Ralph Harris, Architect of Thatcherism

They are dying off, one by one. The great lions of the conservative renaissance, the men that provided the intellectual horsepower that drove the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions, are going to their rest.

On October 19, 2006, Ralph Harris, Baron of High Cross, died. And we honor his towering achievement.

Today the bien-pensant left talks occasionally about building their own think tanks—as if the planet isn’t already groaning under the weight of left-liberal opinion—but when
Ralph Harris, Arthur Seldon, and chicken entrepreneur Antony Fisher opened the Institute for Economic Affairs in 1957, it was a joke.

Antony Fisher had read a condensed version of F.A. Hayek’s
The Road to Serfdom

and was determined to do something about it.

For ten years the IEA was a shoestring operation, young and cheeky. Said Harris, as quoted in The Daily Telegraph obituary

A lot of our thinking was deliberately intended to affront [the establishment] and to wake them up.

But with Harris’s charm and fundraising abilities the IEA was able to secure funding to achieve financial stability. Then in the disastrous 1970s conservative politicians like Keith Joseph, Enoch Powell, and Margaret Thatcher began to pay attention to the IEA and its ideas.

When Thatcher was elected British prime minister in the election of 1979 it was the intellectual output of the IEA that provided the agenda for reform.

Today, of course, Reaganism and Thatcherism seem like an inevitable force of history. At the time, of course, they seemed more like Forlorn Hopes charging against the massed ranks of the left-liberal establishment.

And what these noble warriors inspired in their adversaries was hate. We all know about the foaming hatred of the Bush bashers. It was no better in Britain during the Thatcher years. The lefties hated Margaret Thatcher, hated her with every fiber of their beings. According to The Times obituary

[Harris] confirmed the extraordinary emotions she incited. “I see chaps in the House of Lords whom I know, who were contemporaries of mine at university. They won’t talk to me, and I’m not even Thatcher. I didn’t like Harold Wilson as Prime Minister, but I never felt the hatred and animus towards him that they have towards her. Itching to kill.”

It says something about our liberal friends that, faced with an honorable and spirited foe, they so easily descend into hatred and often find respectable support in their political parties and in the intellectual elite for their barbarism.

It is a tribute to men like Ralph Harris that they never allowed themselves to descend into the gutter with their opponents.

We shall not see their like again.