Sir Antony Fisher — The Whetstones — Thatcher — Cameron
British Post-War “Think Tanks”
The first British “Think Tanks” formed in the 1950s mirrored earlier US versions. The story of the people who created them is one of outsiders, dreamers and visionaries, mostly men who swam against the post-war political tide and believed the state should shrink, individual freedom should grow and that a free market was the main engine that would drive this change.
Many were given uncontroversial names, such as the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) or the Adam Smith Institute (ASI), Others include the Bow Group, The Cobden Centre, Policy Exchange, Politeia, Selsdon Group, the Social Market Foundation and the Stockholm Network.
The set text for these proto free marketeers was The Road to Serfdom by Austrian economist Friedrich Von Hayek, whose warning at the time was that the UK risked sliding into totalitarianism unless it spurned all socialist ideas. This was largely ignored in the UK at the time, where the interventionist creed of John Maynard Keynes dominated, but had a big impact on some, including a young chemistry student, Margaret Hilda Roberts and Anthony Fisher, who saw in centralised socialist planning, with, as he perceived it, constant intrusion into people’s everyday lives, shades of the political philosophy Britain had just defeated in the war.
The early roots of Thatcherism grew from the thinking and actions of this somewhat disparate band of political philosophers, economists and conspiracy theorists.
The Institute for Economic Affairs
Oliver Letwin MP. The Times 1994.
“Without Fisher, no IEA; without the IEA and its clones, no Thatcher and quite possibly no Reagan; without Reagan, no Star Wars; without Star Wars, no economic collapse of the Soviet Union. Quite a chain of consequences for a chicken farmer!”
The IEA was the first of dozens of front groups for the Mont Pelerin Society [MPS] Antony Fisher helped launch in 1955 with Arthur Seldon and Ralph Harris the joint founders and it became the template for practically all think tanks. Other founders included Hayek, who by this time was at the University of Chicago and Keith Joseph. The list of think tanks founded by MPS members is almost a cliché, but necessary to recount: the IEA; the Institute for Humane Studies founded by F. A. Harper in 1961; the Heritage Foundation founded by Ed Feulner in 1973 (MPS president 1996–1998); the Fraser Institute founded by Fisher in 1974; the Manhattan Institute founded by Fisher in 1977; the Cato Institute founded by Ed Crane, Charles Koch and Murray Rothbard in 1977, the Atlas Economic Research Foundation [“Atlas”],founded by Fisher in 1981.
Milton Friedman is quoted as follows “It is only necessary to convince a few wealthy people to get funds to launch any idea, however strange, and there are many such persons, many independent foci of support”. This highlighted the inequity of powerful think tanks with access to politicians, for in societies where those with wealth already exert a greater influence on policy making than those at the bottom, think tanks further exacerbate this problem. The lack of accountability is an injustice in a supposedly democratic society. Think tanks in the UK are not legally obliged to disclose their donors, so there is little transparency in the funding of such influential groups.
Antony Fisher
Sir Antony Fisher (1915–1988) was one of the most influential background players in the global rise of libertarian think-tanks during the second half of the twentieth century. Born in London in 1915 and educated at Eton and Cambridge.
After serving in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War as a Battle-of-Britain pilot Fisher moved to farming. In 1952, he took a study trip to the United States, where he visited the still-new Foundation for Economic Education [FEE]. F. A. Harper of the FEE introduced Fisher to former colleagues from the Agriculture Department of Cornell University. They showed him intensive chicken farming techniques which seemed so impressive, he returned home to start England’s first battery farm, Buxted Chickens, introducing broiler chickens into the UK, which eventually made him a millionaire.
Fisher was elected to the Mont Pelerin Society in 1954. Organised by Hayek in 1947, the group consisted of leading liberal economists and philosophers such as Karl Popper and Milton Friedman. With the help of the equally right wing Liberal Oliver Smedley, Fisher used his money to set up the hugely influential IEA at №2 Lord North Street in 1955.
In 1959 the Mont Pelerin Society met in Oxford and discussed a new topic entitled ‘Strategy and Tactics’, featuring a paper by Seldon and Harris., and the IEA warmly embraced the core principles of Hayek’s work in its publications. Harris and Seldon described the potential obstacles to furthering their economic agenda, which they recognised to consist of established interests with large stakes in the post-war settlement, and weak politicians. They identified their principle task as gaining access to elite opinion; businessmen and politicians, as well as academics, teachers, journalists and broadcasters. They aimed not to promote a groundswell of public opinion for their ideas but influence those already in positions of power. Like Hayek, they believed in changing the minds of those who informed other, ordinary people’s opinion.
Fisher had read an abbreviated version of Hayek’s book in the Readers Digest. His interest sparked, he sought him out, asking how a newly minted rich man could prevent his country and western civilization from going any further down the statist road the Austrian economist had famously described. At the time, Fisher thought going into politics was the answer. Hayek answered: “If you want to do something more for your country, DON’T go into politics, since politicians always lag behind public opinion. And public opinion always lags behind the tide of intellectual thought, so try to change elite intellectual opinion, which, he added, is a 20–30 year process”.
The Noble Prize winning Hayek was the primary intellectual architect behind a Thatcherism defined primarily by privatisation, tax breaks and strike breaking. He saw the emerging think tanks as a necessary bulwark against a prevailing Keynesian consensus. Hayek was officially recognised in December 1984, through receiving the Nobel Prize for Economics. Becoming a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour by the Queen on the prime minister’s recommendation, for “services to the study of economics” was however the real highlight. His audience with the Queen was followed by a jubilant dinner with family and friends at the IEA. “I’ve just had the happiest day of my life,” he said.
Atlas was subsequently launched in 1981 in San Francisco, now headquartered on the campus of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia near Washington D.C. In a strategy paper written in February 1985, Fisher wrote of the need to transform the “extremist, anti-government, radical free market policies of the von Hayek Mont Pelerin Society apparatus into the “new orthodoxy’’ through the launching of hundreds of small think tanks on every continent. It was through Atlas that Fisher was able to extend his beliefs as an agency to create and support free-market think tanks around the world and by 1984 he was watching over 18 separate institutions in 11 countries and today Atlas supports and works with around 150 libertarian think-tanks worldwide. The most prominent include the Fraser, Manhattan, Adam Smith and Pacific Research institutes, the National Center for Policy Analysis and the Centre for Independent Studies.
Buying into Hayek’s ideas, Fisher left his chickens and went into the think tank business, where he changed history. Within a decade, he had seeded 30 think tanks in 20 countries, 150 think tanks to date. As one of Fisher’s first ventures, the Social Market Foundation developed Margaret Thatcher as candidate and Thatcherism as a governing philosophy.” (Manhattan Institute 2003)
In his book Thinking the Unthinkable, Richard Cockett sketched Fisher’s role in supporting all the emerging libertarian think-tanks around the world. “On the strength of his reputation with the IEA, he was invited in 1975 to become co-director of the Fraser Institute in Vancouver, founded by the Canadian businessman Pat Boyle in 1974. Fisher let the young director of the Fraser Institute, Dr Michael Walker, get on with the intellectual output of the Institute (just as he had given free rein to Seldon and Harris at the IEA) while he himself concentrated on the fund-raising side,” Cockett wrote.
Encouraged by Hayek, Fisher hired the Cambridge trained economist Ralph Harris to run the IEA from 1957 to 1987. Along with research director Arthur Seldon they ensured a constant flow of pamphlets on every kind of issue, including early calls for the privatisation of nationalised industries.
Harris became one of the group of men who invented Thatcherism. He became a director of Rupert Murdoch’s Times Newspapers company from 1988 to 2001 and chairman of CIVITAS from 2000 and a fellow of the British Eugenics Society which had earlier helped draft Hitler’s race laws.
Seldon and Harris were, as Harris himself recalled, two “state educated lads”, who had a lot of fun mocking what they saw as the absurdities of state planning, as well as the “public school types” from the Conservative Party, who could only grasp a “parody” of their arguments. In addition, there was an explosion of fresh market activity going on in London, as new industries such as music and fashion, flourished free from state interference, control or, indeed, understanding.
Despite subsequently losing his fortune in several ill-advised business ventures, including a turtle-farming operation, he founded the International Institute for Economic Research in 1971, which went on to spawn the Atlas in 1981 and the International Policy Network in 2001. In 1977 he moved to San Francisco with second wife Dorian, whom he had met through the Mont Pelerin Society, and founded the Pacific Institute for Public Policy in 1979. According to Cockett, Fisher and libertarian icon Milton Friedman lived in the same apartment block during the 1980's.
Fisher had already furthered the Mont Pelerin subversion by establishing the Fraser Institute in Vancouver, Canada in 1974 and a third strand of the franchise, the International Center for Economic Policy Studies [ICEPS] in New York in 1977, renamed the Manhattan Institute in 1978. This became a forum for Anglo-American ideologues and operatives who promoted “free market” and socially conservative philosophies. This was done with help from Fisher’s prominent attorney and Wall St. speculator, the future Ronald Reagan CIA director Bill Casey, one of Wild Bill Donovan’s key people in the OSS in WWII, who signed the ICEPS incorporation documents. This was swiftly followed by the Pacific Institute for Public Policy Research in San Francisco in 1978. Casey served as the first chairman of the International Center for Economic Policy Studies, was a long time conservative, was the lawyer who drew up the founding papers for the National Review and a founding director of the National Strategy Information Center.
During his CIA tenure, Casey played a large part in shaping Reagan’s foreign policy, particularly its approach to Soviet international activity. Based on a book, The Terror Network, Casey believed that the Soviet Union was the source of all terrorist activity in the world, in spite of his analysts providing evidence that this was in fact black propaganda by the CIA itself. Casey obtained a report from a professor that agreed with his view, which convinced Ronald Reagan that there was a threat. In addition, restrictions were lifted on the use of the CIA to directly, covertly influence the internal and foreign affairs of countries relevant to American policy. Notably he oversaw covert assistance to the Mujahadeen resistance in Afghanistan, with a budget of over $1 billion by working closely with Akhtar Abdur Rahman (the Director General of ISI in Pakistan), the Solidarity movement in Poland, and a number of coups and attempted coups in South- and Central America. Casey was also the principal architect of the arms-for-hostages deal that became known as the Iran-Contra affair.
Fisher and Casey wanted the Manhattan Institute “to apply the principles of the market economy to social problems, so naturally it has had considerable influence on conservative policymakers. Summarising the institute’s strategy, institute President Lawrence Mone said in a 2002 speech to the conservative Philanthropy Roundtable: “We make sure we have the right messenger; people like Charles Murray, George Kelling, and Peter Huber and then we market our message to the right people through our books, forums, and City Journal. It takes time, and it takes money, but in the end we know we are making a difference.” The Manhattan Institute’s Board of Trustees is led by Paul Singer, a hedge fund billionaire and major funder of Republican causes and neoconservative think tanks
“In 1981, to co-ordinate and establish a central focus for these institutes that Fisher found himself starting up all over the world, he created the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, which in 1987 merged with the Institute for Humane Studies [HIS] founded by Mont Pelerin member F.A. “Baldy” Harper in 1961. This was to provide a central institutional structure for what quickly became an ever-expanding number of international free-market think-tanks or research institutes,” Cockett wrote.
