TRIGGERnometry - The Real Story of Margaret Thatcher - Iain Dale

Episode Date: September 3, 2025

The Real Story of Margaret Thatcher - Iain Dale Triggernometry is proudly independent. Thanks to the sponsors below for making that possible: - Cape - America's privacy-first mobile carrier. Click https://cape.co/trigger - Promo Code: TRIGGER33 for 33% off - Shopify! Sign up for a £1 per month trial at https://www.shopify.co.uk/trigger/ - Qualia Senolytic. Go to https://Qualialife.com/TRIG for up to 50% off AND use code TRIG at checkout for an additional 15% off. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Substack! https://triggernometry.substack.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Shop Merch here - https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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The biggest myth was that she was somehow America's poodle, Ronald Reagan's poodle, but they had some quite heated disagreements. The flirtatiousness, the fact that she used that very effectively, her feminine charms. How much truth is there to that? Oh, a huge amount. Cross-Armiteron, the president of France at the time. He had a huge respect for her, and he described as having the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe.

Where do you think she might have stood on the big issues of today? Mass immigration, the impact of illegal immigration. She would have probably done something far more hard-line than any British government has done. If you've ever wanted to ask one of our guests a question, now's your chance. Members get ad-free, extended and early access episodes, plus they can submit questions for upcoming interviews. Click the link in the description of this episode or go to Triggerpod.com.com.com. To join us. Ian Dale, welcome back to Trigonometry.

Good to be back. It's good to have you on. We're going to talk about a very specific thing with you today, which is your book and Margaret Thatcher. Really great to have you back on the show. Enjoyed reading the book. It's kind of a quick access to some of the greatest hits, if you like, for some people of our generation who didn't grow up under during that time. But I actually remember a long time ago, you and I had lunch.

And I remember you telling me that you were a fan of Margaret Thatcher. And I at that point basically spent five years on the comedy circuit listening to comedians go on stage and use Thatcher as a punchline. And you were the first person I came across. who actually had an explanation of why... If a sheltered life... I did. I did. As most comedians do,

and most people in the creative arts in general do, actually. And many people beyond that. And you kind of went, well, actually, she saved this country. That's basically what you said. Can you just tell people about that for a start? Well, the reason I wrote the book was exactly to aim it at people like you. Because you have to be, I think, 56 to have voted for Margaret Thatcher. And you've got two or three generations that have grown up since she left office in 1990 and 35 years ago.

And yet, her influence is still all pervasive because the left blamed Thatcher for everything that's going wrong in this country now, even though she left office 35 years ago. And it's as if I was writing this book in 1925, as opposed to 2025, I'd be writing about Disraeli. And you think, well, did Disraeli really have any influence on what happened in the 1920s? not really, no. And it also coincided. The publisher approached me and said, would I like to do it? I first said no,

because I thought, well, how can you beat Charles Moore's three volume biography, which I think is probably one of the best political biographies ever written? But once I got it into my head that I wanted to aim as a younger audience, and I've got a personal trainer after all my health things, and he was 25 at the time. And when he found out what I did for a living, his first question was, now I've heard of Margaret Thatcher, but who was she?

What does she do? I'm asking, oh my God. So it's also aimed at people like him. So what did she do? Well, huge amounts. You have to think back to what Britain was like at the end of the 1970s. We were really the sick man of Europe in terms of our economy. The trade unions controlled everything.

They literally controlled Labor's economic policy. And they had a very moderate leader, Jim Callahan, who was prime minister, a really sort of feisty chancellor is at Dennis Healy. But the trade unions would be in number 10 virtually every week, saying to the prime minister, well, this is what you've got to do. And he had no choice. There was no democracy in the trade unions at the time. Strikes were called on shows of hands at meetings outside factories.

And, of course, those who wanted to strike would put two hands up, not one. the hard left were controlling a lot of the trade unions and we were just sort of strikes were commonplace and I was how old was I was about 14 or 15 in the late 70s and I just remember thinking once there must be something better than this a better way to run the country and I remember seeing Margaret Thatcher make a speech

in 19, I think it was 1978 and I thought well she's not only diage the problem, she's come up with some solutions. And so she introduced various policies, trade unions reform, which everyone thought when she first got into power there'd be a sort of big bang of trade union reforms.

But she knew that that wouldn't work. That would just create confrontation. So she introduced a series of trade union acts over the 1980s. I think there were four of them. And it was very, very sort of slowly, slowly catchy monkey. You had the closed shop where you couldn't

be employed by a lot of the public sector industries, or even private sector, actually, unless you were a member of the union. I mean, we look at that now and think, well, how could that have been allowed to happen? You had secondary picketing. People would go and picket sort of companies that had nothing to do with their own strike. You had lots of violence on the picket lines. There was no democracy at all. Trade union leaders weren't elected by their members.

So she appointed a ruddy-faced Suffolk Farmer to be employment secretary in 1979, Jim Prior. And he was a real sort of wet, very consensual man who did not seek conflict with the unions, but it introduced a trade union act that would sort of ameliorate some of the things that were going on. And over the course of the 1980s, all of these things were dealt with. And the reason the minor strike happened when it did in 1980s, was because Arthur Scargill, the miners leader, a very hard left firebrand leader, still alive, I think he's in his 90s now,

he knew that if he didn't have a strike within a few months in 1984, the new trade union act would come in, which would mean that he'd have to have a democratic ballot. And there had been a dispute with the miners in 1981 over a pay claim, and the government just caved in. liberically because they knew they weren't ready for a coal strike.

Because again, you have to think back to that time, British industry couldn't function without coal supplies. So Nigel Lawson, when he became Energy Secretary in 1981, one of his main priorities was to build up coal stock. So if there was a strike, the country could survive. So in March 1984, Scargill called a strike with no ballot. And that proved to be as undoing in the end because it split the minors.

So there were some groups of minors who thought they should have had a national ballot, and they kept working. And that almost made the dispute worse because you had minor against minor. And Margaret Thatcher supported the working miners. She effectively encouraged businessmen to channel money to them. to support them in a way to ferment this split because for any organisation splits it becomes weaker. And the strike lasted a year

and it was a strike that the government had to win and there were some pretty awful violent scenes on picket lines but she had to prevail and she did. And essentially the trade union movement almost at a stroke was weakened and if you look at the number of strike figures over the 1980s, you see some 1984 goes up like that straight down and then it was flat, almost to the present day.

Now, I think a lot of people thought, well, we've got rid of strikes now. They won't happen again. In the last few years, I think they're coming back. And one of the conclusions I've drawn is that all politics and all economics are cyclical. Every 30 or 40 years, we go back to where we were. We thought after 1992 that there'd never be a Labour government again. They'd lost four elections. Well, there was.

We thought there'd never be a left-wing leader of the Labour Party again after Michael Foote. Well, there was, Jeremy Corbyn. We thought inflation had been conquered. Well, it hasn't been, as we've seen in the last few years. So it's very interesting. The older you get, the more you see, the history is starting to repeat itself. Well, I'm so glad you made that point, because I think actually one of the reasons that the publishers might have approached you to write a book about Thatcher is that her name is

becoming repeated again. And I think partly it's because people are quite desperate for things to change in a kind of fairly radical way. And a lot of people, contrary to what you've just said, they see her as someone who came in and destroyed everything and faced down everybody and broke through. But I also, and this is what I was going to ask you about, I hear a lot of quite reasonable, sensible people, particularly on sort of on the center right who would have been fans of Thatcher back then who are saying she was a, great conservative prime minister, but she's not remotely what we need now. Do you know what they're talking about? Do you know what they mean? Do you agree with them? To an extent, because although, I mean, I think I'm regarded as somebody who is one of the keepers of the Thatcher Flame. I think she was the greatest prime minister of the 20th century outside wartime.

