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Margaret Thatcher: a legacy of freedom.

Article Excerpt
It is a great pleasure to be back at Hillsdale College, Michigan. It is some 32 years since I first visited the college for a meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society. Those few days were an important education in American politics for me. The conference was attended by many people who had just returned from the Republican Convention at which President Ford had narrowly defeated Ronald Reagan. They were full of enthusiasm for Reagan and full of conviction that one day he would become president. Their enthusiasm--and their passion too for sound doctrine--swept me along. I think I became a firm Reaganite at that conference here in Hillsdale. And I have never had cause to regret my conversion.

I was already "a Thatcherite of the first hour", to use Gaullist terminology. Indeed, along with Ralph Harris, Arthur Seldon, Keith Joseph and such distinguished alumni of that Hillsdale meeting as Madsen Pirie and Stuart Butler, who went on to found the Adam Smith Institute in London in the late 1970s--well, we all have a good claim to have been Thatcherites even before Lady Thatcher. Most of the intellectual groundwork for what became Thatcherism was done in places like the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Adam Smith Institute, the Centre for Policy Studies, the Mont Pelerin Society--and Hillsdale College.

But I have to add some words from the Lady herself when someone made the same claim in her presence: "The cock may crow, but it's the hen that lays the eggs." We couldn't have implemented those ideas of freedom without her courage, leadership, stamina and commitment to those same ideas. So it is fitting that Hillsdale College should be erecting a statue to Lady Thatcher--you were allied with her in the same cause of freedom long before she became a personal friend of the college.

I congratulate the sculptor, Bruce Wolfe, on his magnificent achievement. Not only is it a superb likeness of Lady Thatcher at the apogee of her political authority, but it also captures the extraordinary energy that she always projected--even when, as here, seated in a comfortable armchair. I will be especially nervous delivering these remarks today, feeling that Herself is seated just behind me and likely to catch me out in some error.

It is, finally, a great pleasure to be here under the gavel, so to speak, of your President Larry Arnn. I first met Larry at the dinner table in London of the late Peter Utley, a great conservative journalist, who was another Thatcherite of the first hour. While I was learning Reaganism in Hillsdale, Larry was learning Thatcherism in London, in both cases from the best possible teachers. In the end, of course, Reaganism and Thatcherism are the same Anglo-American conservative philosophy of ordered liberty applied in somewhat different national circumstances.

That is why Thatcher and Reagan were such a natural and successful partnership. They did not always look like a natural partnership, however. One acute and well-placed observer, Sir Percy Cradock, who served as Lady Thatcher's foreign policy advisor in Downing Street, pointed to some very sharp differences between them in the following contrast: "the bossy intrusive Englishwoman, lecturing and hectoring, hyperactive, obsessively concerned with detail" and "the lazy, sunny Irish ex-actor, his mind operating mainly in the instinctive...

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