By the time the sun is up on Friday 10 June we shall all be a lot wiser - and sadder too, quite likely. Either we shall have found out that the Iron Lady is impregnable or she herself will have been found out. Margaret Thatcher is the favourite politician of those who like an exciting life. Her maxim in politics - she has claimed it as Thatche's Law - is that the unexpected always happens. Certainly something always happens when she is around, and it is often something nasty. Yet she seldom takes the blame when things turn out badly. It is not just that she has been lucky in escaping the natural consequences of her own misjudgments: her impregnability rests upon a sort of ideological second-strike capacity which has enabled her to find vindication in discomfiture.

LRB 2 June 1983 | PDF Download