For that passage alone, he has probably by now been expelled from His Age.  But, on almost his last page, he asks whether Mrs. Thatcher really turned the country round.  (His book was published just before her fall.)  "Margaret Thatcher was even more the prisoner of her ideology than the socialists she despised," he decides.  Actually, she was the prisoner of politics--of such things as her longevity and the number of enemies so embattled a figure was bound to make, and also of the return of inflation, which was a denial of her ideology.

With the accession of John Major, whose entire life has been passed in Annan's Age, we now have a return to a consensus.  But it is not the one which Mrs. Thatcher challenged.  Like most British politicians of all parties, Mr. Major is a Jenko-Thatcherite.  He agrees with Mrs. Thatcher that the state should have as little to do as possible with the economy, and with Roy Jenkins that the state should have as little to do as possible with morals.  There are dangers in that consensus, as in the old.  Adam Smith did not think that freedom in economics would best work without its being accompanied by a suitable morality.  Otherwise, before the Wealth of Nations, he would not have written his Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Half of what Annan's Age believed--the directed economy--remains rejected by Major's Age, thanks to Mrs. Thatcher.  But the young Annan, his friends and mentors, also dreamt of an undirected morality.  To paraphrase Khrushchev, Annan's Age said we will Bloomsbury you.  And it has.

Frank Johnson is deputy comment editor and columnist of the London Sunday Telegraph.

Essay Types: Book Review