Some of Us

As the iron lady passes reluctantly into history it is worth looking back at the decade to which she gave her name. Thatcherism was never simply a doctrine, it was a mood, a set of values and beliefs derived from provincial England in the 30s and affronted by the permissiveness and decline of the 60s and 70s. Mrs Thatcher notoriously scorned the suave, silver-haired Establishment which had proved such a failure in all fields, and she scorned as well the way things "had always been done". The 80s were the years of new men and new women: people filled with new certainties and not always encumbered by social graces or compassion for the weak. In this book, Julian Critchley encapsulates the spirit of Thatcherism by profiling some of those who did so well in her Britain. Not all are politicians, though John Major, Nicholas Ridley, Norman Tebbit, Cecil Parkinson and Edwina Currie are included. The media are here too - Robert Maxwell, Rupert Murdoch, Max Hastings, Sir John Junor, Jeffrey Archer and the great ringmaster Bernard Ingham.
Business is represented by two innovators, Anita Roddick and Tim Waterstone, by Sir John Cuckney, chairman of Westland Helicopters, and the financier Michael Ashcroft. Woodrow Wyatt is included as a man of the world if not of the people, and Immanuel Jakobovits and Edward Norman as men of the cloth. Nor is the Left ignored - in different ways Thatcherism gave both Neil Kinnock and Ken Livingstone their chances. Julian Critchley's irony and scepticism never endeared him to his leader, nor to many of those profiled here, but they do make him an astringent guide to the Thatcher years.