Just as Ronald Reagan’s popularity was never fully understood in Britain, so the intensity of dislike which Margaret Thatcher provokes is not fully understood in America. Some of her enemies are obvious and predictable. The Labour Party leaders whom she trounced, former Prime Minister Edward Heath and the “wet” Conservatives whom she displaced, the trade-union militants whom she deprived of their accumulated privileges and power, inevitably see her as the Wicked Witch of the West. But the cloud of hostility extends much further and more strangely.
It is rumored to include the Queen. If so, part of the trouble may simply be the clash of two strong-minded women in a tricky professional relationship: but the Queen also represents a tradition of consensus politics and noblesse oblige which Mrs. Thatcher has brushed aside. Many upper-middle-class Conservatives are repelled by what they see as the amoral, profit-obsessed face of Thatcherism. That economic freedom may actually be the most “caring” and “compassionate” basis for society is too subtle an idea for them to grasp.
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