For many Britons accustomed to watching Thatcher browbeat enemies and dress down aides, it seemed like only a matter of time before her support for Major would cool. He lacks the image of steely resolve Thatcher made her trademark; he rose through the party ranks as a builder of consensus, not an ideologue. In the months after she stepped aside and sided with Major in a leadership fight, Thatcher took care not to second-guess him publicly. But privately she has reportedly been calling Major’s cabinet “the B team.” The question now is how badly the rumors of war might hurt the Tory party. Voters are alarmed by a deepening recession, and two Gallup polls published last week showed the opposition Labor Party opening up substantial leads over the Tories. As the Red Queen told Alice, “When you have once said a thing, that fixes it, and you must take the consequences.” Both Thatcher and Major may live to regret the consequences of her jibes.
Outwardly, Thatcher’s relations with Major remain correct. The two met for 90 minutes recently in what Downing Street called a “perfectly friendly” debriefing on her recent trips. But that meeting only underscored the awkwardness inherent in their relationship. By mutual agreement the two rarely pose together, and Thatcher has granted no interviews to the British press. “You can’t win,” said a source close to Major. “Either you’re her poodle, or you’re leaving her out in the cold.”
To avoid run-ins at home - and supplement her modest backbencher’s salary - Thatcher has been spending more and more time abroad. When she travels, she speaks - at a reported $60,000 per appearance. And when she speaks, it is not to articulate Major’s more tempered view of British policy. Last month she toured South Africa, where she was greeted like a monarch by President F. W. de Klerk. This month she was in Moscow. Her private meetings with President Gorbachev, whom she warned about backsliding on perestroika, topped Moscow’s main evening news show. This week she embarks on a tour of the United States, where she may implicitly criticize Major by defending British sovereignty within the European Community.
The more Thatcher trots the globe, the more pressure she will be under to resign her seat in Commons and ascend to the largely ceremonial House of Lords. She should “put party before self,” Conservative M.P. Jeremy Hayes said last week in calling for her to make the move. But Thatcher will decide in her own time, said an aide to the former prime minister, adding, “It’s a very personal thing.” Until then, right-wing romantics will dream that she might return to power, like France’s Charles de Gaulle. A less glorious comparison would be to her own predecessor, Edward Heath, who stayed in the Commons glowering at the woman who unhorsed him. “She’s in danger of turning on a man she anointed,” says Michael White of The Guardian. “At least Heath turned on an ideological enemy.”
The Tories must find a way out of their impasse if the government is to survive the next election, required by July 1992. In large part Major and his cabinet have themselves to blame for losing ground with voters. Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont remarked recently that higher unemployment is “a price well worth paying” for bringing down inflation; in polls, 80 percent of Britons have rejected that view. The government has sent mixed signals about the European Community, dumping Thatcher’s open hostility to the Brussels bureaucracy but not embracing Europe fully for fear of alienating the Tory right. While aides talk of “Majorism” - a plan for a “classless society” they tout as the logical successor to Thatcherism - Laborites now charge that Major has no agenda at all.
Some party leaders want to paper over Thatcher’s criticisms by limiting her to nonspeaking campaign appearances. But all that may not be enough if Thatcher keeps sniping from world capitals. Only 30 percent of the voters now think the party is united, down from 66 percent at the end of the gulf war. “Any sign of Tory disunity is a major problem,” said British pollster Robert M. Worcester. “Labor spent more than a decade in the wilderness as a divided party.” Right now, the Tories’ most optimistic scenario may also come from Lewis Carroll: after tormenting Alice, the Red Queen eventually fell asleep.
