Nonetheless, the later effect of my departure from Downing Street was to leave time heavy on my hands. Throughout my deliberately busy life I had been able to find solace for personal disappointments by forgetting the past and taking up some new venture. Work was my secret elixir. Now I would have to adjust to a different pace. It was difficult to begin with.
I am not by nature either introspective or retrospective: I always prefer to look forward. I feel easiest dealing with immediate practical problems, and (within reason) the harder the better. Now there was far more opportunity for reflection than I had enjoyed — if that is the word — either as Leader of the Opposition or as Prime Minister. And, painful as it was, perhaps for the first time I felt an inner need to ponder on what I had made of my life and the opportunities I had been given, and on the significance of events.
At first, my involuntary ‘retreat’ was dominated by dark thoughts. I was still able to read in the press a series of obituary-style assessments of the ‘Thatcher years’. And it was no surprise to discover in some newspapers a very different account of the record of my time as Prime Minister than I remembered or thought accurate. It was clear to me from the start that this must be put right by giving my own account in my memoirs — after all, I had made enough public jokes about writing them, and there was no shortage of interest. And one thing that records do not do is ‘speak for themselves’, however much politicians may wish they did. Yet I did not see this so much as a means of self-justification — that was essentially between me, my conscience and the Almighty. Rather, and increasingly, I wanted to give encouragement to those who thought and felt as I did, the next generation of political leaders and perhaps even the ones after that, to keep their gaze fixed on the right stars.
In one sense, I had been politically marooned. Yet, as the weeks went by, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that my little island was no more deserted intellectually than socially. I found myself in the company not just of concerned friends but of like-minded academics, journalists and members of the younger generation of politicians, in fact those whose ideas and convictions were well placed to influence the future. I came to see that on leaving Downing Street I had, however disagreeably and unwillingly, broken out of the kind of self-imposed exile which high office brings. For years, I had had to deal with and work through politicians and civil servants who, with a few remarkable exceptions, by and large did not agree with me and shared little of my fundamental approach. They had dutifully done their part — and some beyond duty. But the inevitable loneliness of power had been exacerbated in my case by the fact that I so often had to act as a lone opponent of the processes and attitudes of government itself — the Government I myself headed. I was often portrayed as an outsider who by some odd mixture of circumstances had stepped inside and stayed there for eleven and a half years; in my case the portrayal was not inaccurate.
Now I was outside again. But it was a different ‘outside’ than I remembered. I found that by contrast with those difficult days as Leader of the Opposition which I have described earlier in this book, nearly all the cleverest conservatives, those who had something to say and much to offer, were of my way of thinking. The revolution — of privatization, deregulation, tax-cutting, wider ownership, restoring self-reliance, building ladders out of poverty, strengthening our defences, securing the Atlantic alliance, restoring the country’s morale and standing — which had been so laboriously achieved inside Government had to some extent obscured from me the extent of the intellectual revolution which had occurred outside it. From time to time, for example at my annual visits to the Centre for Policy Studies, I had seen something of what was happening. But I had not grasped its full measure. And as I now came to have misgivings about some Government policies, I correspondingly placed greater hope in those outside Government who still carried on the battle of ideas. Moreover, this had its pleasant and practical side. For I never lacked stimulating conversation; and when I needed help with a speech or article or briefing on some abstruse subject there was a small army of enthusiastic and expert volunteers to provide it.
I had a similar experience abroad, where my speech tours increasingly took me. To begin with, I was received as a former Prime Minister and spent much of my time with people I had known in office. But at the top of international politics the faces change quickly. Former contacts are a diminishing source of capital. What I really enjoyed and found intellectually bracing was when I was received not just for the office I had held — or even what others considered I had achieved — but for what in some more general sense I ‘represented’. I suppose I might have expected this in the United States, the seat of radical modern conservative thinking and almost my second home. But when I talked to politicians, businessmen and intellectuals from the newly liberated democracies of Central and Eastern Europe, to West Europeans who shared my concerns about Maastricht, to political and business leaders of Asian and Pacific countries whose economies were racing ahead by making full-blooded capitalism work, to those who were rapidly turning Latin American countries around from being Third World failures to First World dynamos, I found the same thing. I was simultaneously chairing and participating in a sort of revolving seminar. They wanted to hear all that they could from me; and I found myself learning much from them.
Of course, I was equally aware of the setbacks — of weakening links between America and Europe, of former communists slipping back into power in the officially ‘post-communist’ world, and of the horrors of the Balkan tragedy which Western weakness allowed and encouraged and which streams of Slovenes, Croats, Bosnians and democratically-minded Serbs came in to describe to me. Yet, I felt from the way in which I was received by my hosts abroad (as well as the way in which I seemed to fall on my feet at home) that the basic themes I had preached and sought to practise over the years were as relevant and potent as ever. It was not that the world had turned away from my kind of conservatism, but rather that conservatives themselves in some countries had temporarily lost confidence in themselves and their message. The foreign visits were tiring. But I decided that while I had the strength — and so far there seems plenty — I would strive to influence the thinking of peoples, if no longer the actions of governments. And I hoped that when I could no longer fulfil that role myself my Foundation would do so for me.
Sadly, as I have suggested, all this has become increasingly necessary. It is hard to imagine as I write these words that the West so recently secured a great victory over communist tyranny, and free-enterprise economics a decisive triumph over socialism. The mood in the West now seems to oscillate between bravado, cynicism and fear. There are problems at home. In most Western countries public spending on social entitlement programmes is leading to swollen deficits and higher taxes. There are problems abroad. Western defences are being run down and the resolve to use them is dwindling. There is deep confusion about the future of Europe and Britain’s place in it. The ‘special relationship’ with the United States has been allowed to cool to near freezing point. The West has failed to give the democrats in the post-communist world the support they needed; their place is being taken by too many dubious figures. First by our inaction, now by our weakness, we are encouraging the Russians to believe that they will only receive the respect and attention of the West if they behave like the old Soviet Union. In the former Yugoslavia aggression has been allowed to pay. And disarray grows in NATO, because it has destroyed an empire and not yet found a new role. Not that everything is bad. The world is a freer, if not necessarily safer, place than during the Cold War. But that most important element of political success is missing — a sense of purpose.