She did rescue our country, I believe. I think we were on a very steep decline in the 1970s. In a sense, there are parallels to be drawn to today. But you can't just lift 1980s Thatcherism and implement it in 2025. There are things that, believe it not, there are things that she got wrong. I can't believe I just said that. There were. In 11 and a half years, you're going to make some mistakes, and she certainly did. I mean, we can talk about that if you want.

But the basic principles of Thatcherism, sound money, freedom of the individual, freedom of speech, encouraging entrepreneurialism. I mean, all of those things are applicable to our society and our economy today. So there are lessons to be learned, but anyone who just says, oh, if only we could bring back Margaret Thatcher, it would all be okay.

Now, one of the differences between her time and now is that she was regarded as a conviction politician. Thatcherism didn't really start until really the end of her first term. She was a magpie. She stole ideas and put them all together and came up with an economic policy that was probably the most free market that we've had in this country.

But she was also a pragmatist. And that's one of the – when I thought – when I started writing the book, I thought I could do it off the top of my head. I thought, well, that would be really easy to do. But it wasn't. And writing a short book is actually much harder than writing a long book. And first of all, you have to decide what to leave out. but she

the lesson that I drew from writing the whole thing is that she's much more of a pragmatist than she would ever have wanted to admit to most of her reforms were done quite slowly she wasn't a bull in a china shop yes she portrayed herself as a real conviction politician and she was to a large degree but she always regarded that

the word consensus as being a weak word and in a sense it is and everyone who sort of says oh well why can't politicians all just get along and that's not what politics is all about politics is about the battle of ideas and if you think back to the 1980s

in foreign policy terms it was it was capitalism versus communism and it was as simple as that and capitalism prevailed under leadership of her and Ronald Reagan So she would make great speeches, quite inspirational speeches in many ways, and they have stood the test of time, outlining the virtues of leadership. And where she differs from today's leaders is that she was a leader,

both in a leader of people and a leader in thought. Kirstama has no convictions at all, as far as I can see. And that's where I think his main failing is because people react to leadership. People generally like strong leadership. That's why so many benevolent dictators actually succeed. Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, I think, is the obvious example here where, yes, Singapore was a democracy. He was a very authoritarian leader, but kept being reelected because people respected him And they would trade certain freedoms for economic prosperity.

And safety. And indeed. And I think that's where she scored. But as I say, the image was sometimes different from the reality. The most positive thing that happened to her was in 1977 when a Soviet newspaper called her the Iron Lady. And she lived off that for the rest of her time in office. And I remember a few days after that. She was called that.

She was making a speech, I think, in Kensington, and stood up and said to the audience, well, here I am in my red star chiffon gown, my hair gently coiffured, the Iron Lady of the Western world. Of course, the audience lapped it up. And that's the image that she had. And she didn't like that image to be tarnished in any way.

So you had the famous U-turn speech in 1980, where she said, well, U-Turn, if you want to, the lady's not fraternity because her economic policies at that time were causing huge amounts of unemployment. People, even in the Conservative Party, really wondered whether she would be able to prevail. She had a lot of opposition with her own party, and this is where there were lots of parallels with Kemi Bezanoch, that the chapter on her period in opposition from 75 to 79, actually, after every 200 words, I'd be thinking to myself, well, this is what Kemi is facing.

There were, she had no policy platform at the beginning, nor to the Conservatives now. She was the first woman leader, Camie's first woman, black woman leader. And so it goes on. And there is so much that I think Camie Bajdonaut can learn from Thatcher's period in opposition. And a few weeks ago, Camry WhatsApp me with a photograph of a page from a biography by Patrick Cosgrave about her period in opposition. She'd circle the bit. She said, this is my life. And this is where I think a lot of commentators don't really get that the conservatives in 1975 were at year zero.

Here, they're probably a bit more at year zero. Yeah, there's a big difference. There are differences. There was no reform. There was no reform. There was no social media. And there was no 24-7 news media. Those are the big differences.

But there are lots of parallels to be drawn to, I think. Now, there are a lot of people like yourself who are fans of Thatcher, but I think it's fair to say that she is divisive. I think that's very much. I'm not a controversial statement. But particularly in the north and in places like Scotland, why does she also, why people have such vitriol towards her? Because they really do. Is it unfounded? or does she deserve some of it as well?

Well, I think it is true to say that one of the failings of the Thatcher period was not to cope with the consequences of de-industrialisation. It was quite clear that many of our manufacturing industries or our heavy industries in the 1980s were effectively bankrupt. And in her view, well, if they keep having to have taxpayer subsidies, let them wither on the vine. So it caused lots of unemployment. I mean, you look at the mining industry for a start.

Now, today's environmentalist should be thanking Margaret Thatcher for effectively shutting down the mining industry. But they don't. Even though she was the first world politician to make a speech on climate change in 1989, they still regard her as the devil incarnate. Now, what the Thatcher government tried to do, they introduced lots of, employment schemes to try and mediate the effects of unemployment. But I don't think they quite understood the extent of it and the fact that in some particularly mining communities, but also steel communities particularly in Scotland and the North East,

I don't think they understood that every single male in a particular village would be employed down the mine or in the steelworks. And if suddenly everyone loses their job, And that destroys the fabric of society in a particular community. And I don't think there was enough recognition of that. They did have these schemes, but they were sort of a, I was going to say half-hearted. I'm not even sure that's right. But they didn't do what they needed to do.

And some of these communities do still feel the effects of those industries shutting down. And you can't replace everything with call centres. and so I think that is why she is still reviled in a lot of those areas. If you're a trigonometry fan, you probably think before taking things at face value. So why trust a mobile carrier that makes billions selling your data behind your back? That answer is Cape, a premium mobile carrier built from the ground up to protect your privacy. Unlike the big providers, Cape doesn't ask for your name, address or social security number when you sign up. They delete call metadata after just 60 days instead of storing it for years, and they never

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effectively took Liverpool under his wing when he was Environment Secretary. And did he, and he's still regarded as a bit of a hero in Liverpool now, even though he's a sort of filthy Tory, because he did do a lot to help regenerate the city. And all of the Dockland's developments really started under him. So I, but Liverpool had a hard left council all through the night. Well, probably has ever since then still. But when you have people like Derek Hatton involved and all of the consequences of that, I mean, conservatives have not obviously been electorally successful in Liverpool since then.

But it's going to be very interesting at the next election to see whether reform get any kind of support. in areas like Liverpool. Because if you think most people, I think, believe that even if they think the Tories let Liverpool down, I mean, Labor has let them down far worse. And whether they start to be punished for that, well, I don't know. The Liberal Democrats have made a few bits of headway in Liverpool

over the years. They did control the council at some point. So I think there's an appetite for change, but how that's going to come about, I don't know. One of the things I actually really liked at the book is that it was nuanced. It's obvious that your prophylact. But you don't shy away from some of her policies, which later down the line, you look at it and you think to yourself, did that cause more harm than good?

In particular, the one that I'm thinking about is people having the chance to buy their council flats. Now, at the time for a working class person, the chance to be able to get on the property ladder, buy your council flat, actually get equity was transformative for huge swathes of working class communities. The problem was that council stock was never replenished, which meant that part of the reason we're in the mess with the housing crisis a part of it. And look, that was a long time ago and successive governments have failed in order to replenish that stock. But part of it comes down to Thatcher, doesn't it? This episode is brought to you by Netflix's remarkably bright creatures. What if a Pacific octopus held the key to a mystery that could heal your heart?

