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On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with observations about the ongoing government shutdown, how it could be a strategic mistake for Republicans, and why this political standoff is best understood as a “quasi-election” about the rule of law itself.
Then Frum is joined by Lord Charles Moore, the authorized biographer of Margaret Thatcher, to mark the centenary of her birth. Together, they look back on Thatcher’s transformation of Britain, from nationalized stagnation to a revitalized free-market democracy, and her alliance with Ronald Reagan, which helped bring the Cold War to a close. Moore explains how Thatcher’s belief in “law-based liberty” and her defense of national sovereignty set her apart from both libertarians and nationalists, and why her example of disciplined, principled leadership feels more and more distant in the politics of today.
In the book segment, Frum discusses Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, and reflects on exile, despair, and why holding on to hope, rather than despair, matters when history suddenly turns dark.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
David Frum: Hello and welcome back to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Charles Moore, the authorized biographer of Margaret Thatcher, and we’ll be discussing the life of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in this, her 100th-anniversary birthday month. At the end of the conversation, in the final segment of the show, I’ll discuss the book The World of Yesterday by the Austrian Jewish writer Stefan Zweig.
Before beginning either of these segments, however, I want to open with some thoughts about events in Washington at the moment: the government shutdown that began on the 1st of October. I record this episode on the weekend of Canadian Thanksgiving, American Columbus Day—speaking to you from, in fact, Ontario, Canada—and the government is shut down as I record. It looks very unlikely that the United States government can possibly reopen before the 14th of October, and the shutdown may extend longer than that.
Now, a shutdown is a very strange thing in American government because the government is sort of shut down and sort of not. Interest on the debt continues to be paid, Social Security checks continue to be issued, and many essential functions of government continue. As you’ve all noticed, the ICE guys have not stopped throwing people into the back of trucks, and the military continues to do its operations. All of these essential services continue to be performed, even if the people who perform them continue not to be paid, and even if you think some of those services may be a little less essential than others. But many aspects of the government do shut down and many essential workers sort of self-shut down. If you’ve tried to fly by air in this month of October, you’ve noticed a lot of delays. And that’s because air-traffic controllers are regarded as essential workers, but since they’re not paid, some of them call in sick and do other things: They take the day off. They drive Uber. They have ends to meet, the same as everybody else.
Government shutdowns are a recurring feature of the United States government. There was a government shutdown that lasted 34 days over Christmas in 2018, 2019. There was a government shutdown that lasted 16 days in 2013. There was a government shutdown that lasted 21 days in 1995, ’96. But the most recent government shutdowns—’95, ’96; 2013; and 2018, ’19—were all started by Republicans and were all lost by Republicans. And from that experience, the Republicans of today drew a lesson that is guiding the politics of the shutdown in 2025.
Republicans concluded: We started those three prior shutdowns; we lost them. Therefore, whoever starts the shutdown will be the side that loses. And if we can maneuver the Democrats into being the side that shuts down the government, they must lose. And indeed, in 2025, it was the Democrats who failed to deliver the necessary votes to get over the hump of 60 votes in the Senate that would’ve kept the government open, so the Republican talking point that the Democrats did it is sort of true. But they made a miscalculation in understanding the pattern. It may be that the reason that Republicans lost the past three shutdowns—’95, 2013, and 2018, ’19—was that they initiated it, but as we see this shutdown unfold and the Democrats seem not to be losing, maybe what matters more is not who did it, but why.
In 1995, the Newt Gingrich Republicans shut down the United States government to try to force cuts in Medicare on the Bill Clinton administration. In 2013, the new Tea Party Republican majority in the House tried to shut down the government to force the Obama administration to roll back a lot of its subsidies to health-care plans under the Affordable Care Act. So in both those first two cases, the shutdown was about the Republicans trying to cut funds to health-care spending, the Democrats were resisting, and the Republicans initiated the shutdown and then lost. In 2018, 2019, the Republicans initiated the shutdown to try to force Democrats to give them more money for President Trump’s border wall, and they didn’t get it; they lost that fight too. And they lost the fight because of the why: that Americans did not agree with Donald Trump that it was urgent to spend billions upon billions of dollars to build a wall across the United States border.
In this present shutdown fight, the Democrats may have initiated it, but unlike the Republicans in ’95 and 2013, they initiated it to defend health-care subsidies, not to take them away. And that may turn out to be the thing that matters—not the who, but the why. We’ll see the result.
But I wanna think a little bit about the strangeness of this particular battle. Now, Donald Trump is trying to force the Democrats’ hand by using the shutdown as an opportunity to inflict pain on Democratic constituencies: stopping the flow of programs that benefit blue states, construction and other kinds of programs like that, and furloughing and then firing large numbers of government workers who are regarded as Democratic constituencies. Much of the government, by the way, is staffed by people who probably vote Republican. Federal prisons, the guards there probably are Republican leaners. ICE seems to be Donald Trump’s personal militia, so they, presumably, are voting for him. And the military votes in probably the way, more or less, the way the rest of America votes: It’s, I’m sure, quite split down the middle. But many of the civilian functions are thought to be, or at least Donald Trump thinks them to be, more Democrat than Republican. And if you can fire the workers at the CDC, that’s a pain point for Democrats. That’s a pain point for Democratic blue states, Maryland and Virginia. And by imposing pain, he can force the conclusion of the agreement on his terms.
I mentioned at the start, or I think I mentioned at the start, that this is a uniquely American event. Government shutdowns don’t happen in other countries. And the reason they don’t is because most countries are parliamentary systems. The parliament votes the supply, the money, and the executive spends the supply. If the executive can’t get a vote in parliament to authorize the supply, then the executive falls; that’s a loss of confidence. And the prime minister or the chancellor loses power, and there’s an election—or a shuffle of coalitions, at least.
