Intellectuals and Mrs Thatcher

 

There can’t be all that many people who are willing, in the presence of others, to call themselves intellectuals. There may even be those for whom intellectuals are a fiction, like fairies. But most people would struggle to their feet to attest to their existence.

‘Intellectual’ is a word which is hard to use without irony or reproof; often, it is a slur, and it has often seemed to invite the qualification ‘so-called’ or ‘supposed’. An intellectual need not be intelligent, and may be a fool. We think of him/her as someone who has no religion, as someone who is concerned with ideas but unable to commit himself to any, or to do anything with them.

There are intellectuals who have wished to change the world, and a very few who have managed to do so: but some intellectuals have been thought to have difficulty in changing their socks. Bertrand Russell, apparently, was unable to make himself a cup of tea.

The term 'Intellectual' came to currency with the classifications employed in the Marxist sysem, and has been used to deplore the scarcity in this country (UK)  of a certain species (an Intellectual) supposedly thick on the European ground, especially in France, where they have a quasi religious veneration.

Under the reign  of Mrs Thatcher came to mean someone who was opposed to Mrs her politics, and has been exposed to redundancy by her success. She was seen to have made 'Intellectuals' t failures, or to have driven them off to higher salaries in America, and to have encouraged them to be snobs.

Intellectuals in Mrs Thatcher's time were  people who called her Mrs T 'common' or 'suburban', who disparaged and mocked  her for growing up in a Methodist household and even worse, shock, horror
in a grocer’s shop. Mrs Thatcher suffered the fate of being sneered at by 'intellectuals', for her antecedents in trade.

source: Karl Miller

• Intellectuals by Paul Johnson
  Weidenfeld, 385 pp, £14.95, October 1988, ISBN 0 297 79395 0
• CounterBlasts No 1: God, Man and Mrs Thatcher by Jonathan Raban
  Chatto, 72 pp, £2.99, June 1989, ISBN 0 7011 3470 4