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masterstroke because almost overnight, hundreds of thousands of die-hard tribal labor voters became conservatives. It was partly why she won the 79 election. It was certainly contributed to the massive majority in 83. And some people would even say it was the reason John Major got a narrow majority in 92. Because once she voted conservative once, it's easy to do it again. And that's what people did throughout the 1980s. And I remember in the 1983 election, I was a student, and I was organizing the campaign on the worst council estate in Norwich. And I literally knocked on every single door in this area.

And I kept saying to the candidate, I said, you're going to get a lot of votes here. He said, oh, no, you can't get votes on that estate. I said, you watch. And on election night, we watched the ballot boxes being emptied from that estate, more than 50% conservative votes. It was incredible. And it did transform these estates because if you own something, you are going to take more care of it than if you don't. And it was transformational all over the country. And you could tell which estates where

people had bought, lots of people had bought the houses and which hadn't. Now, the point about replenishing the housing stock, and you write on that, I think in 1979, 100,000 council houses, were built. In 1990, it was 8,000. That hasn't really changed in all the years since then. Even under Blair, that didn't change. And it was because one of the rules about selling council houses was that councils were only allowed to keep 25% of the proceeds. And they generally didn't spend them on new council housing. Now, in terms of replenishing the stock, though, those houses are still there. I mean, it wasn't as if they were being knocked down. People were still living in them. The problem is that the population has increased exponentially since then, and how general

house building, whether it's council housing or private sector, hasn't kept pace with the demands. So a lot of people blame the Thatcher economic, the Thatcher Council House sales for the fact that we haven't got enough housing now. And as I say, I'll admit there is an element of truth in that, but it's not the whole story. because what's like what you said is that the way she's been portrayed by the left is that she's an enemy of the working class. And it's, but as you alluded to, it's actually, that's not true. Well, forget council houses.

Look at the share-owning democracy. I mean, I remember these privatisation campaigns in the 1980s, a massive adverts on television that tell Sid ones for people to buy shares in British gas, British Telecom, all sorts of different industries were privatised. That's another debate. But the fact is, ordinary people were enabled to buy shares for the first time. Because before then, people had just thought, well, that's for rich people. That's not for the likes of me.

Well, they did. And virtually all of the privatisation, virtually all the privatisations were oversubscribed. More people wanted to buy shares than were available. So that was another example of where wealth was effectively being transferred to the working classes. You look at Council House says that is the biggest transfer of wealth to the so-called working classes in British history. And yet it was said that she was only in favour of rich people. Well, the evidence is not there to back that up. It's very interesting you say that.

I remember we interviewed Nigel Lawson during the pandemic, not long before his, his, death. And I remember, I think I can't remember with Neil Francis, one of us put these same arguments to him with the criticisms. And he kind of, you know that she did win three major elections with, you know, big, big voice. So clearly she was very popular. Well, yes, but up to a point, because you have to look at the round there in that she had a split opposition in 1983 and 1987. The Liberals had merged with the SDP, so it's a liberal SDP alliance. And they got, I think, 27% of the vote in 1983, and Labor got 29. So the opposition vote was split. She would have won anyway, but she wouldn't have got the size of majority. And her percentage

of the vote, I think it was something like 44 and 79, 42 and 42. which compared to other elections, I mean, that's a decent performance, but she never got over 50% of the vote. But in our electoral system, that is pretty difficult to do, right? It is, well, I can't actually remember the last time. Yeah, I don't know that that's happened. You know what I was also going to ask about? I think you alluded to the Iron Lady moniker a while ago.

And I think it's fair to say that it was also foreign policy and geopolitics that really helped to establish her as a great stateswoman on the world. world stage as someone who was really a significant figure, not just in Britain, but around the world. And was on that, was her reputation of being strong and bold, etc.? Was that a fair characterization of her approach to foreign policy and world-related affairs? Yes, but even there, there are myths. And as you know, the last chapter in the book is all about the myths around nature, and I try to explode some of them. The biggest myth was that she was somehow America's poodle, Ronald Reagan's poodle.

Now, she was a great ally of Reagan, but they had some quite heated disagreements, not least on the Falklands War. Also, the invasion of Grenada, which the Queen was head of state of Grenada, and Reagan didn't give her any prior warning of what he was about to do. And he was in the middle of a cabinet meeting when she phoned him to remonstrate, and he took the phone call. while the cabinet ministers were around the table. And at one point, and this is actually on film, I think, at one point he took the phone from his ear and he just allowed the rest of the cabinet to hear. She was ranting, and he goes,

isn't she magnificent? And there were disagreements on policy regarding the Soviet Union in that Reagan at the Reykjavik summit wanted to effectively have a nuclear. free world. She thought that was absolute madness and told him so. So again, the myth that she was just in Hock to Reagan all the time. In fairness, I'm sure that myth exists. I've not heard that. In fact, what I thought that she was known for is the fact that unlike most British prime ministers that I've lived under, she was actually, while being very, very friendly and willing to

work together with our American partners, was very clear about the British national interest. And it's one of the reasons quite a lot of us would like some more of that, actually, because we want to work extremely constructively with America, I think. But we've also got to remember Britain has its own interest. And she was a great negotiator. Right. And she had a bottom line and she would never go below that. She would not have negotiated the Chegos deal that Stama did. And I mean, we're talking on the day that apparently has been a deal with France, where instead of one in, one out for illegal migrants. It's 17 in and one out.

Now, how he's going to sell that to the British people? I do not know. That would never have happened under Thatcher. You look at her negotiating style with the EEC where she felt that we were paying far too much in and she was sort of, well, she was like thumped the table and said, I want my money back. And eventually she got it.

So she was quite, she was very trenchant in international affairs. You look at sanctions on South Africa, for example, where she was the only Prime Minister or president in the Commonwealth who refused to impose sanctions on South Africa. So this is yet another one of these myths that the left have been able to propagate, that she was somehow in support of apartheid or even a racist. You look at the papers, you look at all of the records, and there is nothing to substantiate that. In fact, the direct opposite, where all of her letters to the South African leadership would demand the release of Nelson Mandela. She would talk about how to gradually dismantle apartheid. The meetings that she had with them were all the records of those meetings demonstrate the same thing. And you look at the memoirs of Sir Robin Renick, who was our ambassador to South Africa at the time.

and he lays out in graphic detail exactly what she did to help bring about the end of apartheid and yet she's got this reputation of somehow being sympathetic to it and Nelson Mandela thanked her for her role in this when he visited her there was only a few months before she left office

and he came to Downing Street and Robin Renick had had a pre-meeting with the Prime Minister and basically said to him, look, Prime Minister, he's waited 30 years to say what he's got to say to you She goes, oh, you mean I should shut up? So she did have a reputation for dominating meetings.

And she did shut up for an hour. To the extent the meeting went on so long that the waiting press outside were chanting free Nelson Man. So I think it's things like that where you've got to try and look through the conventional wisdom and actually try and look at the facts. So when you do that, you get a very different... So perhaps you should explain then

what was the name? of her opposition to the sanctioning of South Africa? Because she thought that sanctions would hurt the very people that everyone else was trying to help. And if you think about it, she was probably right on that. And it was a very lonely position. I mean, the various Commonwealth heads of government meetings, she was viciously attacked by people

and all the different sort of anti-South African pressure groups that existed. But I remember at one, she said, I don't care if it's just me alone. if you're right, you have to stick to what you believe, even if it's a very lonely position. Sounds like Kirstama. I mean, sometimes she didn't help herself, but with some of those things that she would say,

because she did give some sort of concession on the importation or export of Krugerans or something. And I think she must have been in quite a touchy mood at this press conference because she goes, yes, I did make a concession, but it was just a little tintsy-wincey concession. It means nothing. You think, well, why did you do that? Similarly, when she came to an agreement with the Irish government under Garrett Fitzgerald

on the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985, which caused her a lot of headaches within her own party because they regarded it as a bit of a sellout to the Republic of Ireland, again, she had a press conference where she was quite insulting to the Irish. And she knew that she'd gone too far and did apologise afterwards because you think, well, if you're going to come to an agreement, you kind of got to stick to it and defend it. Look, starting a business is exciting, but it isn't easy. It's not just logos, merch and big ideas.

