For the Observer Magazine of 19 February 1989, Noel Malcolm assessed the cause and extent of Margaret Thatcher’s ingrained anti-Establishment zeal (‘Mine, All Mine! The British Establishment in Maggie’s Grasp’). Thatcher had been rapidly replacing the Establishment great and good with men – and it was always men – who were ‘one of us’.
‘And just as we all know what yuppies are but can never find anyone who calls himself a yuppie,’ he wrote, ‘so it has always been difficult to find anyone who would admit to being a member of the Establishment.’
To show how the left would look to purge Thatcher’s appointments, Malcolm listed the heads that would roll if Neil Kinnock were elected – including ‘the man they most love to hate, Lord Rees-Mogg, one time Conservative candidate, former editor of the Times, ex-vice-chairman of the BBC, and now chairman of the Arts Council.
The charge against Thatcher went further than the appointments. ‘All governments have made politically motivated appointments from time to time; only she has systematically subverted the country’s institutions, breaking their independence and bending them to her will.’
But, as Malcolm wrote, the deeper point was that Thatcherism had forced them all to think of themselves as businesses, which ‘illustrates just how profoundly indifferent the prime minister is to the nature of any institution that cannot be modelled directly on Marks & Spencer’. A form of Thatcherisation by the back door in other words.
‘The Establishment has taken some hard blows. But it will outlive Mrs Thatcher in the end, however much it suffers under her uncomprehending rule.’ In fact, the Establishment only had to wait until the end of the following year when the Tories themselves decided to replace Thatcher with a new leader. Live by the sword…