According to Cockett, as the international think-tanks proliferated, “Fisher used the local and international gatherings of the Mont Pelerin Society to find personnel, fund-raisers and donors to serve the Atlas Institute”. In 1973, Mont Pelerin had been instrumental in launching the Coors family think tank, the free market Heritage Foundation, in Washington, D.C.
Following the Thatcher victory, Mont Pelerin launched an ambitious overhaul of the Heritage Foundation, importing half a dozen British Mont Pelerinites in anticipation of the 1980 Presidential run by Ronald Reagan. Through these operations, Fisher provided financial and operational support for a huge number of fledgling think-tanks, most of which would not exist without his influence.
For example, Madsen Pirie, Eamonn Butler and Stuart Butler were students together at University of St Andrews, Scotland. In 1973, they left Scotland to work with Edward Feulner, a Senator from the State of Illinois who became co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, in the same year. After their apprenticeship in America, Pirie and Butler returned to Scotland in 1977 to found their own think tank, the Adam Smith Institute, with assistance from Fisher.
The IEA’s brand of free market liberal economics had been deeply unpopular when it was first founded, but with the help of fundraising led by Harris and John Wood of the Conservative research department had attracted nearly 300 separate corporate donors by 1969 including BAT, IBM, Proctor & Gamble, Shell, Unilever, high street banks and media outlets such as the Financial Times and the Daily Telegraph, as well as large City of London businesses such as British Assets Trust and Prudential. Some 20 years later the IEA men started really making their mark, particularly with Enoch Powell and other Tory right wingers, via a series of easy-to-read pamphlets with snappy titles such as “Down With the Poor” (1971) and “The Challenge of the Radical Reactionary” (1981). By combining the classical liberalism of the 18th and 19th centuries with Conservative principles, these helped shatter the Butskellite consensus at Westminster and create the necessary intellectual climate for the emergence of Thatcher as the free-market successor to the interventionist Heath.
By the time Margaret Thatcher had been elected Prime Minister of Britain in 1979, Fisher had contacted von Hayek, Milton Friedman, and other leading Mont Pelerin figures and spelled out an ambitious expansion effort; in effect, the launching of a new international. The Mont Pelerin apparatus had effectively moved straight into 10 Downing Street. In recognition of the Society’s loyal service to the House of Windsor, Queen Elizabeth II appointed Ralph Harris a peer for life, as Lord Harris of High Cross, and knighted Antony Fisher and Allan Walters. Walters was given an office at 10 Downing Street as Thatcher’s resident economic advisor. During Thatcher’s 1979–90 reign at No 10 Downing St., her various governments relied heavily upon the IEA, now based at 55–57 Tufton Street, along with several other closely linked organisations working with the intent to cut the UKs ties with and subsequently split or even break up the EU.
as an unofficial thinktank. Another was the more restrained Centre for Policy Studies, set up by Thatcher and Sir Keith Joseph.and several other independent public-policy institutes in the U.K. The Reagan administration drew heavily from ideas and experts in the Heritage and Hoover Foundations, as well as the American Enterprise, Cato Institutes and the ACCF Center for Policy Research.
On New Years Day 1980, von Hayek wrote back to Fisher:
“I entirely agree with you that the time has come when it has become desirable and almost a duty to extend the network of institutes of the kind of the London Institute of Economic Affairs. Though it took some time for its influence to become noticeable, it has by now far exceeded my most optimistic hopes….
What I argued thirty years ago, that we can beat the Socialist trend only if we can persuade the intellectuals, the makers of opinion, seems to me more than amply confirmed. Whether we can still win the race against the expanding Socialist tide depends on whether we can spread the insights, which prove much more acceptable to the young if rightly expounded than I had hoped, fast and wide enough… The future of civilization may really depend on whether we can catch the ear of a large enough part of the upcoming generation of intellectuals all over the world fast enough. And I am more convinced than ever that the method practiced by the IEA is the only one which promises any real results….
This ought to be used to create similar institutes all over the world and you have now acquired the special skill of doing it. It would be money well spent if large sums could be made available for such a concerted effort.’’
On 20th February 1980, Margaret Thatcher added her endorsement to the project in a letter to Fisher; and May 8, Milton Friedman threw his support behind the international effort: “Any extension of institutes of this kind around the world is certainly something ardently to be desired.’’
Margaret Thatcher eventually thanked Fisher, Harris, and her IEA sponsors during its 30th anniversary dinner at Grosvenor House in April 1987, with the 72 year old Fisher flying over from the United States for this auspicious occasion. During the dinner Lord Blake told guests: “No single body has contributed more than the IEA to the long overdue destruction of étatisme and to the recovery of Britain.” Finally, it was Thatcher’s turn to speak. “Anyone who dared to challenge the conventional wisdom of the post-war consensus was derided, pilloried, criticised, frowned upon, and looked down upon as being either reactionary, pitiful, or ignorant,” she said. “The IEA dared to challenge that. You did not say, as so many others did so, ‘what can a few people do among so many. You set out to challenge, to change public sentiment… once you, with your courage, gave expression to other views, others followed… what we have achieved could never have been done without the leadership of the IEA”. She tried that evening to convince Fisher that the Tory party should take over the IEA, but he was apparently appalled by the idea.
Fisher died in 1988, only four weeks after being knighted.
John Blundell
To preserve his legacy, Fisher had hired John Blundell, a childhood admirer of the IEA and a friend of Thatcher’s, to take over as president of Atlas, then head of the Institute of Humane Studies, with a reputation as “a highly effective manager and fundraiser”. Blundell was an idealist, a curious, unassuming and softly spoken conservative.
Blundell was born in relatively affluent Congleton in Cheshire on 9th October 1952 and attended King’s School Macclesfield. At the age of 16, in the family three-storey semi-detached house, his university lecturer father handed him an IEA pamphlet as part of a batch of documents aimed at helping him decide upon a suitable university degree.
Blundell ended up studying economics at the LSE where he became an active supporter of the IEA and a lifelong devotee of Thatcher. Through his work at the institute he learned about Antony Fisher’s American free market think tanks which were being financially supported by Charles Koch. Following graduation in 1974, he flew to the US to attend the Koch funded South Royalton Conference hosted by the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS), founded by free market advocate Hal Harper with Fisher’s support. This event attracted a new generation of ideological adherents to libertarianism, many of whom would influence world affairs. Koch was represented by George Pearson who was looking for new, young talent and free market initiatives to support.
One delegate recalled: “I met several of the Austrian luminaries for the first time and I was blown away by how seriously the youthful audience took theoretical controversies.” Another recalled that: “Milton Friedman even showed up to deliver an evening lecture. That conference was a major event in the recovery of the Austrian economics movement.” Blundell thus discovered the world of heavily financed, powerful free market think tanks where he would establish his intellectual and spiritual home and become a powerful member of this small community
By 1977 Blundell had been hired to head up the Parliamentary and Press Liaison office at the Federation of Small Businesses [FSB] and in 1978 was elected as a councillor in the London Borough of Lambeth. He resigned as FSB spokesman and moved to California with wife Christine and their three-month-old baby boy Miles. He soon became an active figure in classical liberal (rather than plain conservative) organisations and was offered a well-paid job at the IHS in April 1982 and subsequently Atlas, where his particular combination of skills and qualities became apparent. He was still working at the HIS when it moved to George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, one of the many front groups and free market think tanks to benefit from Koch funding. In 1987 he became President of Atlas and the following year president of the HIS, where he presided over a period of considerable expansion of both organisations from Fairfax. He became a senior member of the Koch cortège and a member of the Mont Pelerin Society and was becoming increasingly aware of the small number of scientists and free market think tanks that had started to challenge the emerging science of climate change.
Asked about global warming, he said: “I recall that as president of Atlas I would put free market-oriented environmental thinking on our workshop agenda in order to make sure it spread outside the USA, or at least to make sure think tanks around the world were at the very least aware of this work.”
In March 1991 he moved from Atlas and IHS to become President of the Charles Koch and Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, where he played a very important part in the development of a growing and systematic programme of “targeted philanthropy” and be responsible for distributing millions in tax-deductible philanthropic donations.
The extent of Blundell’s power and the scale of the Koch network of think tanks at this time are revealed in a private, highly confidential letter typed at his Washington offices to his contact William Orzechowsi in Fairfax, Virginia, in November 1991. Blundell was helping recruit a huge army of free market climate change denial troops, including the executive vice president of the Citizens for a Sound Economy, a privatisation policy analyst at the Reason Foundation and two executive directors for the “non-partisan” National Taxpayers Union. Directors of development were also needed at the Cato Institute, Institute of Humane Studies and Institute for Justice.
One job advert ran: “A citizens action group is seeking a field director to coordinate fundraising, petition drives, media relations, and coalition building with various state level non-partisan campaigns,” adding, “experience in ballot initiatives and petitioning is preferred.”
The think tanks included “free market advocacy groups promoting economic freedom” and “lower taxes” working in the fields of social security, medical care, poverty, welfare, education choice, regulation, trade, labour relations and the environment. Blundell was looking for specialists in lobbying, media relations, recruiting students and visiting scholars and “mobilising grassroots support.” His activities would establish the foundations for a direct role in the growing climate denial movement.
He returned to the UK as Director General of the IEA in January 1993. The IEA was a troubled ship with disagreement about its direction and identity and there were serious concerns for its future. He reaffirmed the core purpose and mission to affect the long-term climate of opinion to influence the creators of public opinion, such as academics, journalists, and writers, to effectively wage a ‘war of ideas’. in 2003. In 2009 he stepped down as Director General and returned to the US where he continued to be active as a speaker and author
Blundell helped to develop or played a part in founding the Charles Koch Charitable Foundation, the Buckeye Institute, the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, the Fraser Institute, the Institute of Economic Studies, the Institute for Justice, and through the Institute Development and Relations Committee of Atlas, several think tanks in various parts of the world.
Linda Whetstone
Linda Whetstone is the daughter of Antony Fisher and followed closely in her father’s footsteps. She became a trustee of the IEA, having made a brief if slightly bizarre cameo appearance at the Conservative conference in October 1978 in Brighton. She is a fiercely sharp economist of the Chicago School and dressage judge who runs an equestrian centre from the family home and was long involved with the running of the IEA, as well as running her father’s educational project, the Network for a Free Society. She has been described as “being on an international crusade for free markets and lack of government intervention”. Staunchly anti-EU, she is remembered even now by older politicians for her vocal campaigning against staying in the Common Market during the 1975 UK referendum.