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UK slash trigger. But you know, what you're saying, actually, particularly with the Anglo-Irish agreement, particularly with apartheid, is this is a woman who is quite consistent

in her principles, which is, as you said before, softly, softly catching monkey. Yeah. You don't really, in life or in politics, get in anywhere, get anywhere by coming in and being unnecessarily combative. It takes time. I mean, I'm sure if I thought hard enough, I could think of things where she did do that and was combative. Well, she was combative anyway, in just her natural way.

She was very combative with the EEC, as it then was, about the British rebate. And some diplomats at the time thought this was counterproductive. Sorry to pause it, Ian. There are people listening to this who've got no idea what the EEOC. Well, it was the forew on of the EU. Okay. Up until 1992, it was called the European Economic Community. And the Maastricht Treaty in 92 turned it into the European Union, a much more of a political entity.

And she had always been pro-Europe. And this is, again, one of the things, people often say, well, would Margaret Thatcher have voted for Brexit if she'd been alive in 2016? Well, we can never know. Most people who knew her far better than I did believe that she would have voted to remain. She was never anti-EEC. She was anti some of the rules and regulations, and she became, I suppose, ever more Euro-sceptic as the years went on. But when the 1975 referendum on our membership,

only two years after we'd joined, she was pictured in a jumper with all the flags on from the different countries. She made speeches in favour of remaining a member of the EEEC. And again, if you read a lot of her... speeches. They were very pro-Europe. Even the famous brew speech in 1988, where she said, well, we haven't successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in the UK to see the reimposed at European level. I mean, quite a direct thing to say, but you read the rest of it, and it's full of praise for the single market, full of praise for sort of a bit more European integration.

So again, people imagine, I mean, one of the reasons that she was brought down was because she was, because of her strident tone over the future of the EEC, where you had a socialist president of the European Commission, Jacques DeLaw, who effectively wanted to create a United States of Europe. And she saw that coming a mile off. And she was a great believer in the nation state. and the speech that probably precipitated her down for more than any other was at the beginning of November 1990 where she'd just been to the Rome summit and came back to do a statement to the House of Commons and she did her famous no, no, no, sort of no to the European Parliament becoming the legislature,

no to the commission becoming the executive, etc. And that really offended a lot of pro-European Conservatives. but I don't believe that she would have wanted to actually leave. But as I say, we will never know. Before we get on to her downfall and we'll talk about all of that because it's a fascinating story. There is one myth that you talk about in the book, which I find particularly interesting,

which was told to me, which is that by sort of the early 80s, 8180, it looked like she was on the way out. Her goose was cooked. all of a sudden the Argentines invaded the Falklands, or Lachmalvinas, whichever you want to put it. I think we'll stick to the Falklands, if you don't mind. And that saved her political bacon.

Up to a point, Lord Copper. You say cooked, her goose was maybe cooked. Well, it was goose green in the other battles and the Falklands that certainly, I mean, it reinforced her reputation as an Iron Lady. It sent a really direct message to the Soviet Union. Don't mess with the Brits. And because I think there was a general view, certainly in the communist world at the time,

that, well, they would prevail because the West was too weak. And we all know from recent experience what happens when the West is too weak. So the Soviet Union were really watching events very, very closely. She could have been toppled over the Falklands very easily.

She had a really torrid time On the day after the invasion, there was a House of Commons debate, and it did not go well. She didn't give a good speech. Her defence secretary, John Not, gave a terrible speech. There was at a meeting of the 1922 committee. It was a Saturday sitting of the House of Commons, so very dramatic. And they were torn apart by Conservative backbenchers.

Well, how could you not have known or foreseen that this was going to happen? It was a perfectly reasonable question to ask. And that night, I think it was that night, she was in her room in the House of Commons with a lot of other people and trying to think well what do we do now and the first sea lord arrived in full military uniform and basically said we have to send a task force to retake the Falklands and she said what do you mean we have to

he said because if we don't we'll be a laughing stock of the world Britain won't mean anything any longer and that was really all it took to persuade her to do this So she said, well, how long will it take? And he said, it'll take me two days to put the Pertals Force together. It will sail on Monday. And it'll take three weeks to get to the Falkton. So she said, no, you mean three days?

He said, no, three weeks. I don't know whether she knew it was 8,000 miles away or not. And, well, we all know what happened then. But that was a real formative experience for her, because a lot of her cabinet had fought in wars. Willie White Law, got an M.C., I think, in the Second World War. Francis Pym also, several others. And they had to sit her down

because when the first British ship was sung, she got quite emotional about it. And they had to sit her down and say, look, these things happen in war. You have to sort of get over any sort of emotional attachment. But Carol Thatcher, her daughter, tells a story that she would come back

to the flat in Downing Street every night and see her mother writing in her own hand letters to the families of, all of the sailors or soldiers that have been killed and with tears streaming down her face, which again sort of goes against the hardline image that she had. So it was probably of every event in her premiership, it was probably the most significant in the way that it led her to become maybe a slightly different prime minister than she had been before.

Did it win her the 1983 election? Well, it certainly didn't do her any harm. but if you look at the polls, they were already starting to turn. The economy was already starting to turn when the Falklands War had happened. So I'm skeptical. I think the majority would have been smaller. She would have still won, given that the Labour Party were in such a catastrophic state under a very left-wing leader, Michael Foote.

She would have still won, but not by 144. Because what's also interesting about Thatcher is that she was, like you said, she was also a pragmatist. So, for instance, her friendship with General Pinnishay is something that I always struggled with because I have friends who are Chilean and I know what an awful, terrible man he was to his own people. Do you know, I found out recently I've got a Pinnishet in my family tree. Don't you do with something I didn't like about you, Ian? Well, again, here, the reason that, I mean, to describe it as a friendship, I think is sort of overcooking the egg a little bit.

But without Pinochet and Chile, we would have lost far more ships in the Falklands because he gave us intelligence as to when Argentinian planes were taking off from the Argentinian mainland to go and bomb British ships. And on the three days that that radar didn't work or was being fixed or something, four British ships were sunk. So she always felt a bit of a debt towards him. And yes, he was a brutal dictator. But she never forgot that. And when the Blair government arrested, well, I say the Blair government, I mean, governments don't arrest people in this country, but he was arrested in Britain because there was a

warrant out from the Spanish government for his arrest. And he was under house arrest, I think, in Sunningdale for quite a long time. And she sort of led the campaign to allow him to be released to go back to Chile. And got a huge amount of flack for this. And I quote from a speech that she gave at the 1999 Tory Party conference where she explains why she was doing this. And it was because of the amount of British lives that Chile had helped save during the Falklands War. Now that's a basic human thing, I think. And she did feel that she owed him a debt and that our country owed him a debt.

And I think she was right on that. Ian, and where do you think she might have stood on? we talked about the fact that the situation in 2025 is very different to the one in 1979. But nonetheless, where do you think she might have stood on the big issues of today? The cultural aspect of things has become very, very important in Britain, mass immigration, the impact of illegal immigration. The economy is obviously a problem in its own way too. Where do you think she might have come down on these things and what might have been her policy prescriptions?