Now, the United States cannot have these kinds of elections at other than the statutory times, but in a way, what is going on in a government shutdown is exactly the kind of event that would, in another country, force an election—in a way, the legislature saying, The executive has lost our confidence. We won’t vote supply, and we are withholding supply until the executive changes its ways. What it is, it’s a kind of artificial election; it’s an election in miniature. And as Democrats think about what their strategy is, thinking of this shutdown as something that would be an election if it were happening in Canada or Germany or Britain is a way for them to think about it.
Because the reason they’re withholding supply from the Trump administration is not just because of an argument about how generous health-care subsidies should be. That’s the ground the Democrats picked, but that’s not what this fight is really about. This fight is about the rule of law because the background to it is: Any deal you strike with the Trump administration on spending, the Trump administration has said, We’re not bound by it. We declare our intent, we assert our right to refuse to spend funds that Congress has appropriated. So even if there were a deal where Congress said today, Here’s the funding deal, and the Trump administration said, Right, that’s the funding deal, the Trump administration could then walk out the door into the next room and say, That deal we agreed to five minutes ago? We’re repudiating it. We’re holding things back.
And meanwhile, Democrats are also saying, Why would the parliament, the Congress, vote supply to an executive that is breaking the law in all kinds of other ways? Carrying out killing people on the high seas without the approval of Congress; detaining, arresting, deporting, imprisoning, torturing people without any kind of grant of power to do that—not that there ever could be a grant of power, literally, to torture people; and using the power of the presidency to identify specific people whom the president doesn’t like as targets for selective criminal prosecution.
Congress is forcing a kind of quasi-election on this question. Now, there won’t be a vote in the public, but there will be movement in the polls that will cause one side in Congress or the other to panic and to say, If there were an election, we would lose it. And the consciousness that if the election were today, you would lose has an effect on behavior not as legal as an outright election, where you actually do lose power, but it concentrates the mind. And we’ll be seeing, over the coming days, one party in Congress or the other realizing, If the election were today, we would probably lose, and that will begin to affect their behavior in one way or another.
So if you think of this government shutdown, actually, it’s kind of American government functioning in a uniquely American way, but trying to address a universal problem: an executive that has lost the confidence of the legislature. You can better predict what is likely to happen and the consequences. This is a case where it’s going to be very hard to arrive at the kind of deal that was patched up in the three most recent shutdowns in the past. It’s going to be a deal that is going to have many more enforceable mechanisms because it’s a deal with an executive that says, We’re not bound by deals. How do you do business with people who say, Whatever piece of paper we sign, we don’t mean a word of it, and you can’t make us honor it?
And now my dialogue with Charles Moore.
[Music]
Frum: Charles Moore, Baron Moore of Etchingham, has traced one of the most brilliant careers in British journalism. He joined The Daily Telegraph immediately upon graduating from Cambridge and Eton. He leapt to The Spectator, becoming editor in 1984, still in his 20s. The editorships of The Sunday Telegraph and then The Daily Telegraph followed in succession.
Moore left daily newspapering in 2003 to commence work on the three volumes of his magisterial biography of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. It is as Mrs. Thatcher’s great biographer that we speak to him today, almost exactly upon Thatcher’s 100th birthday: October 13, 1925. A single-volume abridgement of Moore’s authorized biography was released by Penguin last month.
Charles is a friend of mine of many years, a friendship whose perhaps most dramatic moment may be the day Charles took my wife, Danielle, foxhunting. Now, in prints and painting, foxhunting looks a stately and serene pastime. In real life, it’s about as stately and serene as high-jumping in an active sawmill, and that was a dramatic day.
Charles, welcome to the program. It’s so good to talk to you.
Charles Moore: Thank you, David. And I got a little wind that you might mention this embarrassing incident with Danielle, so I’m wearing my hunt tie in her honor.
Frum: (Laughs.) Thank you. So let’s begin by refreshing people’s memories about who Margaret Thatcher was and why her prime ministership was so important not just in British history, but world history.
Moore: Well, Margaret Roberts, as she was, was born 100 years ago next week and born over a grocer’s shop in provincial England, in Grantham. And it would’ve been unthinkable at the time that anyone from that background would probably lead the Conservative Party and become prime minister, but doubly unthinkable that a woman would do so. And that was her most immediate—and in some ways, her most remarkable achievement, actually—was to do that and become Britain’s first-ever [woman] prime minister.
But it turned out to be a wider set of achievements than that because Britain, rather as it is today, was in a bit of a low ebb when she became leader of the party and, indeed, when she became prime minister. She became leader 50 years ago and prime minister in 1979. And it was sort of a low ebb economically, very little hope around us, as is very much the case now, and a troubled international situation, as is very much the case now. And I think what mattered, and matters still, is the example of a particular type of leadership, which is partly ideological—this is, obviously, partly to do with conservatism—but also a personal style of leadership and something that’s quite unusual in British conservatism, which is, if you like, an evangelical approach to conservatism. This is something which matters to the world and which can make the world, not just Britain, a better place.
And there was no more important ally in that, of course, than the United States. And it’s of particular interest to Americans, but it is of real interest everywhere, that there could be such a close relationship between a two-term United States president and a three-term British prime minister.
Frum: Just to remind people of the sequencing: Margaret Thatcher was elected before Ronald Reagan became president. And so in many ways, she had, in American politics, the impact of a harbinger, a suggestion that something was possible, something might be coming. And in some ways, she led the way with something—both with things that worked and things that didn’t work.
Thatcher is maybe most famous in the British context for her privatizations of former state-owned companies. There weren’t such things in the United States. But the United States did move in the 1980s much more from a, for example, regime of the state constructing public housing to voucher programs, like the program Americans know as Section 8, that give people the means to buy their own housing rather than have the state build the housing for them.
Moore: Yes, your blessed country didn’t really need privatization, ’cause it hadn’t had nationalization, to a large extent. But it was a revolutionary idea that she had, which then became exported—I think it was sort of specifically exported to about 50 countries in the world—that the state could sell off a lot of the industries that it had taken control of.
