Effect’. Where change had seemed impossible in the complexities of the Cold War, it now seemed possible for people with only a selective knowledge of History, or much real-life personal experience, manage a ‘computer assisted Brave New World.