Well, I don't know what her policy prescriptions would have been, but she was always concerned about excessive immigration. She made a, actually, I think it was an interview, not a speech, in 1978, something around there. And at that point, the National Front, which was the forerun of the British National Party, a horrible, violent, racist organisation, they seemed to be gaining in popularity, particularly among football hooligans. Now whether she was trying to signal to people on the hard ride that she would be hardline on immigration, I don't know. But in this interview, she used the word swamped. Now imagine if Nigel Farage used that word nowadays, what the reaction would be.

Well, it was exactly the same in 1978. She was absolutely castigated for it. Immigration was never really a problem in the 1980s. It just wasn't. There weren't labor shortages. at all. Well, the numbers were completely different. Yeah, I mean, it was literally low tens of thousands.

And I think there were some years when there was net emigration. So I think she would be horrified by what's going on over the channel at the moment. What would her prescription be for it? I genuinely don't know. Well, I don't imagine she'd be faffing about with... Well, you say that. But when people blithely say, well, send in the Royal Navy, which you might think would be a natural thing for her.

to want to do until you think, yeah, but what would the Royal Navy actually do? Turn the boat. Do what the Australian Navy do? No, no, no, no. The Australians get your boat. They turn it around. They leave enough fuel in it so you can only return to where you've come. But that's not comparing like with like. I mean, it was successful for the Australians. They have this massive ocean. Whereas we're dealing with the biggest shipping lane in the world. Now, I don't think you can necessarily compare the two. But she would have probably done something far more hard line than any British government has done, but I don't know what that would be.

Well, that's what I'm saying. And that's what I'm getting at right. I don't think she'd be faffing about with pretending to smash the gangs while letting me. I don't think she'd do a deal where, you know, it's one for 17. Well, she certainly wouldn't have given the French 770 million pounds to do sweet FAA. Right. Right. Exactly. And did she have a sense of what it, did she ever talk about British identity or what it means to be British, what are British values, Is that something that she? She really did. And I think that's a subject that very few politicians can be very articulate on it.

If, and I'm the same, if somebody says to me, well, what does it mean to feel be British Ian? You kind of know it, but it's difficult to explain. She didn't find a difficult to explain at all. It was sort of like she was very good at articulating the importance of freedom of the individual, for example. And there are so many clips now that doing the rounds on Facebook reels where people have taken little excerpts from her speeches and it's incredible how

in somebody's quite moving it is that she does it in a way that there's a bit of an American I mean Americans are very good about talking about what it means to be American and proud to be an American and all that and she can do that and whether she learned that from Reagan or not I don't know but very few other British politicians can So yes, identity I think was important. But what was it that she, you might not be able to do full justice,

but what was the central theme of what it means to be British and her telling? I think she was very proud of British heritage and she was proud of the empire, which, I mean, we're not allowed to say anything in favour of the British Empire. You are on this show, man. But it's the sort of thing, I know if I talk about it on my radio show, I mean, literally are torn limb from limb from limb for even suggesting. there might possibly be something positive about the British Empire in terms of educating people about democracy, for example. And I think she was very proud of our cultural history, our political history, in bringing democracy to other countries.

She also was incredibly respectful and proud of the monarchy. And again, this is another myth that she didn't get on with the Queen. Well, if she didn't get on with the Queen, why did the Queen go to her few? which she had never done for any other British Prime Minister apart from Churchill. It was said that Howard Wilson was her favourite Prime Minister. She can go to his funeral. And the way that their relationship was portrayed in the Crown was it was utter fiction. And it was almost as if they were daggers drawn the whole time.

Well, it's simply not true. I think the Queen did, didn't agree with her on South Africa, for example. I think there were one or two issues and I think she was concerned about the rise in unemployment. her role as the monarch was to counsel, advise and war, and that's as far as it went. And there's a wonderful anecdote. I can't remember whether I put in the book on, I don't think I did. On the day of her election in 79, she went to the queen, for the queen to ask her to form a government, and the queen's private secretary met her at her car, took her through the palace and said,

now when you walk into the broom, you walk up to the queen, you do a curtsy, and then You kiss hands. I'm not sure there is actually any kissing. So Margaret Thatcher wanted to be deeply respectful, did the biggest curtsy you've ever seen anyone do, and then couldn't get up. And so she looked plaintively at the private secretary who sort of came over and grabbed her by the hand,

but he couldn't pull her up on his own. So the queen had to come up, and they sort of pulled her up off the floor. She would have been mortified by that because it would have been quite humiliating. Give me one minute to tell you about seniletics and why they're being called the biggest discovery of our time for promoting healthy aging and enhancing your physical prime.

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slash trick for up to 50% off and use code trigger checkout for an additional 15% off. That's Q-U-U-A-L-I-A-L-A-L-A-L-A-L-A-L-A-L-A-L-A-L-Rig for an extra 15% of your purchase. Thanks, Aqualia, for sponsoring today's episode. And, Ian, one of the things that I think all men, or straight men at least, like to imagine, or think about is that the feminist, the feminine. power that she had over all these men that she would be dealing with, the flirtatiousness, the fact that she used that very effectively, her feminine charms. How much truth is there to that? Oh, a huge amount. Frossomiton, the president of France at the time, not somebody ideologically

on the same page as Margaret Thatcher, but he had a huge respect for her, and he described her as having the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe. And she really played up to that. I think with Ronald Reagan, it was the same. People often ask me, well, how would she deal with Donald Trump? Which, again, is an impossible question to ask, how does anyone do it with Donald Trump? But I'm not sure whether he would have been susceptible to that kind of thing from her in terms of the sort of flirtiness. You're looking confused. Well, he appears to me, at least, to be someone who's very susceptible to the female terms. I don't know. I'm not sure whether she would have worked on him. I'm not sure. If what you're saying is she's not his type, I probably agree.

But I think that is something, it's an interesting conversation because I think as women have become more empowered and have gone into the workplace more and become more like men, I think there are fewer and fewer women who are openly willing to use those very powerful tools, actually, that are in their arsenal. You know, for understandable reasons, of course, because they come with risk if you're not someone who's in a position of real power like she was. But I see the way some people react to Georgia Maloney. You know, I think there is a real power in that. And it's interesting to see somebody like her who was both simultaneously very,

you might say very masculine in many ways, but also deeply unembarrassed about being very feminine and using that to get what she wanted. There's also a great anecdote about Jim Pryor, who I talked about, the Employment Secretary. and he was talking to her one day and he goes, Margaret, you're sounding very sexy today. He goes, have you got a cold?

She says, Jim, I don't need to have a cold to be sexy. And there was a certain type of man that she quite liked, usually quite tall. I mean, Cecil Parkinson was one, so a very good-looking man who she promoted very quickly. John Moore, who nobody remembers now, but he was seen as possibly going to be her successor in 1987, then he had some sort of breakdown.

But again, a very sort of suave-looking man. She liked a man in uniform. I mean, I don't want to over-reg the pudding on this, but I think she was well aware of her attraction to a certain type of man. Very interesting. And she was a bit of a fan hag. A what? Have you not heard this expression?

No. God. explain it. I think it's best that you do it, actually. No, with my voice, it's better that I do it. It's a woman who likes the company of gay men. That is what I assume, but

it doesn't sound quite as politically correct in the modern context. It's not the phrase maybe that you hear too often nowadays, but she had a lot of gay men working for her. Matthew Paris worked for in opposition. And she was actually quite liberal, much

more liberal on some social issues than again, her reputation suggests because people think of her support for Section 28, which banned the promotion of homosexuality in schools. The reality is if you read Charles Moore's book, she was never really in favour of it. But it was she had, she felt she had to agree to the amendment, the Dane Jill Knight and MP had put down to the legislation because she owed her one for something sort of in the past. Now, I mean, it should never have happened in my view.