It may be recalled that the Tory party at the time was very keen that the controversies of Powell and Joseph be forgotten and that it should attack the Labour Party on economic rather than social grounds. The theme of the conference was The Next Government. Linda Whetstone had “inherited her father’s clarity of thought and impatience with political pragmatism”. She took to the podium, wearing a crumpled canary yellow collared t-shirt, immediately in front of Margaret Thatcher and addressed assembled delegates in a clear, almost shrill voice.
“We have far too much legislation, too much rest and we must start undoing it,” she said: “The next Conservative government must not pander or protect certain sectors. Let’s not go out of our way to help small businesses, agriculture trade unions, coloured people, women.”
She shouted: “I may be what people call a right wing Conservative but I believe we cannot help those people who cannot help themselves at the moment because we cannot afford to do it. We cannot give them the choice in education, we cannot give them the choice in health care that some of us can afford and we cannot do it because we insist on trying to help different groups on trying to legislate against things all the time….”
Before she finished her speech, the band started a rousing rendition of God Save the Queen, the audience took to its feet and her concluding remarks were, deliberately or otherwise, drowned out for the television viewers watching the conference at home. Whetstone’s ideological distrust of the state would later inspire her to support free market attacks on climate science.
Margaret Thatcher — Iron Maiden, Iron Lady
Early Life Roots
Margaret Thatcher was born Margaret Roberts on October 25th 1925 and grew up in the small market/railway town of Grantham in Lincolnshire above the family’s corner grocery store. She had an older sister Muriel, born in 1921.Her father Alfred Roberts was a grocer, an austere man, Rotary Club member and devout Methodist who served as a prominent local Conservative councillor, alderman, and mayor. He was a well read classical liberal who introduced his younger daughter to Mill’s “On Liberty” and the works of Rudyard Kipling.
Mother Beatrice “Beatie” Stephenson was born at 10 South Parade, Grantham on 24 August 1888, the daughter of Daniel Stephenson, employed for 35 years as a cloakroom attendant, and Phoebe Crust, a factory machinist whose father was a farmer from a village near Boston. Beatie’s father died in December 1916, and five months later Beatrice married Alfred to become Mrs Roberts. Beatie had been strictly brought up by her mother not to waste money or be idle and accompanied her husband and daughters to church twice every Sunday and went to a sewing/dressmaking circle on most Tuesdays. Margaret is quoted: “My mother was a good woman who was always intensely practical. She taught me how to cook and make bread, how to make my own clothes and how to decorate”.
Father Alfred instilled values of hard work and public service. The family lived in a 3-story brick building, with the grocery a corner shop, where the sisters worked in the shop, the parents taking separate vacations so that it was “open all hours”. During World War Two she was inspired by Winston Churchill’s defiant speeches and his refusal to give in to Nazism, seeing Churchill as a heroic figure. As a major point on the main London to the North railway, Grantham experienced heavy bombing during World War II.
Alfred’s uncompromising attitude had a huge influence on her politics and personality. She believed her upbringing as a shopkeeper’s daughter allowed her to contend that capitalism worked on a larger scale mirroring that. A favourite 1930s film of hers was “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” about rent-seeking. Her subsequent strong beliefs about free trade are said to have been rooted in American poet Walt Whitman who regarded ‘the spirit of the tariff” to be malevolent, helping a few become rich while the majority become poorer.
School and University
Margaret attended the Huntingtower Road Primary School and then Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School, where she focused on science and mathematics and by the age of 13 had already expressed her goal of becoming a Member of Parliament. From 1943 to 1947 she attended Somerville College, Oxford University, where she received a degree in chemistry She taught during summer vacations to supplement her partial scholarship and was active in conservative political circles, becoming president of the University Conservative Association from 1946 to 1947 .She discovered Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom” while at Oxford, with C. S. Lewis, Colm Brogan, and Karl Popper other influences there and throughout the 1940s.
Early Political and Personal Life
After university, Margaret worked as a research chemist for two different companies in the developing plastics industry. She continued to be involved in politics, attending the 1948 Conservative Party Conference, representing Oxford graduates. In 1950 and 1951, she unsuccessfully stood for election in Dartford, North Kent, standing as a Tory in a safe Labour seat. receiving a degree of media attention for these campaigns as a young woman running for office in the early 1950s.
During this period, she met Denis Thatcher, a director of his family’s paint company, from a wealthier background, who had been married briefly married during the war before divorcing. Margaret and Denis were married on December 13, 1951. Margaret then studied law from 1951 to 1954, specialising in tax law, later writing that she had been inspired to pursue a full life with both family and a career. by a 1952 article, “Wake Up, Women,” In 1953, she took the Bar Finals, and gave birth to twins, Mark and Carol, six weeks prematurely, in August the same year. From 1954 to 1961 she was in private law practice as a barrister, specialising in tax and patent law. From 1955 to 1958, she tried, unsuccessfully, several times to be selected as a Tory MP candidate for MP.
Member of Parliament
Following election to Parliament in 1959 for a safe seat, she became the Conservative MP for Finchley, a suburb north of London. Finchley’s large Jewish population led to the development of a long-term association with conservative Jews and support for Israel. She was one of 25 women in the House of Commons, but the youngest and placed both her children in boarding schools. She planned a maiden speech on monetary policy but after placing high in the ballot for private members’ bills, she made her maiden speech from the front bench, planning to present a bill to reform trade unions. The Whips refused, so she piloted through a bill to extend the rights of the press to examine and critique spending decisions by local authorities.
From 1961 to 1964, having left her private law practice, Margaret took the minor office in Harold Macmillan’s government of Joint Parliamentary Secretary for the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance. In 1965 husband Denis became the director of an oil company which had taken over his family’s business. In 1967, opposition leader Edward Heath made her opposition spokesperson on energy policy.
In 1970, the Heath government was elected, and the Conservatives were again in power. Margaret served from 1970 to 1974 as Secretary of State for Education and Science, earning a description in one newspaper as “the most unpopular woman in Britain” due to controversial policies She abolished free milk in school for those over age seven, gaining the title “Ma Thatcher, Milk Snatcher.” And although supporting government funding for primary education, she promoted private funding at secondary and university level.
In 1970 she became the privy councillor and co-chair of the Women’s National Commission. Though unwilling to call herself a feminist, associate with the growing feminist movement, or credit feminism with her success, she supported women’s economic role in the family.
In 1973, Britain joined the European Economic Community, about which Margaret Thatcher would have much to say during her political career. In 1974, Thatcher she became Tory spokesperson on the environment, and took a staff position with the Centre for Policy Studies, promoting Milton Friedman’s economic approach and monetarism, rather than a Keynesian economic philosophy.
In 1974, the Conservatives were defeated, with the Heath government in increasingly coming into conflict with Britain’s strong trade unions.
Conservative Party Leader
After serving between1970–1974 as Education and Science Secretary, she won the Tory leadership election in 1975. In the wake of Heath’s defeat, Thatcher challenged him for party leadership, winning 130 votes on the first ballot to Heath’s 119. Heath then withdrew, with Thatcher winning the position on the second ballot.
Denis Thatcher retired in 1975 to support his wife’s political career. Her daughter Carol studied law became a journalist in Australia in 1977. Son Mark studied accountancy but failed to qualify, becoming something of a playboy and taking up automobile racing.
Her radically conservative economic ideas led to the use of the term “Thatcherism.” In 1979, Thatcher spoke against immigration to the Commonwealth countries as a threat to their culture and became increasingly known for her direct and confrontational style of politics.
The winter of 1978 to 1979 was known in Britain as “the “Winter of Discontent”.” Many strikes and conflicts combined with the effects of harsh winter storms to weaken confidence in the Labour government and by early 1979, the conservatives had won a narrow victory.
Thatcher and Think Tanks
By the late 1960s she had twice spent six weeks touring the USA which made a big impression and it was then that she seems to have first appeared on the IEA radar screen. Editorial Director Arthur Seldon clearly sensed some real potential and wrote to long time IEA associate Geoffrey Howe: “May we hope for better things from Margaret?”. Howe famously replied: “I’m not at all sure about Margaret. Many of her economic prejudices are sound. But she is inclined to be rather too dogmatic… there is much scope for her to be influenced between triumph and disaster.”
Ralph Harris ‘loaned’ IEA trustee Nigel Vinson to Thatcher and Joseph as they established the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS). Letters held at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University between Harris and Thatcher’s House of Commons office describe many lunches arranged for 2 Lord North Street. She wrote to Harris: “It is primarily your foundation work which enabled us to rebuild the philosophy upon which our Party succeeded”. In addition, she he is famously recorded as visiting the Conservative Research Department, smashing Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty on the table, then declaring: “This is what we believe in”.
Thatcher was thus arguably the first Prime Minister to be heavily influenced by US style “Think Tanks”, a relatively new political phenomenon in mid 1970s Britain. These organisations would start to play an increasing role in policy formulation both inside and outside Parliament, declaring independence from political parties, claiming to be non-partisan, but openly professing free-market ideologies (Ref. *).
Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister on 4th May 1979 with an underwhelming government majority of 44 seats. She was the UK’s first female prime minister, indeed the first in Europe. She brought in her radical right-wing economic policies and was determined to implement a free market agenda as rapidly as possible. “Thatcherism,” was born, demonstrated through a confrontational style and personal frugality. During her time in office, she continued to prepare breakfast and dinner for her husband, do grocery shopping and refused part of her salary.
Her political platform was that of limiting government and public spending, allowing market forces to control the economy. She was a monetarist follower of Milton Friedman’s ideas and planned to eliminate socialism from Britain. She pushed for reduced taxes hard and the deregulation of industry through the privatisation of Britain’s several government-owned industries and an end to government subsidies for others. She demanded legislation to seriously restrict trade union power and the abolition of tariffs to all but non-European countries.
“I saw myself, quite simply, as having three main tasks: to bring to a successful conclusion the long struggle with the miners’ union…to pursue Britain’s interests in the international politics of oil; and privatization”.
On entering Downing Street she wrote to Fisher to inform him “you ‘created the climate of opinion which made our victory possible”.
She made Geoffrey Howe chairman of a new special sub-committee to plan the mass privatisation of State assets with Nigel Lawson at his command. Lawson was installed as energy secretary by October of that year and immediately began the process of transferring control of the country’s vast oil and gas assets to private companies.
Having taken office during the middle of a worldwide economic recession; the result of her policies in that context was serious economic disruption. Bankruptcies, mortgage foreclosures and unemployment increased, while industrial production plummeted. Terrorism in Northern Ireland continued unabated and a serious steelworkers’ strike in 1980 disrupted the economy even further. Thatcher refused to allow Britain to join the EECs European Monetary System, although North Sea windfall receipts for offshore oil and gas helped lessen the economic effects.