You’re quite right, David, to say that she was a harbinger. She’s younger than Reagan, but when they first met, they were both in opposition and in adversity, to some extent. She’d just become leader of her party in April 1975, they met, and she was only two months into her leadership. And he actually held no office ’cause he’d ceased to be the governor of California, and he was seeking, which he failed to win, the Republican nomination for 1976. And they met in Parliament in Britain and hit it off immediately. And yes, she came into office 18 months before Reagan did, so—and I think this has never happened before in British or American history, that a two-term American president has had the same British prime minister throughout. It’s an extraordinary piece of luck for us that that should be so and that they should already be friends—and friendship, obviously, is a stronger thing when made in adversity than when made in prosperity. And they did see eye to eye, and she was the forerunner, and she made some mistakes from which Reagan could learn and some successes from which Reagan could learn.
Very important for her, of course, that he welcomed her as soon as he became president, when, actually, she was doing pretty badly. And a lot of people were saying the Thatcher experiment—to do with monetarism, the control of inflation, the getting rid of exchange controls, all those sort of things; tackling the trade unions—people were saying, Oh, it’s not working. It’s terrible. And Reagan was very warm in his welcome to her when he didn’t really have to be, actually, but he was, in 1981, which was probably her worst year. And their alliance was a strong mixture of personal affection, shared belief, and a sense that this is their time, that Things are happening in the world, both economically and in global power structures, where we’re both needed, and we need to be together.
Frum: I want to return to this point about nationalization and privatization, because these ideas are so old that their salience, I think, has drained from public remembrance, to the point where, this year, the city of New York may well elect a mayor whose big idea is that the government should own grocery stores, that the government should greatly increase its role in the ownership of housing. You have to be, now, fairly old to remember the last time this was seriously tried.
So one of the stories that I take from your book: In 1979, when Thatcher was elected, the British government owned the telephone companies, the gas companies—I’m going to forget what all else—and the telephone company was a special disaster, with waiting times for telephones in not weeks, but months. I remember this from my own visits to Britain at the time, and you tell a funny story about this, about just what was involved in getting a telephone from the government in 1979. Would you like to take us down memory lane?
Moore: Yes, yes. I mean, first of all, of course, it was nobody’s fault. There were only really landlines then. And you had to get them put in, and you had to get them put in, in Britain, by what was originally the Post Office and then became British Telecom. And you had to join a queue, that beloved British institution. And I needed a tele—well, everyone, really, needs a telephone, but I particularly needed one ’cause I was a journalist, and we’d just got married and bought our house. And they said six months, it’ll take to put in. All it requires is to put in a piece of wire to put in the telephone, and there you are, but they said it takes six months.
And as always happens when you have a sort of nationalized industry, which is supposed to be done in the name of the people, what it actually privileges is those who have power, because I was able to jump this queue because the editor of my national newspaper said, This young man must have a telephone. So he rings up the chairman, and the chairman of the whole damn company of the nation, the nationalized industry, has to personally decide that I get a telephone. (Laughs.) It’s just sort of absolutely inconceivable now, and I think it shows—if you imagine how that ramifies, how it affects how everybody else is able to do their business every day, you’ll see how massive the changes were, and you’ll be amazed at how much they were resisted.
Frum: Yeah. Well, you mention exchange controls. Again, this is something that may be coming back, and the United States, on this one, may be leading the way, but remind us of what those were and what they did and why you had to get rid of them.
Moore: Well, when I was a boy, it affected every individual so that if you went abroad, you were only allowed to take 50 pounds out of the country, going on holiday, and this was written in the back of your passport. And if you exceeded this sum, you were in big trouble. (Laughs.) So, I mean, that’s just at the relatively trivial tourist level, but you could not move money freely in and out of the country. And, of course, one of the effects of this was to—and the idea was to protect the pound—but the effect was to prevent investment, global investment, and restrict what would otherwise be a much freer market. And again, Mrs. Thatcher lifted exchange controls almost immediately and against the orthodoxy of the day—and not without trepidation, because Britain had suffered from devaluations in the past.
But it did work. And it presaged other things, which was something which we call Big Bang in the city of London; the city of London, of course, is your Wall Street. And we had very restrictive practices there, which essentially meant that almost no non-British people could trade in stocks and shares on the London Stock Exchange—and again, sort of unimaginable now.
And that was all legislated for by Mrs. Thatcher in her second term and began in 1986, and indeed, again, troublous in some ways, some genuinely troublous in some ways. And indeed, in 1987, there was a very big stock market crash, from which you also suffered. But again, it would be unimaginable—you couldn’t possibly run a great financial center of the world if you had anything like that today.
Frum: One of the themes of this history is that Thatcher had a number of big ideas, but her most salient and urgent idea was the cause of economic liberty, which was a very exciting and powerful idea in 1979, and one that now has gone into quite [a] recession. And one of the most ironic counterpoints here is that the young people in Britain who hate Thatcher don’t remember why they hate Thatcher, but if you press them, Why is she such a figure of evil to you?, the great indictment they will lay at her door is that she got rid of a lot of coal-mining jobs, which is not exactly what happened. She allowed market forces to work in the coal-mining industry, which was automating rapidly. And now, all these years later, a president of the United States is using state power to create coal-mining jobs and to protect coal-mining jobs and to protect this one antique industry from market competition and the very market forces that Thatcher unleashed.
Thatcher did this in part because, as you remind us in the book, she was the first world leader to draw attention to the risks of global climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels, especially coal.
Moore: Yes, that’s correct, though the sequence isn’t quite right. So she only really talked about climate change, which she did very strongly, after she’d already beaten the coal miners’ union. But they were indeed related point forts because she believed, among other things about the coal industry, that it needed to be on the way out. And indeed, in competitive terms, it was on the way out with Britain ’cause we could not produce coal at anything like the low prices of—which were sort of even more subsidized or artificial—like those coming from Communist Poland, for example, coal [coming] from Communist Poland. It is an extraordinary irony that it’s all gone around this way, and you can understand why, to some extent, because there’s always been the feeling, which was strongly expressed at the time in Britain, that manual workers were suffering because of Mrs. Thatcher’s measures, and the coal mines would be a particular example of that.
