The demise of Margaret Thatcher precipitated a flood of public memories. But on the day of her grandiose funeral, Britain’s Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, told listeners to BBC Radio Four’s Today Programme how he remembered the “Iron Lady” for a private act of kindness.
Sacks fondly recalled how the late UK Conservative prime minister put herself at his disposal when as a 16-year-old schoolboy he sought her advice about a school essay he was writing on politics. Noting how she upbraided him for his apparent Liberal sympathies, he evoked a Moses-like figure who, if she aroused animosity with her bellicose confrontational style, always acted out of fervent concern for the common good.
Could a future British Muslim or Hindu religious leader ever enjoy such a memorable early encounter with a future Prime Minister of the United Kingdom? It may not be an idle question.
Sacks was growing up in the north London suburb of Finchley, an area encompassing one of the largest Jewish communities in Britain, whose MP Thatcher became in 1959. At that time, Conservative Jews in Finchley were switching to the Liberal Party, which had taken up the cause of Jews outraged by the blatant anti-Semitism of the local golf club, run by racially intolerant Conservatives. Not only was Thatcher swift to repair the damage this ill-feeling was doing to her local party, she also became a conspicuous friend of Jews at the national level. Nor does this seem to have been a matter of mere expediency, for Thatcher could be said to have regarded Judaism as the exemplary religion of capitalism.
It was a striking feature of her period in office during the 1980s that she often appeared more sympathetically disposed toward the then chief rabbi, Immanuel Jacobovits, than she did to the then head of the Anglican Church, Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie. Jacobovits’ fundamentalist interpretation of Judaic ethics, his gospel of hard work and individualistic striving for self-betterment, was far more congenial to her than Runcie’s liberal hand wringing about the fate of the poor in the face of her free market policies. It was also a striking feature of her premiership that politically ambitious Jews with backgrounds in business began to displace the old patrician order of the Conservative party typified by the Prime Minister of the late 1950s, Harold Macmillan.
Macmillan was a grandee, the scion of an upper-class family who believed that privileged persons like himself enjoyed a right to rule but were duty-bound to be mindful of the welfare of society at large and to seek to mitigate the harsher effects of the capitalist system. He was not a little dismayed by Thatcher’s Cabinet with its wealthy Jewish businessmen championing “de-regulation” and trumpeting the virtue of self-help. Never before had so many British ministers of state been Jews. It was this that occasioned Macmillan’s dubious quip: “In my day the Cabinet was full of old Etonians. Now it seems to be full of old Estonians.”
Furiously tribal in her politics, Thatcher was apt to ask her staff when confronted by someone previously unknown to her: “Is he one of us?” When it came to Britain’s Jewish establishment, the question seemed increasingly superfluous. Conversely, Jews could feel that she was “one of them.” It was a remarkable turn of events, since hitherto most British Jews had identified with the Labour Party as the instrument of their communal interests. The political commentator, R.W. Johnson, observed that she stood this identification on its head as Jewish entrepreneurs became central to her drive to topple the old Conservative establishment and forge an egalitarian US-style “enterprise culture.”
If Jews have been notably keen to burnish the myth of a British leader who remains as divisive in death as she was in life, it is scarcely surprising. The Jewish political columnist, Daniel Finkelstein, portrays Thatcher as a de facto Jew, a Gentile who shared the characteristic Jewish sense of being an outsider. There was, he suggests, something Jewish about the way she shook up Britain’s complacent old governing class and liberated the mercantile energies of a people stifled by ossified institutions.
Beneath all this may be discerned an underlying affinity between Thatcher’s religious faith, the austere Methodist brand of Christianity in which she was reared, and Judaism. From childhood she had imbibed the lessons of the Old Testament, internalizing its narrative about the exiled chosen people who would one day build “New Jerusalem” in the “promised land.”
Mrs Thatcher’s entrepreneurial New Jerusalem became in some sort a reality. Today, Britain’s rich list features a business elite of multimillionaire Hindus and Muslims as well as Jews, whose success owes much to the stimulus of her puritan creed. Yet by this stage, only the most blinkered ideologue could feel no reservations about the consequences of the entrenchment of her rabid faith in free market capitalism as the cross-party consensus of British political culture. The truth is that her vaunted “bonfire of regulations” became a license for conduct by bankers and speculators that proved not just un-regulated but ruinous. It was surely not what she or her stern religious ally, Immanuel Jacobovits, had in mind.
Striking a pious tone on the day of her funeral, Jonathan Sacks did not allude to any of this. Understandably perhaps, the Chief Rabbi preferred to remember how Thatcher made time for him all those years ago when he sought her advice about his school essay. Not that his experience of her was at all unusual. On a personal level, the “Iron Lady” was by all accounts the most considerate of human beings. As for her readiness to be free with advice — not even her bitterest critic would be likely to dispute that.
