Thatcher, 9/11 and Boston

In this week’s Comment, I note the obvious truth that Margaret Thatcher, whom one eulogist described as “a tough consensus builder who cared about everybody,” had nothing but contempt for consensus. Nor did she care about everybody. But, boy, was she ever tough.

In the current New Republic, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, who knows whereof he speaks (he covered Mrs. Thatcher’s rise and fall for half of Fleet Street, and wrote about it in his 2005 book, “The Strange Death of Tory England”), recalls a striking instance:

On the evening of Thursday October 11, 1984, at the Conservative conference in Brighton, I was in a suite in the Grand Hotel where a small party was being held. The prime minister was sitting on a sofa nearby engaged in animated conversation, which I did not interrupt. Later on, I went elsewhere, and she went to her own room. Shortly before three in the morning, a bomb planted by the Irish Republican Army wrecked the hotel, killing five people and narrowly missing the prime minister. 

She emerged in disarray, but in one piece. Later in the day, she gave a speech as scheduled, but now saying that the very fact they were still gathered there, “shocked but composed and determined, is a sign not only that this attack has failed but that all attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail.” No, she wasn’t bringing harmony that day, but she was magnificent all the same.

Mrs. Thatcher’s bracing, keep-calm-and-carry-on response to a terrorist outrage—one that nearly took her own life—contrasts favorably to the tsunami of fear and overreaction that engulfed the United States in the wake of the (admittedly much bloodier) attacks of 9/11. That continues to this day in such varied forms as a bloated and secretive national-security establishment, the unending shame of Guantánamo, and a cult of memorialization (the annual reading of the names of victims, the wrongheaded project of a museum at Ground Zero, etc.) that has had the ironic effect of darkly glorifying the perpetrators. There’s still a lot we don’t know about today’s gruesome explosions at the end of the Boston Marathon—the dead and injured are still being counted. But the aftereffects of the tragedy will surely test how much, if anything, we have learned about keeping calm and carrying on.

by Hendrik Hertzberg, New Yorker |  Read more:

Photo: Simon Dack/Rex Features/AP