But it was something at the, and you can't. look at these things through the prism of 2025. You have to think, well, what was it like back in 1988? And as somebody who at that time, I mean, I knew I was gay, but I hadn't come out, I didn't actually see a problem with it, which people would be horrified by, because I didn't think it was right to promote homosexuality in schools. But promoting something is not the same as discussing something. And it meant that teachers felt that if a 15-year-old boy, What basically said, I think I might be gay, they felt they couldn't even engage in the conversation because they might be prosecuted. Now, there weren't, I don't think, any prosecutions ever.

But it led to the Tory party being seen as being very anti-gay, which, I mean, anybody who knows anything about the Tory party knows that without gay men, in particular, most local associations wouldn't exist. Her PPS, Peter Morrison, who was in that position when she, when she lost, office. Well, he was not only gay. It turns out he was a paedophile. And she even had known that. But she had no problem. She was one of the few conservatives in 1967 to vote for the legalization of homosexuality. She had very liberal views on abortion. Yet again, people imagine she was a real social conservative. She's more kind of classical liberal based on the way you're describing. Absolutely. That's really interesting. That's why, I mean, I describe myself as a social liberal fiscal conservative. But the way that, I mean, particularly

social media is acting at the moment, I mean, I'm considered a dripping wet. You are? You are? You mean I'm considered or I am? No, no, you are a wet. Even I consider you're wet. I'm not a wet. I'm not even on the right and you're away to the left of me. Well, on social issues, yes, I am. On immigration, I would agree with that. On immigration, I am. Yeah, you're right. But again, I am the stature right as I ever was. And in the 1980s, I would have been considered not on the far right, but on the definite right. Whereas nowadays, I'm seen by many people who consider themselves on the hard right as a dripping wet liberal. And that's because of my opinion is that's because the cultural issues are primal now.

They are much more important in many people's eyes, particularly on the right. But actually, with illegal immigration across the political spectrum, as you know, those are the issues that people care most passionately about. Now, of course, the economy is very important. But that is a secondary issue in terms of the way people think now. And so the fact that you are socially liberal on cultural matters, therefore makes you a wet because we don't get to the other stuff, really. A wet now means something different from the 1980s,

because a wet to the 1980s would have meant a sort of left-wing conservative. Yeah. I think nowadays you have to draw a distinction between a capital C conservative and a small C conservative. I remain a capital C conservative and I remain a small C conservative on economics, but not necessarily on most... Yeah. And this is an interesting question. Again, one I'm sure you can't answer with any definiteness, but I sort of see Nigel Farage as coming from the Theturite tradition, really. Is that a fair observation?

Yes, it is. And Nigel, I also don't think on some cultural issues is as right wing as he sometimes claims. He was a great Thatcher admirer in the 1980s. It was only in, I think it was it 1992 when he foresaw where the European Union was heading and left the Conservative Party. So I think he is a child of Thatcher in many ways in the same way that I would consider myself a child of Thacher. Batcher. I mean, on sort of gay issues, for example, I remember when equal marriage was being discussed in, what was it, 2012 or whatever, he rang me up and he said, now what do you think of this? He said, I'm trying to make up my mind what I think about it. And so I sort of gave

him the benefit of my views, and then he went in the opposite direction. I've never seen, people think of Nigel Farage as somehow sort of bigoted, and I've never seen that at all. And I don't think she was either. But it speaks to your point, which is if Margaret Thatcher was in charge of Britain or running a major political party in this country at a time when tens of thousands of people from other countries are coming here illegally, you said yourself, she would have been way harder line than what's happening now. And that's where Nigel's at, really. And to be fair to myself, so would I. Yeah. In that I hold no candle for illegal immigration at all. I believe that all nation states need to control their borders. And I don't see why that should be a controversial statement. I

I think most people on the left believe that most, not all, but most do. I mean, you cannot have open borders, particularly when you're a kind of... I mean, Australia, you could argue it's such a massive country that would it really make that much different? It would, because most is unhabitable. Well, that is true. But most, I mean, in Britain, a country the size of us, I mean, with a landmass that is only half the size of France, and yet we have the same population, I mean, I do react when people say, oh, we're full up here. Well, we're not full up, clearly.

I mean, 7% of our landmass is built on. So it's a facile argument to say that. But you cannot accept everybody that wants to come here. So I absolutely believe that we have to have rules and regulations. It's just how you pitch them. And I think anybody that crosses the channel illegally, and it is illegal. People keep saying there's no such thing as illegal immigrants.

Well, there is. I mean, of course you can claim. asylum, but if you've crossed the channel in a dinghy, that is an illegal act. Of course. Yeah. And therefore, instead of being put in hotels when you get to this country, I mean, there's got to be some sort of deterrent there. Well, yeah, you should be deported.

Yeah, exactly. Right. And I think, I mean, the home office, what did somebody tell me last night on my radio show that once people actually get here, they aren't even contacted either by the home office or the police for maybe years. And you think, well, the argument that, well, we're importing terrorists all the time,

and I think that can be an exaggerated argument, but even if only one in a hundred is a potential terrorist, we kind of need to root them out. Of course, but none of them should be here. None of them should be here. I'm completely with you on that. But where I think we differ

is on legal migration. In what way do you think we differ? In that it doesn't bother me. I mean, when I was doing a podcast recently, the host was sort of talking about, whenever he goes out of his front door, all he hears is foreign accents. And I'm thinking, yeah, okay. Foreign accents are foreign languages. Because it's important.

Well, sorry, foreign languages. That's a big difference. Well, it is a big difference. And I say that as someone who speaks a foreign language. The reason is that when people don't speak the same language, in the same space, it automatically creates distance. But that doesn't necessarily mean that they can't speak the language, but they might be speaking to one of their friends who's from the same place.

And I find that fascinating. I want to know where they come from. Yeah. I am not triggered by people speaking foreign languages. No, but some people are. I know, but you said we differ. No, I think we differ on the level of legal migration. Okay.

In that I think if the economy, the level of legal migration has traditionally always been determined by economic need. And I have absolutely no problem if a particular sector, if they can't find the workers in this country, you've got the skills or even with no skills to do the jobs, I have no problem with importing them from elsewhere. We don't differ on that. Well, where do we differ? I think where we differ is that your understanding of economic need is very different from mine. What has been happening for since, not 1997, but since the Blair government effectively is the mass importation of low-skill.

low-wage workers. We agree on that. Right. Who are boosting GDP, but they're not boosting GDP per capita at all. In other words, we as a country are becoming poorer, not wealthier. And if you speak to a perfectly decent, not xenophobic, not prejudiced people who work in the trades, for example, during the 2000s and afterwards, you know, the sparkies and all the kind of people who work with their hands, they'd say, I've got no problem with Polish people,

but when they come and work for less and maybe a little bit harder, that causes our wages and our quality of life to go down. I agree with all of that. Yeah, I don't think we differ. But where I differ with you from what I can see is the your concern. You mentioned like Kirstama's speech. All the media commentary had a massive meltdown as if he was some Enoch Powell figure. Because what did he say we're becoming an island of strangers?

Ian, I have to tell you, there are millions of people in this country who feel that way because the city in which they live, and it's mostly a city problem, has become completely transformed within one generation. But isn't it interesting that the people who are most concerned about immigration tend to live in areas where there are no immigrants or very few immigrants? I don't think that it's a talking point that people in the media like to use, but I can explain to you why that makes perfect sense.

