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When Margaret Thatcher unexpectedly became Tory leader in 1975, most commentators assumed that she would be a short-lived aberration before the party recovered its senses. When she became prime minister four years later they still confidently predicted that she would either be forced off her radical agenda within two years or swiftly replaced. Even at the height of her ascendancy, after her third general election victory, political analysts maintained that “Thatcherism” was such a personal amalgam of values, instincts and contradictory policies that it could not possibly survive its author’s departure. Lady Thatcher herself, in the bitterness of her fall, angrily accused John Major of unpicking her legacy.

In reality, of course, the Thatcher revolution is still very much in train. Far from being reversed, it has been driven on — by Conservative and new Labour alike — into areas she herself never dared to touch. No revolution truly deserves the name unless it endures. By drawing Butler, Macmillan and Heath onto Labour’s ground of nationalised industries, welfare and planning, Attlee’s post-war settlement established a new consensus that outlived his government for nearly 30 years. Thatcherism’s greatest success was to invert this process, forcing the old Labour movement of trade unions, paternalists and militants to reinvent itself as a Thatcherite party, pursuing her unfinished revolution with the zeal of the convert.

But Thatcherism, as Simon Jenkins argues, comprised not one revolution, but two. The first was the one she boasted of: privatisation, taming the unions, and the free market, which has transformed the basket case of 1976 into the strongest economy in Europe. The second, proceeding in parallel with the first but in direct contradiction of its professed goal of “rolling back” the state, involved a relentless accumulation of power to the centre, away from local government and all the other institutions, professions and organisations that had previously enjoyed some degree of autonomy and devolved responsibility.

Jenkins first drew attention to this second revolution in 1995, in a provocative little book called Accountable to None: The Tory Nationalisation of Britain, which detailed the malign effects of the Thatcher/Major years on the administration of health, education, the police, the railways and the law. This book is essentially a sequel, carrying the story on to demonstrate the blind enthusiasm with which new Labour, while spouting lip-service to localism and “choice”, has continued to gather power to the centre, imposing more and more targets, incentives, sanctions and rules, enforced by unelected agencies and quangos with ever-diminishing competence and efficiency. Again and again he comes back to the devastating verdict that, under cover of privatisation and the pretence of devolution, the provision of one service after another has been effectively nationalised.

But this book is more biographical than its predecessor. Jenkins sees the root of the disease in the contradictions of Margaret Thatcher’s restless personality, torn between a theoretical belief in “freedom” and a compulsive instinct to control. The latter usually prevailed. John Major was a very different character; but, by the time he took over, the instinct to interfere, centralise and micro-manage had become ingrained in Whitehall, and he was too weak and lacking in convictions of his own to stand against it. The weaker the politician, indeed, the more tempted he will be to try to demonstrate strength by controlling from the centre. Tony Blair is a cross between his two predecessors, combining Mrs Thatcher’s messianic personality with Major’s lack of clear direction. The result has been ever more nannying government initiatives with less and less impact on the ground. If the title had not already been used some years ago for a book on the poll tax, Jenkins could well have called this book Failure in British Government.

Thatcher and Sons certainly makes a more arresting title, with a cover picture showing Mrs Thatcher in her blue suit striding ahead, followed at a distance by Major, Blair and Gordon Brown. The inclusion of Brown is important, not just because he is assumed to be the next prime minister and expected to carry forward both revolutions, but because he has already been the driving force of Blair’s domestic policy for the past nine years. In fact, he, more than anyone, embodies both sides of the continuing revolution, since the centralisation of power in Whitehall really means centralisation in the Treasury. Nigel Lawson set the pattern under Thatcher; Ken Clarke carried it on under Major; but Brown has taken the practice of Treasury control of every detail of spending in every department to new heights. The Treasury is the real villain of Jenkins’s book.

All this is very entertaining, at the same time as inducing despair at the absurdity, vacuity and counterproductive self-delusion of modern politics. But Jenkins has a positive theme too. He has a remedy, if only it could be enacted. The heart of the trouble, he argues, lies in the emasculation of local government. The damage actually began with Ted Heath’s insensitive reorganisation in 1973. But Mrs Thatcher — for reasons buried deep in her Grantham upbringing — pursued a visceral vendetta against local government for 11 years on the excuse that it was more extravagant than central government. This was quite untrue, except in a few highly-publicised cases; but the myth was effectively propagated to justify draining almost all autonomy from it. While the rest of Europe has been devolving power back to the regions, cities and communes, Britain has been going determinedly in the opposite direction. Nothing would do more to improve British government and the delivery of public services than to restore real power to the historic counties and county towns. There is a project for David Cameron, if he really does not want to be Thatcher’s grandson.

POWER AND POLITICS

Simon Jenkins regards centralism “as Thatcher did socialism, as inherent in the nature of the modern state”. For proof, he cites the British government’s reaction to the terrorist threat: “Saddam Hussein and a London bomb were enough for Blair to put the state on constant alert and demand an ever greater concentration of power on Downing Street.”

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