In 1981 Britain had its highest unemployment since 1931 at 3.1 to 3.5 million. A serious effect was a steep rise in social welfare payments, making it impossible for Thatcher to cut taxes to the extent planned. There were riots in some cities and following the 1981 Brixton (London) riots, police misconduct was exposed, further polarising the nation. In 1982, those industries still nationalized were forced to borrow and thus had to raise prices. Thatcher’s popularity was very low. Even within her own party, popularity waned. In 1981 she began replacing more traditional conservatives with members of her own more radical right-wing circle and she began developing a close relationship with the new US president, Ronald Reagan, whose administration supported many of the same economic policies.
Then, in 1982 Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, perhaps encouraged by the effects of British military cutbacks Thatcher sent 8,000 military personnel to fight a much larger number of Argentinians and victory in the Falkland’s War restored her to popularity.
Continuation in Power
With the Labour Party still deeply divided, Thatcher won re-election in 1983 with 43% of the vote and a majority of 101 seats. The right-wing policies continued, unemployment stuck at over 3 million, manufacturing continued on a steady decline, mortgage failures worsened and crime rates and prison populations grew. Financial corruption was exposed, including misdemeanours by several major banks. The government attempted to reduce the power of local councils, responsible for the delivery of social services and the Grand Hotel in Brighton where a Conservative Party conference was being held. Her reaction in responding calmly and quickly added to her popularity and image.
During 1984 and 1985, Thatcher’s confrontation with the coal miner’s union led to a year-long strike which the union eventually lost. She used strikes from 1984 through 1988 as a means to further restrict trade union power.
In 1986, the Single European Act (SEA) was initiated, a first step towards European monetary union. Banking became affected by new European rules, as German banks funded the German reunification economic revival. Thatcher began to disengage from further moves towards greater European unity. In 1987, with unemployment at 11%, she won a third term as prime minister, the first twentieth century UK prime minister to do so, but with 40% fewer Conservative seats in Parliament. Thatcher’s response was to become even more radical. Privatisation of the remaining nationalised industries provided short-term gains for the UK treasury, as stock was sold to the public. Similar short-term gains were realised by selling state-owned housing to occupants, transforming many into private owners.
The 1988 attempt to establish a poll tax was highly controversial, even within the Conservative Party. This was a flat rate tax, also called the community charge, with every citizen paying the same amount, with some rebates for the poor. The flat rate tax would replace property taxes which were based on the value of property owned. Local councils were given the power to levy the poll tax; Thatcher hoped that popular opinion would force these rates to be lower, and end Labour Party domination of local councils. Demonstrations against the poll tax in London and elsewhere sometimes turned violent.
In 1989, Thatcher led a major overhaul of the finances of the National Health Service, accepting British participation in the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. She continued with attempts to fight inflation through the use of high interest rates, despite continued problems with high unemployment. A worldwide economic downturn aggravated British economic problems for.
Conflict within the Conservative Party increased, but Thatcher was not grooming a successor, although by 1990 she had become the prime minister with the longest continuous term in the UK’s history since the early 19th century. By that time, not a single other cabinet member from 1979 was still serving. Several, including Geoffrey Howe the party’s deputy leader, resigned in 1989 and 1990 in protest over her policies.
By November of 1990, Thatcher’s position as party leader was challenged by Michael Heseltine, and a vote was called, with others joining the challenge. Following failure on the first ballot, despite none of her challengers winning, she resigned as party leader. John Major, who had been a Thatcherite, was elected prime minister. Margaret Thatcher had been prime minister for 11 years and 209 days.
The month after Thatcher’s defeat, Queen Elizabeth II, with whom Thatcher had met weekly during her time as prime minister, appointed Thatcher a member of the exclusive Order of Merit and granted Denis Thatcher a hereditary baroncy, the last such title granted to anyone outside the royal family.
Iron Lady
Lady Thatcher had started to become referred to as “The Iron Lady” soon after becoming Conservative party leader and 3 years before becoming Prime Minister. This followed the publication of an unremarkable article by a Red Army propaganda outlet known as Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star) on 24th January 1976 (Ref. 1). Captain Yuri Gavrilov subsequently denied coining that nickname, suggesting the British had already adopted it, which was rumoured to be true, since some in Britain had started referring to Lady Thatcher as the “Iron Maiden” in reference to the medieval torture device. According to Gavrilov, the use was an allusion to 19th Century Prussian statesman German Otto von Bismarck, so was originally intended as an insult, although it evolved into something more complimentary.
“Zheleznaya Dama Ugrozhayet,” — “The Iron Lady Wields Threats”.
This moniker was intended as an insult and was followed a week later a powerful speech given at Kensington Town Hall on 31st January 1976 entitled “Britain Awake” to her Conservative Party constituents where she reacted to being called the Iron Lady (Ref. 2). She warned of the dangers the Soviet Union posed at the height of detente. She later personally thanked the Soviet press, for this label marked her out as a staunch, if not particularly perceptive, opponent of the Soviet Union.
That “Iron Lady Speech” and her friend Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire Speech” 7 years later predicted victory in the Cold War, which few had believed possible during the years between 1976 and 1983. She may have over-estimated the offensive capabilities of a country that would soon become ruinously bogged down in an indecisive Afghanistan conflict for a decade, but one thing was clear, this Iron Maiden would never appease Moscow.
A few old men in the Russian security organisations will retain these fond old memories, but have not looked kindly upon the almost complete abandonment of Russia post 1990 which occurred following the utter collapse of the country, as explained by Kasparov and others (Ref. 5).
The Lady certainly liked the sound of it by the time of her famous 31st January 1976 speech.
“I stand before you tonight in my Red Star chiffon evening gown. (Laughter, Applause), my face softly made up and my fair hair gently waved (Laughter), the Iron Lady of the Western world. A cold war warrior, an amazon philistine, even a Peking plotter. Well, am I any of these things? (No!) Well yes, if that’s how they …. (Laughter) …. Yes I am an iron lady, after all it wasn’t a bad thing to be an iron duke, yes if that’s how they wish to interpret my defence of values and freedoms fundamental to our way of life”.
This “representing” Britain blurred into becoming an embodiment of Britain as Thatcher combined gendered and political performances on the world stage: ‘As the Queen grew older and less glamorous…Margaret Thatcher became more powerful and wreathed in myth, the very embodiment of Britannia’ (Ref. 4) This monarchical tendency became a source of public fascination, particularly after victory in the Falklands War. “Britannia had been brought to life, but this singular hypostasis had been brought to life not because she was a battle-axe like Boadicea, but because she was so womanly, combining Britannia’s resoluteness and Boadicea’s courage with proper housewifely demeanour. She came to be compared to Elizabeth I ‘the very personification and embodiment of Britishness” (Ref. 4). This regal image gave Thatcher an easily identified femininity bestowing her with a ‘dignity, an aura of benevolence, even perhaps, for some, magic and mystery’ (Ref. 4)
North Sea Oil.
The ‘conviction’ of Thatcher would have been nothing but folly without the North Sea’s black gold. It was oil revenues that bankrolled the unemployment, the destruction of manufacturing, the high-exchange rate, the termination of British coal mining, and the big-bang that turned London into a capital of global neoliberalism and pumped growth into the South-East in the early 1980s.
As North Sea Oil came on stream bringing in an estimated £70 billion in revenues, it turned the UK into an OPEC country, an oil-exporter, and it overturned a chronic balance of payments problem rooted in the post-war period of clinging to imperial over-stretch.
What may seem odd to many who do not recall the seventies and their follies is the belief in Thatcher as a saviour. The post-war settlement created after 1945 was indeed in a terminal crisis. Its cause was not Trade Union power, which was a symptom of the disintegration, the vast residue of Britain’s early proletariat left by the receding tide, but crisis there was and she became the solution after her victory in the Falklands War.
On the left and outside official Labour, there were four broad responses to Thatcher, personified by Tony Benn, Stuart Hall, Eric Hobsbawm and Ken Livingstone’s. Benn was for traditional left populism with a democratic language entirely new to 20th century British politics, but this was captured by the far-left and in particular by the miners’ leader Arthur Scargill, an anti-democratic syndicalist who orchestrated its destruction.
Stuart Hall saw ‘Thatcherism’ as an ideological force and gained its influence thanks to the “decomposition of the labour movement” which permitted Thatcher’s “regressive modernisation”, her capacity to forge a new form of capitalism under the guise of traditional institutional mores. The “march of labour” had been “halted” and now faced a counter-attack thanks to what it had achieved. Eric Hobsbawm saw Thatcherism a threat akin in a way to Fascism, demanding a defensive ‘popular-front’ type response and thus a progressive alliance of Labour and Liberal-Democrats to secure what had been gained. The difference was important. Hall saw the rise of Thatcherism as thanks to the chronic weaknesses of Labour and the left while Hobsbawm saw it as a response to its strength and achievements.
My own view was that there could be no successful response to the rise of Thatcher and Thatcherism without challenging the undemocratic nature of the British state which she deployed with such effect (allowing her, indeed, to abolish municipal government across a great city, unthinkable elsewhere). “It’s the constitution, stupid” had to be the starting point for any social and economic response. This eventually fed into Labour thanks to John Smith, before Blair decided to become Labour’s Thatcher with a social face.
It was not that she had ‘conviction’ while all those around, before and since, fail to stand for any principles at all. She was not alone in having courage and if anything had far more cunning, deviousness and patience than most. An analysis of her mastery of the timing of the post-Falklands 1983 election, published in the new edition of Iron Britannia, demonstrates her obsession and supremacy in these arts. Rather, the love of her leadership introduced an unhealthy Führerprinzip into British politics which was and remains a sign of the very British disease that struck official politics in the 1960s. Indeed from the Pergau Dam to the sale of military equipment to Saddam Hussein investigated in the Scott Report, Thatcher was involved in corruption and illegality from which she only just escaped official censure.
No, what undoubtedly her character helped to unlock in these benighted isles was energy. She broke the suffocating integument of elite consensus and the closed, hierarchical world that, ironically, went back to the Second World War she lauded. In doing so she released energy across the country, for good as well as ill. The energy of entrepreneurs, of city slickers, of New Labour, of rioters, in music and on the stage, of speculators and welfare cheats, of working men and women who bought their own homes.
But the source of this energy was not her inner character but money, lots of it. And she even personified this in her own migration from being Margaret Roberts to Margaret Thatcher. She was not just the grocer’s daughter who got her way by sheer graft, she was also an oil millionaire’s wife.