The problem that the critics never really sorted out was, first of all, that they had been suffering for a very long time before Mrs. Thatcher came on the scene. What she was doing was trying to find a way, a future, that went through all these problems, rather than just moaning about them and spending more and more government money on them. So actually, for example, a Labour prime minister, Harold Wilson, actually closed more pits and made redundant more miners than Margaret Thatcher did; it’s one of those typical ironies of history.
But the related problem was that, if you have nationalized industries, you tend to have labor unions who exploit their monopoly role for political purposes. And this came to a very dramatic head in Britain with the miner strike because they’d already managed that in the 1970s and brought down a Conservative government by doing that. Mrs. Thatcher, being a minister in that Conservative government, she was not going to let that happen again. It was a matter of, in the famous question, “Who governs Britain?” And so she prepared—very, very carefully, over several years—for what she feared would happen, and it did happen. And she lasted out the strike, which was nearly 12 months in the making.
So she had quite a strong sort of democratic thing on her side, and it remained a great sadness and a great scar that there was such a bit of conflict, but there’s nobody saying, Let’s have the coal mines back. That—you’re telling me, David, and I’ve read—is not quite the case in the United States. (Laughs.) But I think modern societies still wrestle with this point about what happens to certain workers—and I suppose they’re particularly white working-class workers, and they’re particularly male workers—when the world moves on in terms of who produces what. And the resentments are real; the difficulties are real. But the solutions put forward by the Thatcher critics were preposterous, and she had the courage, and it is a political courage, to face that down and win so that you can go on to the next thing. And in her case, the next thing was a much more plural energy market, with nuclear elements, increasing importance of gas, and, as you’ve yourself said, the beginning of renewables.
Frum: Well, in a strange reversal of history—I’m not going to remember the figure on employment now—but in the first Trump term, about 50,000 people worked in the American coal industry; that’s not just miners, but everybody: bookkeepers, everybody. Which was fewer, at the time, than worked as licensed yoga instructors in the United States. But I think Trump had both a cynical view that these were his people, his voters, and a romantic view that this is the kind of work that a man should do. He shouldn’t be smiling behind a counter; he should be in the bowels of the earth, dangerously digging out an environmentally destructive rock so that it can be burned to power iron manufacturing and dreadnought building and other kinds of early-20th-century industrial activity. And that was his idea of how it should be.
And we have had this conversion where a lot of the contemporary right, both in Britain and the United States, seem to have a kind of an aesthetic idea about how an economy should be organized. They have an idea of what work should look like and what work should not look like. And if the market delivers work that doesn’t look the way they think it should [look]—not brawny enough—well, then the state should intervene to preserve these otherwise vanishing and uneconomic folkways.
Moore: Yes, I think there is a sort of odd romanticism about that. But, though I don’t share it, I have some sympathy with it because of the particular predicament of not very highly educated men in modern Western societies, who, in the 20th century, were brought up to think of themselves as overwhelmingly valuable to their countries and then have the humiliating experience of not being so valuable. And, of course, the value is validated by two world wars, of course.
And indeed, Mrs. Thatcher herself shared a lot of that belief. She felt, in a womanly way, particularly strongly about the armed services, so she absolutely loved soldiers, sailors, and airmen, and this was tremendously sort of close to that sort of male reality of work. But, first of all, she understood economic reality. And secondly, she’d had these endless traumatic problems with labor unions because they were so politicized and their leaderships were so separated from their workers that they weren’t actually—and they were very undemocratic; they weren’t reflecting the wishes of the workers. So she liked the aspirations of these upper-working-class manufacturers and so on—manufacturing workers. But her big thing—and she said this one slogan, which helped win her the leadership—she said, We back the workers, not the shirkers. And the whole idea of these people who were constantly striking seemed to her, obviously, economically damaging, obviously, but also immoral and shaming.
And though, in some ways, Mrs. Thatcher was a very divisive person in her character—deliberately so, because she wished to have the argument—in the industrial sphere, she actually brought, in the end, relative harmony. So when she became prime minister in 1979, Britain lost, in that year, Britain lost more than 29 million working days to strikes. And in the year she left, 1990, we lost, I think, 1.6 million working days to strikes. So it was a totally transformed industrial and workplace landscape, which was more harmonious, more productive. And, of course, that meant that, broadly speaking, prosperity increased in a well-distributed way.
Frum: Well, and this is a way in which she was a global harbinger, as well as just a British figure, that when she left office, we seemed to be entering an era in which there was a broad consensus across political parties, from left to right, about markets and democratic institutions and collective security. I’m not going to have the quote exactly—but you’ll recall it better than me—but shortly after she left, she was interviewed and asked what was her greatest achievement as prime minister, and she said, My successor, because we forced him to adapt our ideas into his thinking. And for a long time, it seemed like Thatcherite ideas—maybe made a little more pillowy by social-democratic governments: [Bill] Clinton, [Tony] Blair—but these were basically operating the economy on Thatcherite and Reaganite terms for a long time.
That now seems to have come to an end, that there was a Thatcher era that terminated with the Great Recession, perhaps, about 2010, and we’ve moved then into the more statist era that we thought we had left behind forever in the 1970s.
Moore: I think we have, and I think this is partly to do with a misunderstanding of Thatcherism. Though Mrs. Thatcher strongly believed in free markets, she wasn’t a libertarian and nor was she what’s now called a globalist. It was important to her that the most famous book in favor of free markets is called The Wealth of Nations, and nations meant a great deal to her. And she didn’t think that the wealth of the—it’s not called The Wealth of the World, that book; it’s called The Wealth of Nations. And she believed strongly—she was not an economic nationalist in that sense—but she believed strongly in the need for independent nations to trade with one another. And she did not feel that this was a way of undermining their independence but, in fact, made of increasing their reciprocity and their respect for one another’s independence.
