Salisbury resident brings Thatcher to life

SALISBURY — Noel Sloan asked a visitor if he wanted to see the shrine: photographs in his Salisbury home of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, including a couple from when Sloan actually met the legendary “Iron Lady.”Sloan, who holds dual citizenship in the United Kingdom and the United States, is an unapologetic Thatcher fan and has been asked several times to deliver a speech he wrote, “Margaret Thatcher: Britain Transformed,” about Thatcher’s accomplishments and legacy. The talk was presented locally as part of a series sponsored by the Reagan-Thatcher Forum (Sloan’s presentation was the inaugural one in the series, last year). He will be speaking at The Hotchkiss School in April (at a date to be determined). Sloan attended Hotchkiss as a young man and fell in love with the Northwest Corner. He is now a banker in New York City but has been a weekender here for the last 13 years. He has been involved in the school’s Portals music program and is a trustee for the Scoville Memorial Library.Sloan gave The Lakeville Journal an informal version of his remarks in his Smith Hill home last Sunday, Jan. 8.Why he admires ThatcherThe United Kingdom was a pretty miserable place in the 1970s, he said, with high inflation and frequent strikes contributing to a malaise that began in the late 1960s.“England was known as ‘the sick man of Europe,’’’ Sloan said (looking very English in aged corduroy trousers and an open-collared tattersall shirt peeking out from a pullover). “It was seen as ungovernable, by either Conservative or Labor governments.”“What was exciting about Margaret Thatcher is she was absolutely convinced she could solve all these major problems. And as the years unfolded, she did.”According to Sloan, under Thatcher the U.K. went from high taxes and labor unrest to low taxes and very few strikes — and re-eestablished itself as a world power.The most dramatic event in Thatcher’s premiership was the coal miner’s strike in 1984-85. Much like Pres. Ronald Reagan’s defeat of the American air traffic controllers union in 1981, Thatcher’s actions had long-lasting effects.Sloan explained that in 1984 state-owned coal mines were losing money. Thatcher’s government announced “pit closures,” — closing the less-productive mines — and the national coal miners union began a strike.A 1974 miners strike during the government of Prime Minister Edward Heath had resulted in widespread power outages and the introduction of the “three-day week,” in which power was only on for three days of the week.The Thatcher government stockpiled coal prior to the 1984 action, which deprived theNational Union of Mineworkers (NUM), headed by Arthur Scargill, of some leverage.“And a fair number [of miners] stayed on the job,” Sloan said, adding that the well-publicized conflicts between police and miners began initially with police trying to prevent violence between rival factions of miners when a separate union, the National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers, striking miners formed pickets to try and prevent other miners from going to work.And support for the strike was not unanimous within the NUM, either, with the Nottinghamshire branch mostly staying on the job and eventually forming its own union.The strike formally ended in March 1985, after almost a year, with the NUM in disarray.Public sympathy turned against the NUM, Sloan said, when it was revealed it had received financial support from the Soviet Union and, oddly enough, Libya.“I guess they just wanted to stir up trouble,” Sloan said of the Libyan angle.The significance of the broken strike was that it “marked the end of militant trade unionism” in the U.K.Changing Britain’s outlookBetween the miners strike and the 1982 Falklands War against Argentina, Thatcher became quite popular — and powerful.“It was apparent that taking on this woman was not a good idea,” said Sloan. And, he added, the national mood improved markedly. “All [post-war] British prime ministers had been presiding over the orderly management of decline. She didn’t believe in decline. She didn’t subscribe to the consensus. It was a very, very bold belief.”Sloan said that Thatcher’s tenure (she resigned in 1990) changed the country’s politics completely, to the point where Labor politicians publicly said their party was wrong to oppose reining in the unions, and allowing citizens to purchase their public housing units.The Labor government of Tony Blair “changed to much more of a Thatcherite government. She changed not one, but two British political parties.”“She’s still controversial, but in the last few years there has been a distinct reassessment. The changes Thatcher made were, in the long run, good.”Sloan said the current government of David Cameron is cutting public spending so aggressively that even Thatcher might pause.And Thatcher resisted privatizing the coal mines and British rail. “John Major’s government did that.”Also under Blair, tuition fees for university students were first instituted. Under Thatcher, tuition was free.“Both Conservative and Labor governments have taken her agenda a little further.”Sloan said that the new film about Thatcher, “The Iron Lady” (starring Salisbury resident Meryl Streep) is a sympathetic and accurate portrayal — and an irresistible story.“Her life is made for a movie,” he said. “She was the daughter of a grocer, raised in very modest circumstances. When she became a member of Parliament in 1959, there were 25 women out of 625 MPs in the House of Commons.“It took enormous ambition just to be an MP.”In 1973, Thatcher said publicly that she did not believe there would be a female prime minister in her lifetime, Sloan said.And he described Thatcher’s tenure as a cabinet member (for education) as unremarkable.But in a short period of time she became a powerful and convincing leader of the opposition in Parliament, and went on to become the most successful peacetime prime minister since World War II.“How is it someone who was just competent became someone of such importance?” Learning and leadingSloan said that Thatcher, deciding that the Heath government was “a complete disaster,” spent her time learning, especially about economics.And she worked on her public persona, eventually becoming as effective as Reagan in her ability “to distill complex issues into simple, almost homely phrases.“She’d make the comparison to a housewife looking after a family budget. She explained things succinctly. “And like Reagan, she hated jargon.”But unlike Reagan, who had the advantage of his acting experience, “she relied more on sheer force of personality.”Asked if Thatcher is a nice person, Sloan said as prime minister Thatcher was “nice to people who didn’t have a high position.”Sloan told an anecdote of a waitress at a reception spilling hot soup on a dignitary at an offical event. “Thatcher helped the waitress clean it up; she knew the waitress would be upset.”“The people who worked for her liked her, and the scene in the movie [with the staff crying after her resignation] is accurate.”Perhaps the most telling moment of the film, Sloan said, shows Thatcher, in tears, writing letters to the families of soldiers who died in the Falklands War.But with cabinet ministers, “she could be extremely tough. To people who could talk back, she was tough, even unpleasant.”As to Thatcher’s reputation as a somewhat unlikely sex symbol to a certain percentage of British males, Sloan quoted French leader François Mitterrand, who described her as having “the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe.”Another time, Thatcher, who had a cold, made a speech. Her voice was husky, and afterwards someone told her she sounded sexy.“What makes you think I’m not sexy all the time?” she is said to have retorted.