At a crucial point, in October 1981, prior to the Falklands as her predecessor Edward Heath openly attacked her, she asked, “What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner ‘I stand for consensus’?” The answer was, of course, the Second World War itself, that saved the British state. In reflecting on this in Iron Britannia I tried to decipher the legacy of what I termed Churchillism on which she drew but subverted. This was the paradox of Thatcher: that she destroyed what she appeared to preserve. Britain may have been saved by her but it will never recover from the experience.
Thatcher did a lot of undeniably immoral things such as supporting Pol Pot, as documented by John Pilger; and undemocratic ones such as pushing through the Poll Tax knowing it would drive poorer, Labour voters from the electoral register, as I have documented (see footnote 10 here). But those like Owen Jones who simply assault her from the left have to ask why she was also, despite what she did, popular with a segment of hard-working working class and natural labour supporters. There was a definite sense of integrity, of a tough person fighting to get her way. Peter Oborne’s pangyric captures this: the need for honest graft as distinct from profiteering, that she personified. Accusing her of ‘hypocrisy’ in this respect simply boomerangs, as to argue that she was not really like this endorses the values of what she claimed. It was this challenge that provoked the energy and I should have included novels to the list, see Ian McEwan’s thoughtful reflection. On the question of oil revenues, George Eaton helpfully demonstrates how much she had to play with and spent in public revenues especially on unemployment, while to my surprise it turns out that Tony Blair spotted and analysed the decisive role and sweeping impacts of North Sea Oil in the days when he wrote for the London Review of Books — it is his estimate of £70billion I quote above, worth double as it reversed a chronic balance of payments imbalance.
What all this brings home are the larger forces that Thatcher personified. The first of these was globalisation, a notoriously unconservative, radical force. The second, and linked to it, was a hostility to the State rooted in the cultural shifts of the 1960s, which she also reflected (something I have long argued, she gave her first speech criticising the power of the state to the Tory Party Conference in… 1968).
Climate Change Opinions
The climate deniers’ greatest success during the early 2000s was the apparent conversion of Margaret Thatcher, when she abandoned the climate cause she had so forcefully and eloquently championed as British prime minister. In her 2002 autobiography Statecraft, published shortly before she stepped out of the limelight due to failing health, a long passage renounced her former beliefs and even revised the meaning of her original 1990 address.
In her 1990 speech she had praised the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), called for precautionary action, and argued that economic growth must benefit “future as well as present generations everywhere.” However, her autobiography states: “By the end of my time as Prime Minister I was also becoming seriously concerned about the anti-capitalist arguments which the campaigners against global warming were deploying.
“So in a speech to scientists in 1990 I observed: whatever international action we agree upon to deal with environmental problems, we must enable all our economies to grow and develop because without growth you cannot generate the wealth required to pay for the protection of the environment”.
This complete and dramatic U-turn meant that her free market admirers could reclaim her legacy and erase from history her arguments that economic growth must be environmentally sustainable while the public seemed to have mostly forgotten that one of the earliest champions of legally binding international agreements was, in fact, a staunch Conservative and economic Liberal.
The cause of this volte-face was very evidently the belief that environmentalism was simply the old enemy of Socialism in a new guise. “The doomsters’ favourite subject today is climate change,” she wrote. “Clearly no plan to alter climate could be considered on anything but a global scale, it provides a marvellous excuse for worldwide, supra-national socialism.”
She attacked former US vice president Al Gore directly and argued that “Kyoto was an anti-growth, anti-capitalist, anti-American project which no American leader alert to his country’s national interests could have supported.” In her notes Thatcher expressed gratitude for the fact that “the issues have been clearly analysed and debated by scholars in the United States.” She informed her readers that her revised position on climate change was based on reading Julian Morris’s Climate Change: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom published by her old friends at the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), Richard Lindzen’s Global Warming: The Origin and Nature of the Alleged Scientific Consensus from the Koch- and Exxon-funded free market Cato Institute and Fred Singer’s Climate Policy: From Rio to Kyoto: A Political Issue for 2000 and Beyond put out by the right wing Centre for the New Europe. All three men were members of free market think tanks and were funding recipients from the fossil fuel industry. The former prime minister, in turning to scepticism, relied almost entirely on publications put out by free market lobby groups, rather than relying on the scientific literature.
Her new position of denial of the science rested on a pamphlet from the Reason Foundation published in December 1997 entitled A Plain English Guide to Climate Science, which claimed that: “It is widely acknowledged that the potential temperature changes predicted by global warming theory do not pose a direct threat to human life. Human beings, and a myriad of other organisms, exist quite comfortably in areas with temperature ranges more extreme than those predicted by global warming models.”
The Foundation received $70,000 the following year from ExxonMobil to “assess public policy alternatives on issues with direct bearing on the company’s business operations and interests.”
The political consensus, that the science of climate change had alerted the world to the need for urgent and dramatic improvements to the clean production of energy had been broken, and one of the earliest and keenest advocates had been successfully neutralised by the sceptics.
Thatcher’s legacy would simply be the rapid and controversial implementation of the free market in Britain, which would reverberate through the economies of the world and have serious ecological implications.
Later Political and Family Life
Margaret Thatcher founded the Thatcher Foundation to continue her work for a radically conservative economic vision and continued travelling and lecturing, both within Britain and internationally. A regular theme was an increasing criticism of the European Union’s centralised power.
Mark, one of the Thatcher twins, married an heiress from Dallas, Texas in 1987. In 1989, the birth of Mark’s first child made Margaret Thatcher a grandmother. His daughter was born in 1993.
In March, 1991, US President George H. W. Bush awarded Margaret Thatcher the US Medal of Freedom and in 1992, it was announced that she would no longer run for her parliamentary seat in Finchley. That year, she was made a life peer as Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven, and served in the House of Lords.
Thatcher worked on her memoirs in retirement. In 1993 she published The Downing Street Years 1979–1990 to tell her own story about her years as prime minister. In 1995, she published The Path to Power, to detail her own early life and early political career before becoming prime minister. Both books were best-sellers.
Carol Thatcher published a biography of her father, Denis Thatcher, in 1996. In 1998 Margaret and Denis’ son Mark was involved in scandals involving loan sharking in South Africa and US tax evasion.
In 2002, Margaret Thatcher had several small strokes and gave up her lecture tours. She also published, that year, another book: Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World.
Denis Thatcher survived a heart-bypass operation in early 2003, seeming to make a full recovery. Later that year, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and died on June 26th.
Mark Thatcher inherited his father’s title and became known as Sir Mark Thatcher. In 2004 Mark was arrested in South Africa for attempting to assist in a coup in Equatorial Guinea. As a result of his guilty plea, he was given a large fine and suspended sentence, and permitted to move in with his mother in London. Mark was unable to move to the United States where his wife and children moved after Mark’s arrest and the couple divorced in 2005, with both remarrying in 2008.
Carol Thatcher, a freelance contributor to the BBC since 2005 lost that opportunity in 2009 when she referred to an aboriginal tennis player as a “golliwog,” and refused to apologise for use of a racist term. Carol’s 2008 book about her mother, A Swim-on Part in the Goldfish Bowl: A Memoir, dealt with Margaret Thatcher’s growing dementia. Thatcher was unable to attend a 2010 birthday party for her, organized by Prime Minister David Cameron, the wedding of Prince William to Catherine Middleton in 2011, or a ceremony unveiling a statue of Ronald Reagan outside the American Embassy later in 2011. When Sarah Palin told the press that she would visit Margaret Thatcher on a trip to London, Palin was advised that such a visit would not be possible.
On July 31, 2011, Thatcher’s office in the House of Lords was closed, according to her son, Sir Mark Thatcher. She died on April 8, 2013, after suffering another stroke.
Thatcher’s Influence on BREXIT
The 2016 Brexit vote was described as a throwback to the Thatcher years. Prime Minister Theresa May, the second woman to serve as British prime minister, claimed inspiration by Thatcher but was seen as less committed to free markets and corporate power. In 2017, a German far right leader claimed Thatcher as his role model.
Margaret Thatcher was the figurehead the true voice of extreme 1980s far right Conservatism and some saw it for what it would become, a dangerous, vicious and somewhat poisonous set of lies. We are now in a position to observe the fruits of that. The aims of the people behind the rise of Margaret Thatcher continue with their business, namely, rolling back government whichever way they can, ensuring the poor and workforce are kept down with little collective power and removing Great Britain from The European Union. This all for their own extremist political ends and for the sake of business friends, countering Clean Energy where and whenever they can, but without appearing to.
Thatcher is regarded by many as having turned British economic decline around, but she was fortunate in being able to rest upon windfalls from selling off state assets and the income generated from the North Sea productive years certainly allowed her to proclaim sound government finances and cut taxes. Her ideological zeal for the free-market helped set in motion the 2008 financial crisis when the financial sector was heavily deregulated by the “big bang” in the belief markets were inherently efficient, and regulation only hampered GDP increases.
The influence of right wing think tanks in her success is often ignored or understated. They provided the intellectual framework for her administration and subsequent governments, paid for by big business, who ultimately benefited the most from the deregulation of the economy and the cutting of social provisions and taxes.
Rachel Whetstone
Rachel Marjorie Joan Whetstone was born to Francis and Linda Whetstone on 22nd February 1968. Father Francis is a patrician old-school Tory and worked in the City as a Lloyds underwriter. Rachel is the youngest of three daughters. A year after she was born, the family moved to Bassetts Manor, a mullioned, Grade II-listed building in Hartfield, rural East Sussex. She went to to Benenden, an exclusive boarding school for girls with royal alumni including Princess Anne.
She is a disarmingly frank public relations executive celebrated for her energy, enthusiasm, exceptional focus and exceptional drive and work ethic, earning a reputation for killer judgement and ‘telling truth to power’. Whetstone has never given an interview and is rarely photographed.
After reading history at Bristol University, Whetstone joined Conservative Central Office in 1990, alongside a young David Cameron and Ed Vaizey jostling for the position of a cabinet minister’s ‘spad’ (short for ‘special adviser’). Three months later, Steve Hilton entered Central Office and she quickly became friends with her future husband, who was to become the director of strategy and right-hand man of Cameron. Upon graduation, Whetstone was very quickly headhunted to become Virginia Bottomley’s special adviser and later for Michael Howard, then home secretary, who succeeded Iain Duncan Smith to become Conservative Party leader in 2003. She worked alongside Cameron and George Osborne and was well-regarded and eventually chosen by Howard to serve as one of his chief-of-staff. Hilton was credited with the “rebranding” and modernising of the Conservatives before they took power in 2010.
She met Hilton after having an affair during the lead-up to the 2005 election with Lord Astor, stepfather to Samantha Cameron, former government whip and opposition spokesman in the House of Lords. It had been thought Whetstone would join Hilton in taking a key role in Cameron’s office, but this ill-judged affair put an end to that. They eventually married after a long on-off relationship and the couple now have two sons together and a home in the small town of Atherton, California. It is claimed that Cameron is no longer on speaking terms with Whetstone or Hilton, despite having earlier recommended that his boss at Carlton Michael Green hire her, according to Lord Ashcroft’s and Isabel Oakeshott’s “Call Me Dave” biography.