And this was why she had such a fierce disagreement with the European Community, as it was then called, later the European Union. Though, at the time, she thought she could achieve that reciprocity through the single market, she came to regret that because she felt it had been used for political reasons to create [the] United States of Europe.
So what you always see in Mrs. Thatcher is a tension—not exactly a contradiction, but a tension—between the desire to open up the world with a desire to have accountable, parliamentary-governed independent nations. And we still see all that going on. And I think there’s a big argument, which didn’t really happen so much in her time, about Okay, well, so who do these nations actually belong to? And a resentment of a sort of global class, which didn’t really exist—we had our own existing hierarchies and elites, of course—but a sort of global class, which is sometimes described as “Davos Man,” which didn’t exist in her day to anything like the same extent.
And that, in turn, has built—that’s not all rubbish, at all, those concerns, but it’s been fanned by tremendously crazy conspiracy theories, and people are obsessed with George Soros or whatever, and all the sort of dark thoughts about what used to be called “rootless cosmopolitans” and is sometimes called just “Jews,” and there’s sort of very unpleasant things that are now all over the internet. Mrs. Thatcher actually did not have to contend with that—
Frum: Yeah, all over many governments.
Moore: Well, indeed, indeed, indeed. And she didn’t really have to contend with that. So I think to understand any great deed, you have to understand—obviously, you have to have a good eye to the future—but you have to understand what they were dealing with, and what she was dealing with was a Britain that jolly well didn’t work at a time when other relatively comparable democracies were working better. So Germany, for example, was working much better at that time, and even France was working better at that time, and the United States was working better at that time, though there was comparable problems. She wasn’t totally a revolutionary, but she had to take us by the scruff of the neck and shake us. And it’s that sort of leadership which is very important.
And what we really lack now in Britain—it’s a different type of problem in the United States, I think, right now—is we haven’t, for years now, had a leadership that was capable of really attaining anything. We’ve had six prime ministers in 10 years or something like that, and almost nothing has been consistently done, except the relentless expansion of spending and welfare in the state. And Mrs. Thatcher had a model of leadership in which she used her sex. Basically, she said, Men just talk and women do, and Women understand economics because they have to deal with the horrors of household budgets in an era of inflation, and so on. And so she would say—and she loved to say, The cocks may crow, but the hen lays the eggs, she being the hen.
And this was a very powerful sense and [why] she was very good at winning elections, because she seemed, if not likable to many, she seemed necessary, and her opponent seemed weak. And so she won three times, ran the show for 11 and a half years, which is unprecedented in Britain in the era of universal suffrage. This is why it matters a lot now, that though she’s from a very different world, you couldn’t govern in her way nowadays, all these sort of things—she produced some of the problems we have to deal with—she was somebody who said what she wanted to do and did it and did it. And that’s what seems not to be possible now.
Frum: You mentioned at the beginning that in 1925, it would’ve seemed unthinkable for a woman to be leader of the Conservative Party. The Conservative Party is now in its fourth female leader in Britain.
Moore: (Laughs.) Yes.
Frum: To what extent is Thatcher responsible for that revolution? And why do you think it has not come to the United States? Because in the United States, although there are women in many high offices—governors, senators—there have been two female nominees for president; both have lost. Hillary Clinton got a larger share of the popular vote than Donald Trump but lost by the rules, and Kamala Harris lost outright. Do you see a pattern here, or is this just “Turn over the cards” and there’s a certain amount of randomness in the play of the cards?
Moore: There may be a bit of a pattern, David. It seems to me that it—and Mrs. Thatcher proves this—that it’s easier for a woman to rise in a party which doesn’t have strong feminist views than one that does, actually. Because what happens in a feminist party, say, like the Labour Party in Britain, is that there’s [a] tremendously violent ideological contest about what that means: What sort of a woman have we got to have? All these different schools of feminism that contests very violently.
And with the Conservatives, it was very simple: They all mostly had prejudices against a woman, but they were very vague prejudices. They weren’t very political. They were just sort of old-fashioned. And when a woman comes along who is nice to them and impressive, and they believe brave—’cause a lot of them had been in the Second World War, and they admired courage, and they thought she had it—they didn’t really have an ideological objection. And they’d think, Well, that’s good. And then often, they’d say, She’s a brave girl. Give her a go.
And so she understood how to turn the disadvantage of her sex into an advantage, ’cause it made her noticeable, unique—looking different, dressing different, sounding different—and the main figure in the room always: the one the cameras wanted to go for, the voice that would be heard as different. And one of the things I try to bring out in my book is always how much she thought about this. So she would think very carefully—very carefully—about what she wore, what her jewelry was like, her hair. She changed her teeth. She changed her voice. She changed her clothes. All in order—some would say artificiality—but I would say it was in order not to get in the way of the message. It was to say, subliminally, Women can do this. And she didn’t, therefore, want to talk about women’s issues much because she wanted to conquer the issues that men care about. So she thought, What do men care about? Money, power, and war. So that’s what I, Margaret Thatcher, are going to master. I’m not going to talk about child care all the time, though, actually, she was interested in education, for example, very interested.
And therefore, she conquered. And therefore, she didn’t become a man in some sort of way. She was very much a woman, including in all the caricatures of women, like being very capricious. And the handbag, which started off being a joke, became the symbol of her power. And indeed, her most famous nickname, the Iron Lady, was given to her by her enemies. It was given to her by the Soviets, the Soviet paper, because they said, in a sexist way, How could a woman—you know, [Otto von] Bismarck was an iron chancellor of Germany; she thinks she’s the Iron Lady, ha ha ha. And she immediately grabbed that and said, Well, look, I’m very happy to be called the Iron Lady if that means that I’m defending the Western world against you lot. And so everything turns round.
And I think it’s actually harder—when I watched Hillary Clinton, I felt she could never get over the point that she was somehow trying to expound her virtue rather than have rapport with voters. It was a sort of I’m very good, and I’m very good partly because I’m a woman, and you’ve got to respect that and support me. In an odd way, it’s a sort of sense of entitlement. Whereas I felt with Mrs. Thatcher—though she’s a very moral person, actually—she was saying, Let’s get rid of all these men who’ve been telling you what to do all the time; let me do it, and I understand what it’s like in your hearth and home. And obviously, it’s sort of mythological in a way, but it worked.
