Free There is No Alternative by Claire Berlinski Page A

campaign, we see the very deliberate association of socialism with wickedness and decay. “This election,” the 1979 Conservative Manifesto announced,
    is about the future of Britain—a great country which seems to have lost its way. It is a country rich in natural resources, in coal, oil, gas and fertile farmlands. It is rich, too, in human resources, with professional and managerial skills of the highest caliber, with great industries and firms whose workers can be the equal of any in the world. We are the inheritors of a long tradition of parliamentary democracy and the rule of law. Yet today, this country is faced with its most serious problems since the Second World War. What has happened to our country, to the values we used to share, to the success and prosperity we once took for granted? . . .
    Our country’s relative decline is not inevitable.
    We in the Conservative Party think we can reverse it, not because we think we have all the answers but because we think we have the one answer that matters most. We want to work with the grain of human nature, helping people to help themselves—and others. This is the way to restore that self-reliance and self-confidence which are the basis of personal responsibility and national success. 26

    Socialism, Thatcher emphasized again and again, was against the grain of humanity’s God-given nature. The manifesto bears her signature on the first page; the two Ts in her last name are crossed high above the stem of the letter. Graphologists would say this is the mark of an exceptionally ambitious, self-confident, optimistic person. For once those frauds would be right.

    I bring up her handwriting because we are about to spend an afternoon in the Thatcher archives. Dull? Not at all. This is where we actually see and smell and touch the fossil record of history, the documents stamped CONFIDENTIAL and SECRET—words that always give me a pleasurable frisson, even if the documents in question are tables of inflation statistics, long-since declassified. This is where we see her handwritten notes on speech drafts and policy memos—mostly illegible, alas, let the graphologists make of that what they will—but some of them perfectly clear. This is where we snoop through the notes and memoranda passed to her by her advisors under cover of that SECRET stamp, the documents that say the things politicians wouldn’t dream of saying in public. This is the good part.
    The Thatcher papers are housed in Churchill College, Cambridge. 27 They are curated by Andrew Riley, a man whose welcoming warmth and enthusiasm for all things Thatcher calls to mind Willy Wonka’s pride in his chocolate factory. I, Andrew Riley, will
conduct you around the archives myself, showing you everything that there is to see, and afterwards, when it is time to leave, you will be escorted home by a collection of large CD-ROMs. These CD-ROMs, I can promise you, will be loaded with archival documents to last you and your entire household for many years!
    Andrew whisks me off for several cups of strong coffee, then takes me up the modern stairs and down the modern hall to tour the paper collection. To enter the manuscript room he spins a huge steel dial—something manufactured by a military contractor, I suspect—and puts his whole weight against the heavy, reinforced door. The manuscript room feels like the interior of a spaceship: sterile, climate-controlled, not a mote of dust, unnaturally silent but for the mechanical hum of the air conditioner. Like an accordion, the shelves whoosh apart and re-whoosh shut at the twirl of a Meccano wheel. Hyperactive motion sensors control sliding glass partitions leading to an elevated overpass; they open if you even breathe too close to them, suggesting that they have a will of their own. Andrew shows me the stacks that contain the documents that are yet classified and will remain so for another generation. “Oh, can I just take a