By the mid-Nineties, the politics of progressive centrist Tories and the smart young New Labour Blairites were close enough for cross-party accord. Tim Allan (a Blair adviser and later Number 10 spin doctor) and Ben Wegg-Prosser (an adviser to Peter Mandelson) were regulars at Whetstone’s dinner table in Cambridge Gardens, Notting Hill.
She subsequently entered the private sector, moving from Central Office, joining One2One followed by a brief stint in 2001 as the first employee of Portland Communications, the PR firm which had recently been set up by Tony Blair’s former adviser Tim Allan. He recalls a ‘mini Davos’ that she organised as a corporate event for NetJets, with Warren Buffett, Bono, Arnold Schwarzenegger and 17 European CEOs at Lord Rothschild’s Waddesdon Manor. Eventually she joined the media company Carlton Communications, where she again worked closely with Cameron throughout the mid-1990s, before he became an MP.
Whetstone personified the global influence of a small group credited with guiding Britain’s “nasty party” from political exile to landslide electoral victory, despite being tangled up in Rupert Murdoch’s international phone-hacking scandal and has always retained close ties to the UK Conservative Party and political establishment. She and Hilton were later invited to be godparents to the Camerons’ late eldest child Ivan who died in 2009 aged just six-years-old. They were at the heart of the so-called Notting Hill set, a group of young, up-and-coming business-minded Conservatives, living the life David Cameron came to embody, bicycles, iPods, hip trainers and Euroscepticism. Based in the affluent area of west London, Whetstone was known as their queen.
In 2003, a leadership contest was brewing inside the beleaguered Conservative party and Howard, the strongest candidate, was desperate to have Whetstone back, so hired her as political secretary and deputy to Stephen Sherbourne, his chief of staff.
Howard failed to win the 2005 General Election and Whetstone needed a new direction. Tim Allan had wanted to bring her back to Portland so that he could return to work for Tony Blair, but whilst having lunch with a headhunter who was looking for a communications person for Google’s offices in London. Allan mentioned Whetstone’s name. Google, despite being relatively new, was a successful and pioneering company and offered her a European Head of Communications role and she rose to become senior vice-president of communications, PR and public policy. Before long, Whetstone hired D-J Collins, a former political adviser to New Labour. He was struck by her ‘rare combination of intelligence, curiosity, good humour, openness as well as her eccentricities.
When Elliot Schrage, the former VP of global communications and public affairs left Google for Facebook, the role was offered to Whetstone. Hilton was still working for 10 Downing Street at the time, so they agreed with Google that they would move to Silicon Valley for one year, renting a bungalow close to the office. Hilton managed by doing 8am strategy calls with Downing Street at midnight, and London’s ‘end-of-day’ calls in the morning. After a year, Whetstone attempted to do her job from London, but it quickly became clear this was impossible, so it was back to San Francisco.
Her political background was an asset, as much of her early work involved negotiating with government departments. Google was pushing into territory that was often contentious, where the law was unclear, with very powerful incumbent industries, according to Collins. “It was quite challenging for government and the crises were numerous”. With Google, her hands were full with the European Union’s battle with the search giant over limiting the power of its services, but she also had a number of victories, including fighting back against similar search power inquiries by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.
She left Google after 10 years, jumping ship to join Uber as Senior VP of Communications and Public Policy in April 2015, shortly after writing an acerbic blogpost addressed to the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, after the Wall Street Journal accused Google of wielding undue political influence. This seems ironic in retrospect, since at the end of 2015, London major at the time Boris Johnson moved to regulate what he called the ‘bumptious’ Uber, claiming it had been breaking taxi licensing laws ‘in lots of minor ways’. Uber swiftly launched a petition, claiming that Johnson’s ‘bureaucratic’ proposals would make it harder, and more expensive, to travel around the capital. Within hours of the petition being announced, the Mayor and senior aides began to be bombarded with angry text messages from George Osborne, Cameron, via special advisers and senior members of the No 10 policy unit and the offices of Cabinet ministers, including Business Secretary Sajid Javid. Strangely, all were demanding exactly the same thing: that the Mayor drop each and every policy that might threaten the finances of Uber (Ref. *).
Those in Silicon Valley cite different reasons for her Google departure, but more than anything Uber wanted to poach her. She walked away from share options worth tens of millions at Google, but the pull factor of Uber was such that there was an opportunity to gain a bigger slice of a smaller pie that had potential for growth. Uber founder Travis Kalanick was considered a maverick, dysfunctional internet billionaire. Her role was similar to that at Google, since tech companies grow so quickly they lack basic operating functions. The tough-talking Whetstone was a big hire for Uber when she replaced the previous big hire, Obama political guru and campaign manager David Plouffe, who remained as an Uber board observer and also works for Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, running the policy and advocacy arm of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative philanthropy. However, for the first time Whetstone could not persuade the CEO to heed her advice.
Her eventual departure from Uber followed several scandals involving the company, including an explosive blogpost by an employee alleging incidents of sexual harassment, a high-stakes legal battle with Google surrounding the alleged theft of autonomous vehicle technology and revelations about secretive programs that Uber used to deceive regulators and spy on its rival. During her tenure at Uber, Whetstone oversaw the response to a significant class action lawsuit from Uber drivers seeking to be classified as employees, as well as a major dispute in California surrounding the company’s unpermitted rollout of autonomous vehicles. Kalanick indicated that she would remain an adviser and friend in an email to staff.
In July 2017 it was reported that Whetstone would join Facebook in September as VP of communications for their WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger products. The newly created role would mean reporting to Facebook’s VP of Global Communications, Caryn Marooney. Whetstone’s role at Facebook was probably intended to be a deliberate stepdown in terms of workload, but did not remain light, as she was quickly required to help deal with controversies about many fraught issues, including government probes over how Russian kackers had misused the platform to disrupt politics in America and elsewhere, the proliferation of fake content and in assessing Facebook’s responsibility for some real-world tragedies related to the use of its tools. Whetstone was also quickly pulled into handling the myriad of criticisms about the performance of CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg. It was reported in August 2018 that Whetstone would be joining Netflix to run public relations.
Steve Hilton
Steve Hilton was born 25th August 1969, the son of Hungarian immigrants, whose original surname was Hircsák and who fled their home during the Hungarian revolution of 1956, coming to Britain, initially claiming asylum and then anglicising their name to Hilton. There is a rumour that his surname is taken from the hotel they stayed in on their first night, which is sadly not true.
A humble background appears to have led to a certain “classlessness”. His father István, had been goaltender for the Hungarian national ice hockey team, considered one of the top ice hockey players in Europe in the 1930s. He was raised by his stepfather, a construction worker, and his mother, in the seaside town of Brighton, England. After arriving in Britain, his parents initially worked in catering at Heathrow Airport. They divorced when Hilton was five years old, leading to what he has described as a struggle and great financial hardship; his mother worked in a shoe shop and the couple lived in a cold, damp basement apartment.
He won a scholarship to Christ’s Hospital School in Horsham, West Sussex, then ultimately read philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford University. Subsequently, while working at a holiday job he saw a party political broadcast and ended up working at the Conservative Central Office in 1990 as a volunteer, three months after his future wife Rachel Whetstone, having impressed research director Robin Harris. He also met a young David Cameron, who was then head of the political unit.
For the 1992 election, confident and talented and at only 22 years of age, he was made advertising co‑ordinator and chief liaison with the party’s advertising agency, responsible for explaining policy to Saatchi & Saatchi. Maurice Saatchi, Margaret Thatcher’s advertising guru, who poached him afterwards, once said: “No one reminds me as much of me when young as Steve does.” Hilton moved from Saatchi & Saatchi to M&C Saatchi, including a stint advising Boris Yeltsin in the Russian elections.
During this period Hilton bought the “New Labour, New Danger” demon eyes poster campaign for the Conservative’s pre-general election campaign in 1996, which subsequently won an award from the advertising industry’s Campaign magazine. The Conservatives went on to experience their worst election defeat for over half a century, with some journalists speculating that the poster contrasted unfavourably with Labour’s more positive campaign. In 2005, Hilton lost out to future Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove in the selection process for the Surrey Heath constituency.
Hilton soon developed a reputation as the quirky, secretive figure behind a radically conservative agenda and was often featured in the tabloids for his casual clothes, bare feet and sweaty post-bike-ride look. He spoke of a need to “replace” the traditionally minded grassroots membership of the Conservative Party, which he saw as preventing the party from embracing a more metropolitan attitude on social issues. He left to form his own company, Good Business, a “corporate responsibility” consultancy that teaches firms how to improve their image, and sales and advise multinationals on ethical practice.
With his business partner Giles Gibbens he wrote “Good Business: Your World Needs You”, published in 2002 which appears to be the founding text of Cameron Toryism and includes a 50‑page chapter on the doctrine of social responsibility, which eventually loomed large in Mr Cameron’s agenda. Hilton was passionately Conservative, working for Peter Lilley before becoming Cameron’s chief strategist. He is currently CEO of Crowdpac, a political fundraising start-up he co-founded that promises to give “politics back to the people”.
It is alleged that Hilton said “I voted Green” after the Labour landslide of 2001, but since then he worked with Cameron to re-brand the Conservative Party as green and progressive. According to The Economist Hilton “remains appallingly understood”. There were reports that Hilton’s ‘blue sky thinking’ caused conflict in Whitehall, with deputy prime minister Nick Clegg once referring to him as a “refreshing but wacky thinker”.
Hilton became the Tory leader’s all-powerful director of strategy after Mr Cameron took over in December 2005. He soon attained cult status as a shadowy figure due to his refused to speak on the record. Even his salary — rumoured to be between £180,000 and £276,000 was shrouded in mystery.
Despite this low public profile, the 38-year-old became Mr Cameron’s closest confidante, arguably making him one of the most influential yet unaccountable politicians in recent history. He was often compared with Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell as well as Philip Gould, Mr Blair’s personal pollster. But Hilton’s reach went way beyond the diagnostic art of focus grouping. He would tell Cameron what was wrong with the party, the funky, liberal architect of Cameron’s detoxification programme who wrote the prescription for the cure and the man who dreamed up the “Big Society” concept. Michael Gove once observed: “It’s impossible to know where Steve ends and David begins.”
In 2008, he married Rachel Whetstone and the couple became godparents to Mr Cameron’s son Ivan and were increasingly seen as the “power couple behind the Tory throne”. It was thought that Whetstone would join Hilton in taking a key role in Cameron’s office.