People who live in the country, let's say, and don't live in a big city, they come to the city every now and again. And they got in the same way that my Russian or Ukrainian relatives come to Britain once every 10 years. And they are shocked by what they see. They are shocked to see a country that they thought looked one way, look a completely different way. You mean look white? Among other things, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

But whiteness is not that they think whiteness is important. Whiteness is a proxy. I think they do think that. That is where we differ. Who thinks that? I think a lot of people find it a problem that. And they define immigrants for people who aren't white. I mean, European immigrants, they don't necessarily particularly care about.

But I think it does, in the end, go back to the color of people's skin. And that is where I have a real problem with the language that some politicians use. Robert Jenrick, for example. I called him out last year. I can't remember exactly what he said. But he was using sub-Tommy Robinson-type language. Such as? Well, again, I could go back and look at what I wrote about it at the time.

But language has consequences. And if you remember when Boris Johnson made his comments about Muslim women wearing a nicarb looking like letterboxes, he didn't mean that in a malevolent way. It was a sort of jokey reference. But I know because I had Muslim women ringing me up the next day that they were attacked on streets. Because by using that kind of simile or metaphor, Boris had effectively given license to people to say things or even do things, which they might not have done before. And when Robert Jenrick made a couple of sort of incendiary remarks last year, he was doing exactly the same thing. Now, I think he meant to do it. He was appealing to the basic instincts of people that the leading conservative politicians shouldn't be.

appealing to in my view. Well, I don't know the incident you're talking about it. If we come back to the thing that you and I were discussing, I think that, of course, a foreign visitor like someone from my family, what they react to is the visual change. It does not mean that they think whiteness is in itself some kind of important thing. It's just the easiest way to see that people, that the country has changed. That's all that they mean, right? So if you had a bunch of white people walking around in Berkers, that would be just as shocking to them as a bunch of non-white people who are not wearing burghers, it is a signifier, not entirely accurate for cultural change in the society. So I think that sometimes these lines get blurred and people think that there is

some real importance about everyone being of the same skin color. I don't think it's that, really. What I think it is, is a sense that society is changing quickly. Many people find themselves now living in a city, which is not the city that they grew up in. Now, look, that's part of history, you have to accept things change, but it has been very, very, very quick. And I understand people being concerned about. I mean, you know this as well as I do. More people have come into this country than came, just under the Blair government alone, then came between 1066 and 1950. More people under 13 years, 14 years of a Blair government or Labor government, and then even more so under the Tories. It's completely unprecedented. That's what people are concerned about,

the scale and the pace of the change and then the impact that has on the communities that people grew up in. And I think it's a perfectly reasonable thing for people to be concerned about and I don't think conflating it with racism, which does exist, is helpful. I think I have no problem with people being concerned about any aspect of how their communities

develop. I just think we have to sometimes watch the way we talk about it. And that's not trying to censor people. Yeah, no, I understand. It really isn't. It's just being decent human beings. But of course, you and I have no right to review on this because we live in Tumbridge Wells, leafy white, Tumbridge Wells that has no immigrants whatsoever. That's what I'm told. Well, actually, well, the thing is...

I don't say, yeah, but Constantine's there. Well, I'm one of many now because I don't know if you noticed, but you live outside of Tumbridge, I live in the town itself. You live in the ghetto. I live in the ghetto of Tumbridge Wells. During COVID, a lot of people from London moved out. And the demographics of Tumberge Wells are changing too. And I know people in Tumberge Wells who just visually notice it.

Why not? Some of them are really happy about it. Some of them are really unhappy about it. But people, I think, are allowed to have that view. And this is the point I was making to you about places that are majority one culture and one group. It's more noticeable there precisely because of this. I think that is true, particularly in some northern and Midlands cities and towns where, I mean, I've never been there, but I'm told that Burnley, for example, a quarter of the town is. It's not. now almost 100% from a Muslim background. Right. Now, you can set, I mean, any, if I was really woke and lefty, I would say, what's wrong with that? Right. But I think there is something wrong with that, because you've created two societies.

And it's a deliberate, I don't know whether it's sort of the council, have done something where the different planning rules or whatever. But then again, in North London, you have a Jewish community that, you know, that, you're, you congregates in a particular area. It is a natural thing for people from a particular background to congregate together. Yes. But I think... If you have many, many millions of people come in a short period of time, that's where you

get the problems that people are concerned about. There are areas, I think, of South London, where you've got a lot of Polish people living in the same area, a lot of Romanian people living in the same area. But that tends not to get the attention that majority Muslim areas get. Because Britain is a historically Christian country, so Christian. are easier to integrate, right? This is partly people from a Christian country are going to have more similar values.

It's going to be easier for them to adapt. You look at southern Spain and you look at the sort of British, well, we call them expats. We don't call them British immigrants to Spain, do we? No one here is going to defend various people. They generally don't even attempt to learn the language. And yet we have... And in Spain, as you know, they have exactly the same concerns about that issue

as we do here. They want to kick the tourists out. they don't like as many tourists. Well, tourists, yes. I think... And immigrants. Well, not necessarily, because I think in Spain, there is a great recognition that the British immigrants actually bring quite a lot of money with them and local economies would find

quite difficult to exist without them. So I think there is a little bit of a difference. Anyway, we've gone a long way away from that. A long way away. But it started with Nigel being kind of in that tradition. That's how we got his sermon. No, but if we look at Thatcher globally, what I find... He's trying to bring it back to Thatcher now.

Yeah, I know. I can't believe I'm doing that. He's become very professionally. Got a hair cut, now I'm wearing a shirt, mate. You would have thought that would have happened. But if you look at Thatcher, one of the things that I found really interesting about her is her dealings with the Soviet Union. But I don't think that we can appreciate seeing here in 2025, actually how powerful the Soviet Union was,

and the level of threat that we perceived from them. She dealt with them masterfully, didn't she? It really is an interesting story because she had very little foreign policy experience when she became leader. I think she'd been on a couple of skiing holiday. She'd been on a lecture tour to the USA a couple of times. And that was about it.

So in the four years from 75 to 79, she made it her business to travel quite a bit. And interestingly, she went to Hungary in Yugoslavia, two countries where you think, well, why would she go there? Because she was determined to see what it was like behind the Iron Curtain. And she had an instinctive hatred of communism,

I mean, understandably. And she, when Brezhnev died, there were two leaders that rapidly succeeded him, Yuri Andropov, who then died after a very short time, she went to the funeral. And all she met were sort of aged Soviet, leader. She met the successor, Chernienko. And on the flight back to London from the funeral, she said to Charles Powell, her foreign policy advisor, for goodness sakes, somebody find me a young

Russian. And they identified Mikhail Gorbachev as that young, I mean, young, what was he 53, I think, young Russian. And so he was invited, he was a minister for agriculture at the time. So he was invited to come on a visit to the UK. And she invited him for lunch at Chequers. I remember Charles Powell wrote to a note saying, do you want to invite him to lunch at Downing Street or your Datchew, Chequers? And the lunch was supposed to last an hour and a half. They sat down and she turned to him and said,

Mr. Gorbachev, you should know that I hate communism. And they had a real set to, I mean, And at one point doing this, they fell out so catastrophically that he was looking over there and she was looking over there. But it lasted six hours in the end. And once they'd sort of got the initial sort of outlining of positions out of the way, they had an absolutely brilliant conversation. And she famously said, he's a man I can do business with.

She immediately got on the phone to Reagan and said, right, this guy could be the next Russian leader. I want you to meet him. And anyway, then Choneyenko died and he was. And so she introduced him to Reagan. And every time he went to see Reagan, he would either phone her up or stop off in Britain on the way, basically to get the lowdown on what Reagan was likely to say to him. And she played a pivotal role in the whole of that period.