Frum: You mentioned the Soviet nickname for her. One of Thatcher’s decisive roles in world history was as both a warmaker and a peacemaker. She led Britain into a successful unilateral war to defend the Falkland Islands against an Argentine invasion—the Argentine defeat, by the way, overthrew one of the world’s most gruesome dictatorships and ushered in an era of civilian rule in Argentina that has lasted, more or less, to this day. But she was also the first to make the big bet on [Mikhail] Gorbachev and to persuade both President Reagan and then-President [George] H. W. Bush to have confidence in Gorbachev as something real. Where would you rank that in the catalog for accomplishments?
Moore: I do rate that high.
She and Reagan went against the trend when they were in opposition to question détente in the 1970s. They said that, actually, the Soviets were gaining from this process, and it wasn’t peacemaking; it was gaining advantage. And they agreed on the installation of cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe and fought off nuclear disarmers and, in her case, won resoundingly the election of ’83, and he won resoundingly the election of ’84. And this succeeded.
And Mrs. Thatcher thought, Right, we’ve shown strength, and it’s from strength that we should negotiate. And she spotted Gorbachev, who was not then the Soviet leader but was the likely one—this is in 1984—and invited him to her country house, Chequers, and they had this extraordinary meeting, which was very remarkable, and it went on and on and on and on and way over time. And they argued about everything, like two students. And one says, Capitalism’s great; it makes you richer and freer. And the other one says, No, communism’s great; it makes us all equal. And so they were really shouting at one another. And this might have been thought to be a disaster, but actually, it was extremely successful because it was the first frank exchange with the Soviet leader, and each listened to the other and enjoyed it. They enjoyed it—that’s why it went on so long—instead of the very stiff interactions that had happened before.
And so an extraordinary week in her life: After she’d had this conversation with Gorbachev that went on all day, she was very excited, and she ran downstairs after he’d gone and said, Oh, it’s so late, and I’ve got to have my hair done because tomorrow’s China. And she went off to China to do the Anglo–Hong Kong agreement, and then she went to Hong Kong to sell that. And then she flew from Hong Kong to Honolulu to Washington, stopping in the middle of the night to insist, by the way, in Honolulu on seeing Pearl Harbor, which, of course, went down very well with her American hosts. And then went to see President Reagan and to persuade him of two things. One was that there needed to be cooperation, rather than unilateral movement, on the Strategic Defense Initiative—what people call “Star Wars.” And the other: to interest him in the proposition of Gorbachev. And he took this from her in a way which he would not have taken, I think, from any other world leader, because he basically trusted her. And it was through her influence that he and his administration started, very gingerly, to get closer to the Soviet Union, and then the whole process began.
And I’ll just say one other thing about that—you might want to come back about how the Cold War ended—but just one other thing about that, which is so interesting about the Reagan-Thatcher relationship, is because of trust, the amount of difference they could contain between them. And the key difference was this—it was absolutely the heart of all this—is it’s about nuclear weapons. Mrs. Thatcher profoundly believed in nuclear weapons because she believed in the deterrent theory, so if they’ve got them and you’ve got them, nobody uses them. Reagan had a much more sort of idealistic, almost mystical idea, that you could rid the world of nuclear weapons, and that’s what you should do. This terrified her because she thought that there would be a huge disadvantage to Britain and Europe if suddenly all the missiles, which nearly happened at the Helsinki—sorry, not Helsinki—at Reykjavík summit, that suddenly America and the Soviet Union agreed to get rid of the whole lot, and where are we left, then? And she thought the whole of the world would destabilize.
However, because the trust existed between the two of them, they were able to contain this disagreement because they had a shared aim, the shared aim being the spread of Western freedom through Eastern Europe and the end of the Soviet Empire. And they found, in Gorbachev, an interlocutor who was prepared to do enough of this for it to work. So I think it was very fascinating and sort of [a] creative thing that such a major difference, which was never fully resolved, was nevertheless contained, and they did win the Cold War.
Now, the next question, of course, is what happens—and we see it today—as a result of winning the Cold War. But anyway, I think what I say stands.
Frum: Well, the end of the Cold War is a chapter whose importance and drama is lost because it was so peaceful. I often think that one of the greatest injustices of politics is the lack of credit you get when things don’t go wrong. When things do go wrong and you turn them around—Winston Churchill is a hero for turning around the situation in 1940, but if everything had been done properly in 1935, this would all be—I sometimes say if somebody put a bag over Gavrilo Princip’s head, or if they’d handled it better in 1914, the Balkan crisis of summer 1914 would be known by eight Ph.D. students in international relations and nobody else.
Moore: (Laughs.) Yes. Yeah.
Frum: But when George H. W. Bush took the oath of office in January of 1989, if an angel had stopped him and said, What is your supreme challenge? What is the thing that will make your presidency a success if you accomplish it? And I believe he would’ve said, Well, the Soviet Union is coming apart—the Soviet empire’s coming apart. If we can arrange it so that none of the Soviet nuclear warheads go astray and none of the Soviet nuclear scientists go to work for some international terrorists, my work on this planet will be done. I mean, there are a lot of other things I want to do, but that is priority one. And that priority was accomplished so successfully that nobody even remembers how important it once was.
I wrote an article about The Atlantic for this, and one of the things that, when you go back into that time, you realize: The United States had very elaborate controls—and Britain did too, and France as well—for controls of nuclear material because these were free societies, and people could wander around wherever they wanted. The Soviets had no such controls because they policed the people. So you could leave your weapons behind chicken wire because no one was allowed to approach within 200 miles of where the weapons were. But once those systems of control of people broke down, the absence of protections for the weapons became a terrifying [prospect].