After falling out with almost everyone in Whitehall, in March 2012, Downing Street announced Hilton would become a “visiting scholar” at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies for a year. His last memo concerned the advocacy of severe cuts in the number of civil servants in the United Kingdom and further welfare cuts. He left Britain in 2012 for California with wife, Rachel Whetstone, suddenly very much the second half of the power couple, resurfacing on the British political scene in the referendum campaign, arguing passionately for Brexit, claiming that if Cameron were a backbencher he would be support leaving. Relations between the pair were reportedly strained to breaking point, although Hilton has maintained that they remained friends. He surprised many by coming out as a Trump supporter, joining Fox News in 2017 with a show called “The Next Revolution”.
Hilton is co-founder and former CEO of Crowdpac, a Silicon Valley technology start-up, which raised $8.5 million from investors like Index Ventures and SV Angel and launched a beta service in the UK in April 2016. Based in a large loft in the South Park neighbourhood of San Francisco, Crowdpac collects publicly available data to show where candidates’ funding comes from and score them on a scale of liberal to conservative and has tools for people to set up political campaigns of their own, supposedly to lower the barrier to political participation. He was fired in May 2018, with Crowdpac also suspending fundraising for Republican candidates on its platform.
In May 2015, Hilton joined the UK think tank Policy Exchange as a visiting scholar, the month his book “More Human” was published, which advocates smaller, human-scale organisations, criticising and putting a case for a populist revolution against large government and business, including factory farms and banks. A chapter entitled “Unity” waxes lyrical about “why all of us can change the world” and the book ends with a rallying cry: “Capitalists and anti-capitalists of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your guilt.”
David Cameron
David William Duncan Cameron was born in London on 9th October 1966. He is clearly a man straight out of the Establishment top drawer, across centuries of finance, culture, and social standing, including the Queen’s, who is a several-times-removed relative.This is an impeccable Conservative bloodline, including three prominent Conservative MPs of the late 19th and early 20th Century.
In 2005, he was the first Eton-educated Conservative leader since Sir Alec Douglas-Home in the early 1960s and a member, along with Prince Charles and his sons, of exclusive Mayfair gentleman’s club White’s. As Michael Wolff stated in 2010: “He is everything a modern politician in a country determined to see itself as proudly middle-class should not be, the leader of the supposedly unelectable Tory party associated with mean-mindedness and execrable privilege. He was also a P.R. man, with the skills and temperament to perform a makeover on himself and his party.
The son of a stockbroker, he spent the first three years of his life in Kensington and Chelsea before the family moved to an old rectory near Newbury, in Berkshire. He had what he describes as a “happy childhood”, with his brother Alec and sisters Tania and Clare.
Father Ian was a former director of estate agent John D Wood and stockbrokers Panmure, where Mr Cameron’s grandfather and great grandfather worked, but his political lineage was gained from his mother’s side of the family, whose ancestral home was Wasing, in Berkshire. His great, great, great grandfather, William Mount, was Conservative MP for the Isle of Wight in the 19th Century. Mr Cameron’s great, great grandfather also called William Mount, sat for Newbury, before passing the seat on to his son Sir William Mount, the first baronet and David Cameron’s great grandfather.
After prep school, young Dave, as he was then called, followed in the family tradition and went to Eton. Strangely his headmaster, Eric Anderson, had been Tony Blair’s housemaster at Fettes public school, sometimes dubbed the Scottish Eton. School friends say Mr Cameron was never seen as a great academic or noted for his interest in politics, beyond “mainstream Conservative” views.
He has described his 12 O-levels as “not very good”, but gained three grade As at A-level, in history, history of art and economics with politics. Before going to Oxford to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics he took a gap year, working initially for Sussex MP Tim Rathbone, before spending three months in Hong Kong, working for a shipping agent, returning by rail via the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. At Oxford, he avoided student politics because, according to one friend from the time, Steve Rathbone, “he wanted to have a good time”.
He was captain of Brasenose college’s tennis team and a member of the infamous Bullingdon dining club, famed for its hard drinking and bad behaviour, an episode Mr Cameron has always refused to discuss. His tutor at Oxford, Professor Vernon Bogdanor, described him as “one of the ablest” students he has taught, whose political views were “moderate and sensible Conservative”. After gaining a first class degree, Cameron answered an advertisement for a job in the Conservative Research Department, progressing quickly through the ranks and soon briefing ministers for media appearances.
He worked with David Davis on the team briefing John Major for Prime Minister’s Questions, and teamed up with George Osborne, who would go on to be shadow chancellor and his leadership campaign manager. He was poached by the then Chancellor Norman Lamont as a political adviser, and was at Mr Lamont’s side throughout Black Wednesday, which saw the pound crash out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism.
By the early 1990s, Mr Cameron had decided he wanted to be an MP. The future Tory leader’s credentials at Conservative central office were well-established and it was believed time in the private sector would benefit his political career, so after a brief spell as an adviser to then home secretary Michael Howard, he took a job in public relations with ITV television company Carlton, now part of ITV, becoming Director of Corporate Affairs, travelling the world with boss Michael Green, who has described him as “board material”. He was in the position from July 1994 to February 2001. The manner by which he obtained that job says much about how men of Cameron’s background tend to progress. With no experience outside politics, he did what any old Etonian might do and worked his contacts. The mother of Cameron’s then girlfriend Samantha, Lady Astor, was friends with Michael Green, then executive chairman of Carlton and one of Margaret Thatcher’s favourite businessmen suggested he hire Cameron, so the 27-year-old was recruited on a salary of about £90,000 a year.
“I tried to persuade him that he could have a really good career in industry, but he was completely resolute about going back to politics, and I respected him for that. He’s good, he’s the real McCoy,” Mr Green told The Independent.
Cameron’s period at Carlton is not remembered fondly by some of the journalists who had to deal with him. Jeff Randall, writing in The Daily Telegraph where he is a senior executive, said he would not trust Mr Cameron “with my daughter’s pocket money”. “To describe Cameron’s approach to corporate PR as unhelpful and evasive overstates by a widish margin the clarity and plain-speaking that he brought to the job of being Michael Green’s mouthpiece,” wrote the ex-BBC business editor.
“In my experience, Cameron never gave a straight answer when dissemblance was a plausible alternative, which probably makes him perfectly suited for the role he now seeks: the next Tony Blair,” Mr Randall wrote. Sun business editor Ian King, recalling the same era, described Mr Cameron as a “poisonous, slippery individual”.
He went part-time from the Carlton job in 1997 to unsuccessfully contest Stafford at that year’s general election. In 2001 he won the safe Conservative seat of Witney, Oxfordshire, recently vacated by Sean Woodward, who defected to Labour.
Tim Allan, Tony Blair’s former press secretary, says the future Tory moderniser held unapologetically Thatcherite views during this period, displaying none of the informal sartorial style that would one day become his trademark. Allan, who had recently left No 10 for Sky, where he did the same job as Cameron, says his opposite number had a difficult brief working for the “challenging” Michael Green. Sky was winning the battle of digital TV quite quickly, so ITV Digital’s spectacular failure in May 2002, came only a year after Cameron was elected to the safe Conservative seat of Witney in Oxfordshire.
One senior business journalist who dealt with Cameron extensively describes him as “thoroughly unpleasant” and not a very efficient press officer. Cameron’s affable demeanour is only skin-deep, he added. Cameron, he says, was a man who cultivated only those who could prove useful.
The media establishment viewed Carlton as a pariah,” according to the former commentator. The young Cameron had a coterie of friendly reporters, but an “offhand” style and habit of blocking questions or simply ignoring calls.
Mr Cameron was by now a married man with a family. His wife, Samantha, is the daughter of landowner Sir Reginald Sheffield, a family even more highborn and wealthy than his. Her step father is Viscount Astor, a minister in John Major’s government, with responsibility for broadcasting and a descendant of King Charles II. She grew up on the 300 acre Normanby Hall estate, near Scunthorpe. Cameron sat on the board of late night bar operator Urbium with Viscount Astor. Samantha became one of his greatest political assets.
Mrs Cameron worked as the creative director of upmarket stationery firm Smythson’s of Bond Street, which counts Stella McCartney, Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell among its clients and was credited with transforming her husband’s staid “Tory boy” image. She has a tattoo on her ankle and went to art school in Bristol, where she says she was taught to play pool by rap star Tricky.
The couple were introduced by Mr Cameron’s sister Clare, Samantha’s best friend and were married in 1996. Their first child, Ivan, was born severely disabled and needs round-the-clock care.
With a young family, Cameron didn’t often socialise with colleagues and his political ambitions meant he rarely took risks. Yet despite Cameron’s reputation as a bright and able colleague, he seemed unremarkable. Few of the executives who worked with him believed he would rise to the top of the Tory party. Few would ever have predicted he would run the country. He was clearly very bright, but without the naked ambition, simply a PR man capable of dissembling and doling out disinformation.
On entering Parliament, Mr Cameron rose rapidly through the ranks, serving first on the Home Affairs Select, which recommended the liberalisation of drug laws. He was taken under the wing of Michael Howard, who put him in charge of policy coordination and then, in May 2005, shadow education secretary. He also served as shadow deputy leader of the house and deputy party chairman. The relatively young and ambitious Cameron, surprised Westminster watchers by beating David Davis in the Conservative leadership election of
In his spare time, Mr Cameron plays tennis, often with former leadership rival Liam Fox, and enjoys dinner parties with his close-knit circle of friends, dubbed the Notting Hill set. Among this inner circle were former central office colleague George Osborne and the formidable duo of Tory aide and marketing prodigy Rachel Whetstone and her future husband, Steve Hilton, a Saatchi & Saatchi executive, who became the pillars of the Cameron marketing and brand-development brain trust. Rachel Whetstone served with him as an adviser to Mr Howard. Former Times journalist and MP Michael Gove was also a key member of his campaign team.
With influential friends and his blue-blooded heritage, Cameron was sometimes criticised for not being in touch with ordinary people. However, an easy manner and confidence in front of the television cameras allowed him to appear, if not exactly classless, then certainly not the upper-crust figure his background might suggest.
During the period when he was advised by them, Cameron was influenced by Hilton and Whetstone’s trendy American somewhat shallow business speak. He regularly planned to curb spending and “big government” and “rebuild the nation’s finance system” if he won power at the 2010 Election. Most famously he coined the PR phrase “Big Society” which was fairly roundly mocked for it’s glib shallowness. The former PR man did however partially reinvent his party with the assistance of Hilton and Whetstone, as well as himself, by airbrushing out all divisions.
Osborne, the brilliant tactician became the brains of the party; Boris Johnson, the party’s most charismatic figure, its soul; and Cameron, the most media-ready of the new blood, its face. In 2005, after Howard went down in the Conservative Party’s third consecutive overwhelming defeat, Cameron, with Osborne managing his run, made his bid to become leader, with bookmakers putting him last out of the field of candidates.