And there were difficulties between the various negotiations between the Russians and Americans, and she was able to sort of smooth the path in a way. And anyone that says that she played a very small part or no part in the end of the Cold War, they need to read their history books. Because one thing you described beautifully in the book is, you know, the real affection that she had for Reagan,

particularly as he got less well and became sicker with dementia and then his inevitable parting. And you tell the story of, the funeral. And it just shows that the power that these two had, really, because they were instrumental, and look, there were other factors as well, but in the downfall of the Soviet Union. Absolutely. And look, people say, oh, yeah, well, look how that's turned out. Well, you can't judge things by what subsequently happens. I mean, the nuclear arms race came to an end. And which, when I was a late teenager in my early 20s.

I mean, there was a genuine fear of nuclear Armageddon. There were feature films made about it, and people genuinely feared that there would be a nuclear war. Now, together, they averted that. And it was, the slogan for NATO at the time was peace through strength,

and it really was. It wasn't sort of a detente policy towards a Soviet Union. It was saying, well, if you get a weapon, we're going to get two. And it was that that really brought about. the end of the Soviet Union because in the end it couldn't work. The Russians could not spend the money that was needed to do what and that's why I think where we are nowadays with Putin it was 25% of the Russian GDP is now sort of

through the defense industries and that is unsustainable in the long term. So when people say we need to sort of get out of you supporting Ukraine no this is the time when you need to stick at it and turn the screw. Which I imagine that's what she would have done. Absolutely. And I think she would have actually been really proud of the way this country has stood up for Ukraine. Do you think, what do you think, how would she have dealt with someone like Putin? Because you see the Trump way of dealing with him.

I mean, Biden had another way. What do you think would have been the Thatcher way of dealing with a leader like Putin? I have no clue. I mean, I'm not sure. I think she would have come to the conclusion that you can't deal with someone like him and therefore probably wouldn't have tried. And she would have done everything in her power to try and encourage the Soviet, sorry, the Russian people to depose him at some point.

I mean, that's fair enough. And then, but if we come now to the end of her career, you know, the economy was in a great place. she transformed the country economically the roaring 80s, you know, loads of money, all the rest of it, city boys, yuppies. I mean, what went wrong? Poltax. It wasn't just that, but Poltax and her attitude and her rhetoric about Europe, those were the two things that mostly led to her decline. You can add into the equation the fact that she kept appointing the wrong people to the cabinet. So in her 11 and a half years in power, not once did she have majority support in her cabinet.

She kept appointing wets to her cabinet. Like people like Chris Patton, William Waldergrave at the end. Why? Because she took too much notice of the whips. The whips, and this is where you have to kind of get into the minutiae of Westminster politics. People imagine it's the prime minister that appoints all government ministers. Well, it's not. The prime minister appoints the cabinet in consultation with the chief whip.

But it's the chief. that appoints most of the junior positions. And if the chief whip over the years keeps appointing people from the left of the party, well, there isn't a big gene pool for the prime minister to choose from to promote people from junior positions to the cabinet. So she had the wrong chief whip then? It's my conclusion. Well, I think she had the wrong chief whip almost entirely through her time in office.

And at the end, she appointed Sir Geoffrey Howe's chief friend in politics, Tim Renton, to be her Chief Webb. I mean, she'd already fallen out with Jeffrey Howe. Why on earth? I still don't understand why she did that. I published Tim Renton's memoirs, the first time a Chief Woot had ever done a book. And he told me, he didn't put this in the book,

but he told me that in the first round of balloting for the whether she should stay as leader in 1990, he didn't vote for. Wow. And he didn't see any problem with that and staying on as Chief Whip. I said, that really is treachery. I said if you'd resigned and done it honourably, fine, but you didn't.

It was almost as if it was the first time he thought about it. And that was emblematic of the problem that she had. So after the first ballot where she had was only four votes from winning, well, she got the majority, but she needed to get plus 15%. She called in her cabinet one by one rather than doing it all around the cabinet table. And they all basically said the same thing. well of course we'll support you in the second round prime minister but you're going to lose and she found this a deeply traumatic experience as you can imagine and there was only really

one or two ken clark being one he said well unless you resign i will resign myself which was i mean fair enough that was at least he was being honest um but that was really that demonstrated her that she could not continue and as she said i've never lost an election again, another bit of counterfactual history, if she had stayed as leader, would she have won in 1992? Again, nobody will know, but I think it's certainly possible. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money, whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings. There's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com.

Ian, and I really want to hone in on the poll tax rights because there's lots of people here who would have no idea about it, what was it, etc. Why was it so divisive? Well, local government funding is not the most exciting political issue, but in the 1970s and 1980s, local government was funded, I mean, predominantly by the central government actually, but a quarter of the funding came from what we call domestic rates. And each property, had a rateable value. And every time there was a revision of the rating system, it was a terrible political problem because inevitably everything,

all the rates went up. And before she became leader, she was tasked by Ted Heath to come up with an alternative to rates. And in the October 1974 election, they had a policy of saying, we will abolish domestic rates, which was a very popular policy. Now, they didn't win. So when she became Prime Minister, she knew that she was going to have to do something.

So there are all sorts of systems that were suggested, a local income tax, a local sales tax, and the poll tax, or community charge, as it was known. And that would amend that every single adult would pay, well, the initial rate was going to be £200 a year, and that would fund all local government services. Now, 200 pounds a year, even in the 1980s, I mean, it wasn't a fortune. But of course, the natural thing for people to say was, yeah, but why should a millionaire pay the same as a dustman? And that was really at the crux of it, about the unfairness. Anyway, as time went on, it went up from 200 to 300 to 400, to 400.

Now, Nigel Lawson, the chancellor, he was never in favour of it, but he didn't, for some reason, didn't veto it. And he kept being asked for more subsidies to make sure it would work. because once you get to a certain rate, if you have, I mean, you can't tax people without their consent. And it got to a level of, so it was five, people thought 500 pounds,

oh, sorry, that is just taking the bits. And so, and it was a brilliant thing for the left because they had something to get their teeth into. So, well, this is Margaret Thatcher's invention. She's wicked for doing this. And it culminated in riots in Trafalgar Square in April, 1990. But just as bad as that, they had taken a decision to trial it in Scotland. Well, you can imagine how Scotland felt about that.

And so that I think was the most important reason for her departure because she wouldn't compromise on it. And we're going to head over to substack where our audience get to ask you their questions. But before we do, what's the one thing about Margaret Thatcher that no one is talking about and should be? Oh my God Leadership She knew what leadership was

We have a prime minister now Who doesn't understand the meaning of the word We've had quite a few of those For a while now Well I think I think that's actually not necessarily true I mean if we go back to Blair

I think he was a leader He knew what leadership was about Brown On some issues yes, but he was never a charismatic leader. No, no. And the thing is that if you look back to the beginning, to the end of the Second World War,

you go through all of our prime ministers since then, they generally go, charismatic one, dull one, charismatic one, and course we associate charisma with leadership. I think Boris Johnson was a leader of sorts, or maybe a rather different kind of... Charismatic, yeah. And then, of course,

and then, I mean, it was supposed to be then Kirstama, the dull one would succeed in, but then, of course, we had Liz Truss and Rishi Sun. both of whom you'd say were pretty dull, actually. So we are in a dull period. Can you be a leader without being charismatic? Now, there's an interesting essay question. I mean, Atley was a leader, but had no charisma whatsoever.

Attlee would never make it in today's politics, I don't think. So I think it's Thatcher's form of leadership that we should be discussing a lot more and working out how it can be translated in today's politics. Ian, thanks for coming on. Head on over to Substack, where you get to ask Ian your questions. Graham Ward asks, in your opinion, what was Margaret Thatcher's biggest political mistake and how did it affect Britain?

Rachel says, can Ian explain why his attitude to Israel is so negative? What?