And this was something that—it was a little after Reagan’s time—but H. W. Bush, it was his top priority, and it was done successfully; Thatcher had an important role there too. And we had this moment in the 1990s where it looked like we had achieved the peaceful end of communism, the peaceful reintegration of Europe, and were on our way to a world of trade and peace that we can only be nostalgic for today because it looks gone.
Moore: Yes, this is quite true, and I think Mrs. Thatcher probably hasn’t got quite enough credit, partly because she fell out with the others, including Bush, about the European Union—which she certainly made some mistakes there because she was very, very hostile to Germany in a sort of visceral way. But she was very alert. She loved the victory in the Cold War, but she was more alert than the rest of them to the dangers inherent in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the consequent collapse of Soviet power. Nobody could have wanted a continuation of Soviet power less. But she did understand the danger of vacuum in Central Europe, and she did understand the danger of Russian resentment. And many accused her of putting too much faith in Gorbachev, and perhaps she did stay with him too long, but the reason she did that was ’cause she could see what might happen if he wasn’t in charge. And indeed, he was nearly overthrown and, effectively, actually was overthrown, really, in 1991, and the old guard of the Soviet Communists came quite close to regaining power. They failed, but it was the end of Gorbachev, really. And then it was [Boris] Yeltsin, and then there was chaos, and then it was [Vladimir] Putin.
And she was very conscious that—Mrs. Thatcher was good at risk, and this is an important thing in statesmanship, I think. She had grand hopes for the future, but they were always qualified by how very nasty people can be, a sense of that, and how very nasty tyrannies are and how many risks occur in things that lurk in things that look good. And so she was, I would say, almost sort of visionary about that, about what happens when you have a power vacuum, so she was trying to warn against all of that. And this is one of the reasons she disliked European union: because she was thinking about what lurked there.
And that, of course, has come back with a vengeance, “vengeance” being the right phrase for what Putin does. So Putin sees the end of the Cold War as just an utter humiliation for the Soviet Union, by which he really means the Russian people—the Soviet Union for him is just the Russian people, I would guess, or the Russian world. And now he’s trying to take it all back, and he sees a very weak Western alliance, which doesn’t have the alertness of Reagan—or actually, in his different way, Bush—or Thatcher, to where the risk lies and how a balance of power should be asserted and how military force should be threatened when necessary and so on.
And so it’s a tremendously dangerous situation we now have, of which the spearhead is Ukraine, but, of course, it spreads much more widely. And the lack of understanding of these questions in Western statesmanship—and I’m afraid, I think, very much including President Trump on this—is really, really alarming. I think about that a lot when I think about Reagan, Thatcher, Bush, and, to be fair, Helmut Kohl, how hard they thought about these questions 35 years ago.
Frum: On that note, let me end by asking you to take a somewhat longer view. When I was a student in law school, I was explained the theory of a law school exam, which is, The answers never change; only the questions do—
Moore: (Laughs.)
Frum: —meaning they’re just trying to elicit, “Do you know these certain number of doctrines?” And they create these crazy factual patterns that is just eliciting your knowledge of the basic doctrines you’re supposed to master before you leave a law school.
But I wonder if there’s something about that in the world of politics as well— that there’s some enduring answers about human liberty; the creative power of free people; the importance of achieving peace not by being trusting and credulous, but by being suspicious and well prepared. But the questions of our time seem so very different from the questions then. And above all, this collapse in confidence in parties of the right: They’ve lost their belief, their understanding that politics is difficult, and you need to be well prepared; you need to know the details if you wanna solve any of the problems. They’ve lost a lot of their faith in markets and human freedom. And, in some ways, they often seem very alienated from their own country. They often act and think like Leninist parties, where We know we’re the minority, so we have to seize power by means, even if illegitimate, and hold power at all costs, with no confidence that people would ever freely choose us, and therefore, we can’t allow free choices.
Moore: Yes, I think there is a lot in that. And this is a very interesting case for Mrs. Thatcher because, in many ways, she did have similarities with some of the what are called populous concerns of the modern right. So she was very engaged, by the way, for example, on the question of immigration and the dangers that that contains and some of the cultural dangers, as well as the mere number, and so on.
But here’s a difference, which perhaps goes to what you’re saying: I think she was fundamentally a legitimist. She believed in the institutions of her country, and she had no desire to dismantle them, except for—what she wanted to get out of the way was a whole load of accumulated rubbish, rather than bash up or ignore the institutions; strengthen the institutions, which, of course, Parliament would be probably the most important in the British system. And make sure that—and if I got a dollar for every time I’d heard her say, “Not just liberty, but law-based liberty,” I would be a very rich man, because she loved to say this constantly. And the other thing she always said was the old saw about “Time spent in reconnaissance is never wasted.” And most of our politicians seem to spend absolutely no time in reconnaissance and waste a great deal of it.
Frum: But on that long view, what are the answers from Thatcher’s time that need to be rediscovered in a world that doesn’t remember her as much more than a cartoon, when it remembers her at all; in a world in which she’s become a demon figure to people who are basking in a legacy she left behind? What are the enduring answers we need to take from her career?
Moore: Well, I think she did make a powerful case, an example, for economic liberty under the law, and she understood that in terms of the trajectory of human life. So what we’re talking about in economics, as the original Greek word suggests, is we’re talking about the household; we’re talking about each person. This is not fundamentally something technical. To understand why it matters to people, you have to look at it across the generations, so it’s all to do with what will happen next, and not just for you, but for your children and your grandchildren. And she had a very good, instinctive understanding about that, so she would think about things like—she’d love to say, Every earner and owner, for example, you’re building up human dignity and human society. Often accused of getting that all wrong, but that’s a very important example, I think.
And the other one is an idea about the exportability of liberty. It’s not that everybody in the whole world has to be ruled in the same way, but Here’s a good thing we in the West have—Britain, United States, particularly the Anglosphere, but generally in the West. We have this. Most people don’t. Most people would be happier if they did. We’re not supposed to go around killing people to persuade them of this, but we can help persuade them of this by our own example. And we can also help defend them when they are threatened by tyrannical power, and there are tyrannical powers in the world, and there will continue to be, and, my goodness, there are today.