Then something happened at the 2005 Tory conference in Blackpool: Cameron, without lectern, teleprompter, or notes, delivered an address of such verve, spontaneity, and clarity that he swept the conference. He then led an electoral reversal of a magnitude not seen in 80 years in Britain, doing what was considered more or less unachievable in the early 21st century and bring back a Conservative and in a sense, the upper class — a post-class upper class, if you will back to power.
The next stage was “detoxification” or “decontamination.” All hard edges rounded, with even the logo changed from a traditional torch emblem to a blurry rendering of a tree. The result, in an age of polarisation, was something rather extraordinary. Cameron “alchemized a position of more or less glutinous consensus,” said Johnson. The Cameron position isn’t about just consensus but about something more mystical, allowing everybody to hear what they want. Having systematically removed most of the overt points of contention, on immigration, Iraq, Europe, the Cameron Conservatives then replaced them with a series of almost totemic notions of agreement.
Cameron is for marriage, which pleases the right, but also for gay marriage, to please the left. He is supposedly green, but simultaneously opposed to over-regulation; he was for responsibility, suggesting an anti-government view but which can also mean he’s a champion of the poor.
“There’s a left-right spectrum. I don’t really do it like that,” Cameron once said, both as explanation and obfuscation “What I’ve tried to do is marry a belief in market economics with the importance of a strong economy while restoring the condition of the Conservatives’ being social reformers and also addressing the future — climate change and the environment. It’s the full kind of package.” This was all said with a well-practiced straight face. “He is, I believe, much more conservative by nature than he acts, or than he is forced to be by political exigency,” says Tory M.P. and Oxford friend Ed Vaizey. Cameron would have you believe that, all in all, such delineations and labels are less relevant to what he is about than his own “developed story.”
Cameron then led the Tory party into the 2010 general election, did not get the support needed to win outright and formed a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats (widely seen as a bad move for Lib Dems who have subsequently imploded). During this term, the anti-immigration anti-EU UKIP did exceptionally well, which posed a problem for Cameron as leader of a highly euro-skeptic party. Many Tory back benchers started to seriously question UKIP’s rise, raising the issues of immigration and UK Parliamentary sovereignty in the form of:
- Free movement of EU citizens throughout the 28 countries, to be able to work and live in any state provided they have a valid passport from an EU country
- EU Regulations and Directives. Regulations are passed by the EU and must be implemented in its entirety across the EU, no exception. Directives are passed by the EU and each member country must pass local laws to implement.
Clearly neither of these can be controlled as members of the EU and both have very good reasons for their existence. Laws and regulations on goods can be harmonised across nations, easing trade. Free movement allows people to go where the work is, reducing unemployment across the continent. However, the rise of UKIP showed the public were getting angry about these two issues in particular and the Euroskeptic wing of the Tories started demanding Cameron and fellow Europhile Tories to do something about it, fearful of losing a large portion of their vote to UKIP.
This drove a wedge between the two sides of the Tory party, which came to a head when 95 MPs wrote a letter to Cameron in early 2014 calling for a veto on any new EU laws. To prevent this and any further damage Cameron announced he would renegotiate the UK’s membership of the EU and hold an “in-out” referendum if the Tories were re-elected in 2015. During and after this period some Tories defected to UKIP.
Following a narrow outright victory in the 2015 general election, Cameron knew he faced a difficult battle in four key areas where he was seeking to renegotiate Britain’s membership terms on behalf of the Conservative government, all of which were major requirements of the Tory far-right
- A British opt-out from the historic EU ambition to forge an “ever closer union” of the peoples of Europe.
- The creation of safeguards to ensure changes in the single market could not be imposed on non-eurozone members by the eurozone.
- Tightening of access to in-work and out-of-work benefits for EU migrants.
- Provision of greater powers to national parliaments to block EU legislation.
Britain was given a taste of the challenge in the EU negotiations when eastern European leaders warned Cameron’s government not to restrict the ability of EU migrants to travel to the UK, with ministers from Slovakia, Hungary and Poland stating that free movement of migrant workers was a red-line issue for them. Britain also found itself at odds with the European commission over plans to require all EU member states to take in quotas of migrants. Theresa May, the home secretary, rejected the proposal.
In 2012 he travelled to the UAE on what was described as a “low-key” arms trip aimed at persuading regional powers upset by Britain’s response to the Arab spring to buy more than 100 Eurofighter Typhoon fighters, potentially worth more than £6bn to Britain. top of 72 bought by Saudi Arabia Media coverage was restricted partly out of sensitivity to Saudi Arabia. Lord Green of Hurstpierpoint, the trade minister, took a parallel trade delegation.
Cameron appeared to come from nowhere to become leader of the Conservatives, in a similar fashion to Margaret Thatcher. Following the referendum result in June 2016, he left Ten Downing St. in quite a hurry.
References
Antony Fisher
1. Think Tank Watch Blogspot
thinktank-watch.blogspot.com/2007/12/sir-anthony-fisher.html
2. The Ecologist (2018), “Quite a Chain of Consequences — for a Chicken Farmer!”, 6th August 2018.
theecologist.org/2018/aug/06/quite-chain-consequences-chicken-farmer-fakenomics
3. Wikipedia: Antony Fisher
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_Fisher
4. IEA — Basil Fisher
iea.org.uk/remembering-basil-fisher/
5. Sourcewatch: Sir Antony Fisher
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Linda Whetstone
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9. Linda Whetstone @ Liberty Forum, Copenhagen 2018.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=128MSUksFjk
10. Linda Whetstone speaking at the Conservative Party Conference 1978
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11. Powerbase: powerbase.info/index.php/Linda_Whetstone
Margaret Thatcher
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Thatcher Bibliography
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Thatcher, M. (2002), ”Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World”..
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Campbell, J. (2003), “Margaret Thatcher: The Iron Lady Vol. 2”, London: Jonathan Cape.
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Arthur Seldon and Ralph Harris
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29. New York Sun “The Great and the Good”, 22nd February 22, 2007.
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Rachel Whetstone
30. www.revolvy.com/page/Rachel-Whetstone
31. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Whetstone
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33. Daily Mail (2017), ” Cameron, Osborne, their Glamorous Chum and the Great Uber Stitch-up: The Disturbing Links Between №10 and the Online Taxi Firm as it’s Revealed one of its Major Investors now has the ex-Chancellor on its Payroll”, 24th March 2017.
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Steve Hilton
38. Guardian (2017), “Steve Hilton: ‘I’m Rich, but I Understand the Frustrations People Have’”, 15th April 2017.
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David Cameron
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General
49. Friedrich von Hayek
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Hayek
50. John Maynard Keynes
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes
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53. The Ecologist (2018), “Oil and Tobacco Explain Funding of Neoliberalism”, 16th August 2018.
54. The Lobster (2017), “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America Nancy MacLean Michigan (USA): Scribe Publishing, 2017,”,
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55. George Monbiot (2019), “Quantomania”, 13th April 2019.
www.monbiot.com/2019/04/13/quantomania/
56. Stedman Jones, D. (2012), “Masters-of-the-Universe-Hayek-Friedman-and-the-Birth-of-Neoliberal-Politics”, Princeton University Press, p. 440.
Climate Change
57. De Smog (2014), “How Charles Koch Sent His Emissary to London to Launch Climate Denial”, 26th November 2014.
www.desmog.co.uk/2014/11/26/blundell-and-koch-empire
58. De Smog (2014), “Blundell: The Missing Link Between Oil Baron Charles Koch and British Climate Denial”, 29th November 2014.
59. Ecologist (2018), “Who Drove Thatcher’s Climate Change u-Turn?”
theecologist.org/2018/oct/17/who-drove-thatchers-climate-change-u-turn
Institution Links
60. Foundation for Economic Education
www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Foundation_for_Economic_Education
61. Atlas Network
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Network
www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Atlas_Network
62. Fraser Institute
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraser_Institute
thinktank-watch.blogspot.com/2007/12/fraser-institute.html
63. Manhattan Institute for Policy Research
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Institute_for_Policy_Research
thinktank-watch.blogspot.com/2007/12/manhattan-institute-for-policy-research.html
rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/manhattan_institute/
64. Pacific Research Institute
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Research_Institute
thinktank-watch.blogspot.com/2007/12/pacific-research-institute.html
www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Pacific_Research_Institute
65. National Center for Policy Analysis
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_for_Policy_Analysis
thinktank-watch.blogspot.com/2007/12/national-center-for-policy-analysis.html
66. Centre for Independent Studies
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_for_Independent_Studies
www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Centre_for_Independent_Studies
67. Adam Smith Institute
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Smith_Institute
thinktank-watch.blogspot.com/2007/11/adam-smith-institute.html
68. Mont Pelerin Society
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Pelerin_Society
thinktank-watch.blogspot.com/2007/12/mont-pelerin-society.html
www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Mont_Pelerin_Society
www.desmogblog.com/mont-pelerin-society#s7
69. Conservative Philosopher’s group
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_Philosophy_Group
Miscellaneous
Brian Crozier, The 61, Shield
Guardian (2012), “Brian Crozier Obituary”, 9th August 2012
www.theguardian.com/politics/2012/aug/09/brian-crozier
https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Brian_Crozier
https://wikispooks.com/wiki/The_61
https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Shield
The Bridge, “In Profile : Brian Crozier And The Institute For The Study Of Conflict : The Terrorism Industry”
Roger Scruton
New Statesman (2019),” Roger Scruton: “Cameron’s Resignation was the Death Knell of the Conservative Party”, 10th April 2019.
Robin Ramsay
https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Robin_Ramsay
Robin Ramsey Lobster 41, “Getting it Right: the Security Agencies in Modern Society”
http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/articles/security.htm
John Newling Cloake
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cloake
www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/honours-diplomatic-services-and-overseas-list-6283145.html
Supplement to the London Gazette, 14th July Territorial and Army Volunteer Reserve Group B The undermentioned O/Cdts. to be 2nd Lts., (on probation) on the dates shown: 198124485614 John Newling CLOAKE (513166), 9th May 1981.
www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/48677/supplement/9299/data.pdf
shaphan.typepad.com/blog/archives.html
shaphan.typepad.com/blog/mi6/ [2007.07.15]
The Elder Cloake: “Head of Trade Relations and Export Department in the FCO”
wikivisually.com/wiki/John_Cloake
Frank Gardiner
powerbase.info/index.php/Frank_Gardner
shaphan.typepad.com/blog/frank_gardner/
Lord Chalfont
quartetbooks.wordpress.com/2018/08/03/lord-chalfont-2/
pinkindustry.wordpress.com/the-institute-for-european-defence-and-strategic-studies/alun-chalfont/
James Goldsmith
popula.com/2018/08/12/goldenballs/
Attachment A- Hayek Letter to Fisher New Year’s Day 1980