And then finally, I would say, she also proved that this was not the preserve of men—leadership was not the preserve of men.
And therefore, these are at least three very important areas where you frequently wouldn’t agree with her, sometimes you’ll think she made terrible mistakes, but these are really major—it’s quite an exemplary story, and it won’t go away.
Frum: Let me end with a bit of a commercial placement for you. I haven’t read the new abridged version, but I have pored over all the original three volumes. This is a life that bears every page. And although the books are very elegantly composed, they are full of sass and fun because Thatcher was, as you keep reminding us—there was a very fun-loving element to her and a very ardent element, passionate often, especially in her earlier days, but all the way through. And she was in politics because of the things she believed, not because of the things she wanted to be, and you capture that and reveal that of this rich and extraordinary woman in what was then a man’s world.
Charles Moore, thank you so much for joining me today.
Moore: Well, thank you, David. You’ve been very kind. Thank you.
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Frum: I thank Charles Moore for joining me today.
This week’s book, as I mentioned at the top, is The World of Yesterday by the Austro Hungarian writer Stefan Zweig. Now, this is a very famous book, and many of you may have already encountered it, but for those who have not, Stefan Zweig, in the ’20s and ’30s of the last century, was one of the most famous writers in the world. He wrote in German. He was a native of Vienna. He was born into a prosperous Viennese Jewish family. He served in a noncombat role in the First World War, and through his life, he espoused a politics of liberalism, internationalism, and peace. He was a European more than belonging to any other country and more than he was Jewish, more than he was Austrian.
At the end of his life, he was driven into exile by the Nazi threat in his native Austria. He left Austria in 1934, immigrated to England, then to the United States, and finally arrived in Brazil, a country he loved and about which he wrote a book.
In 1942, sunk in despair, he wrote this recollection of the world of his early life, The World of Yesterday. And then, after having typed the last page with the assistance of his second wife, who also functioned as a secretary to him, the two of them took an overdose of drugs and committed suicide. He succumbed to a death of despair.
I read The World of Yesterday for the first time a long, long time ago. I recently returned to it for quite a selfish reason: I’ve been working on a memoir of my own, and I wanted to study the engineering of one of the great masterpieces of the work of memoir. How was it done? And I learned a lot from the book. I learned, for example, that it’s very important to tell stories in just a very, very few lines. Our lives are packed with incidents that are interesting to us, but are not necessarily of interest to others. And Zweig ruthlessly excised from his book much that was personal, much that must have been tremendously important to him in his own life, in order to focus on the part of the story that he knew that the readers of tomorrow would want to know about the world of yesterday.
He has a vivid image of the passing of that world. By a strange coincidence, he happens to be at a railway stop when the train that carries the last Habsburg emperor, Karl, who was the emperor at the end of the war. When that train went into exile, Zweig was at the Weimar railway crossing, his own train delayed, and he saw the emperor head off into history—the end of the world of security that he had known and in which he had grown up.
He is able to summon up the rise of fascism in a few telling details as well. And in those few telling details, he puts his finger on some of the enduring mysteries of the politics of fascism that we grapple with to this day. He notices how trucks will pull up in a village, and men will jump out and, with truncheons and other instruments of violence, attack people, jump back into the truck, and drive off. And he noticed with horror, he observed with horror, the incidents of violence. But he said, Who had paid for the uniforms on these men? This is before the Nazis have taken over either the German or the Austrian state. Who paid for the uniforms? Who paid for the trucks? How did these men get so well drilled? How did they know to jump off the truck and jump back on again? And those are, in microcosm, the questions that historians of fascism still grapple with, was: “What kind of movement was this? Who paid for it? What sources of social strength did it draw from?” And Zweig is able to conjure all this up in a line or two.
The theme in the book that haunted me most, though, as I reread it after an interval of so many years, was the theme of despair. And this is the theme that may be relevant to those of you who are listening to me talk about it, who are thinking about returning or visiting this book for the first time. Zweig had reasons for despair. The world he had grown up in was destroyed. The liberalism and democracy he believed in were destroyed. He lost his beautiful home in Salzburg. He lost the collection of autographed manuscripts that he cherished, into which he poured so much of the wealth he’d earned from a successful career. His books could no longer be published in his native country, either in Germany or in Austria, in his native language. And he had suffered so many personal losses, friends and families consumed by the violence and hatred of Nazism. And so, in far-off Brazil, he took his life and let his second wife take her life alongside him.
But it occurred to me as I read this: If Zweig had just held on to his faith a little bit longer, Nazism was doomed. And although he would never get back the world of yesterday, he could have played an important part in building the role of tomorrow. He would’ve returned to Austria—he could have returned to Austria and been acclaimed. He would’ve discovered his works again published, his memories rediscovered, and the world that he tried to keep alive in memory would become a source of inspiration and strength to the new world, the new world of democracy and liberalism that was returning in the Europe he loved and to the German lands whose language he spoke.
And so maybe this is a little simple-minded, maybe there was a lot more going on, maybe I’m just not constituted by either my fate or my personality to understand the feelings that would animate a man like Stefan Zweig. But we all have to hold on, even when things seem despairing, because you never know that hope isn’t just a few months away and, in the deep dark you see, there’s already the glimmerings of the light of tomorrow. And that the world of yesterday can be a resource for the world of tomorrow. Don’t despair. Don’t quit. It’s tempting, but I think Zweig would have rejoiced to see the world that was coming and would have had something to contribute to that world if he could have lived and allowed his wife to live just a few more months longer.
Thank you for watching The David Frum Show today. I hope you will share and support the program. Share it on platforms, like, subscribe. As always, the best way to support the work of this program is by subscribing to The Atlantic. That is the way to support my work and all of my colleagues. I hope you’ll consider doing that. I’ll see you next week.
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Frum: This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
I’m David Frum. Thank you for listening.
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