II. Read and translate the text:

SELF-CREATION

1 Although ideas were important to Margaret Thatcher — more important than to any of the predecessors she had known — political leadership is about more than thinking. It calls for a collection of talents, public and private, light and dark, whether growing out of character on the one hand or artifice on the other. These, which might be called the technical skills of politics, can be broadly grouped into two categories. There are the skills of persuasion, whether exhibited in rhetoric or salesmanship or myriad facets of self-presentation as the politician chooses to deploy them. And there are the skills of management: the methods by which the leader assembles the necessary support, arranges the way decisions are taken and [gets the business done].

Mrs. Thatcher had an idiosyncratic approach to both these aspects of the art of politics. But she paid rather more serious attention to one than to the other. Early in 1986, reckless inattention to the processes of political management brought about the most serious personal crisis of her time as prime minister. She made a series of mistakes, and was driven to more and more unorthodox expedients in order to avoid the consequences. [These revealed her as the kind of politician she had striven mightily to appear not to be]: a politician of the old school, a fixer and manipulator and, when the system forced her to the point, a person capable of being an accessory to outright deception if this was necessary in order to preserve her position. She possessed, it became clear, the willingness if not quite the natural talent to dabble in the darker political arts.

2 As a persuader, she was more orthodox. But her performance, it must be said, was largely the creation of artifice. Her natural rhetorical abilities started low and did not improve. In Parliament, her command of the House of Commons did not depend on mesmeric oratory or any conspicuous parliamentary skill. Nobody looked to her for instinctive eloquence, still less for disarming shafts of humour. Granted substantial majorities in three successive Parliaments, she relied on their dependable loyalty rather than on any wining brilliance of her own to traverse the difficult passages. Between Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher, the Conservatives were led for the quarter-century from the mid-1960s by people with tin ears and negligible capacities for inspiring any but audiences of the already converted. For Mrs. Thatcher was no more compelling outside the House than in it. Indeed, such were the demands of both security and news management that almost never did she allow herself as prime minister to be placed in front of a neutral, let alone a hostile, audience with a view to moving them by the power of her speech.

She made up for this pedestrian style with capacities she could acquire by dogged learning. While rarely approaching eloquence, and never the irresistible fluency of the born parliamentarian, her efforts in the House were usually as effective as they needed to be because she prepared for them meticulously. Age did not stale her almost infinite attention to detail. Her rehearsals for the twice-weekly Question Time were as thorough in her tenth year as in her first. Her big speeches were subjected to intensive planning, far into the night. Only on the most informal occasions did she trust herself to speak extempore. What was required was a battery of facts and figures, assembled in the most persuasive order, coated with the appropriate veneer of righteousness or indignation, and seasoned — although this rarely applied to speeches in the House — with an occasional vivid image contrived for her by a hired hand. No British leader had ever been in power for so long and left so little in the depository of the English language. None, on the other hand, was so infrequently worsted in a parliamentary argument.

3 Contrivance was more conspicuously at work in the most important medium of political communication, television. To this she paid as close attention as she did to Parliament, but with more copious resort to subterfuge. From the beginning she willingly submitted to the imagemakers, principally Gordon Reece and the Saatchis' televisual maestro, Tim Bell, both of whom stayed with her, through several vicissitudes of their own, for the duration. It was not only a question of looks and makeup and dress, all of which, in Bell's «pinion, made it much easier for a professional in his line of business to work with a woman than a man — a woman being well accustomed to manipulation for cosmetic effect. Speech itself was subjected to "radical change. An academic authority on the techniques of political oratory, Max Atkinson, even managed to measure the change Mrs. Thatcher achieved. In his esoteric excursion down this little-travelled by-way of political science, Our Masters' Voices, Atkinson notes that she took voice lessons from a tutor at the National Theatre, and began a programme of special humming exercises to lower her natural pitch level. By making her speak more deeply and also slowly, this would enhance the statesmanlike character of her talk. The experiment was successful, Atkinson judged after listening to tape-recordings of her speeches before and after. «When these are played through an electronic pitch and intensity analyser», he solemnly reports, «it emerges that she achieved a reduction in pitch of 46 Hz, a figure which is almost half the average difference in pitch between male and female voices”. Moreover, she had done it at an age when the natural pitch of women's voices apparently begins to rise. None of this assiduous effort made her voice attractive. Its grating, relentless monotone drove halt the nation into paroxysms of irritation. Atkinson concluded nonetheless that the Thatcher way of oratory had probably created «behavioural precedents» for female politicians of the future.

4 By suchlike devices, the fruit of hard work and serious study, she made herself a tolerably effective performer. She knew her limitations, wanted to minimise them, and did so by the means within her capacity. She wished, still, that she could have been better at it. [For communication, as time went on, became one of her most pressing ambitions.] What she admired above all about Ronald Reagan, compensating for some of his obvious areas of incompetence, was his matchless power to get his message across. She envied that. To emulate it she was willing to try almost anything the media-men came up with. [The so-called «sincerity machine», an electronic gadget which reflects a text on to discreet transparent screens in front of a platform-speaker, thus enabling them to appear to be speaking extempore and direct to the audience], was an American invention she eagerly seized on, putting it to intensive use in the 1983 election and for all her major televised speeches thereafter.

All this was part of the self-improvement, even the self-creation, which is one of the continuing necessities of political leadership. It wasn't unique to Mrs. Thatcher. Like others before her, she simply sought to make the most of a limited talent to enthrall. But on the other side of politics, the managerial, it was a different story. Demosthenes might be an elusive role model, but Machiavelli was closer within her grasp than she liked people to know. To leadership of a collective government she brought habits and prejudices which marked her out as different from most of her predecessors. Dangerously so, it was a style that nearly led to her downfall.

5 Some of these differences were organisational. From the beginning, the cabinet met less frequently than under many previous ministers. It was a rare week when it gathered more than once.

Additionally, the system of cabinet committees was less richly byzantine than at any time since the war. Whereas Attlee, in six years, accumulated 148 standing committees of the cabinet and 313 ad-hoc committees that came and went with single issues, the Thatcher tally for a similar period was 30 to 35 and 120 respectively. As the leader made plain, she did not want government by committee but government by herself in concert with selected ministers, who were often brought together only semi-formally under her aegis and outside the structured dockets of the conventional system. Ad-hoc groups were a way of maintaining her control, bypassing rival interest-centres in the Cabinet and narrowing the circle of decision. Some ministers complained about them. They imparted a certain looseness to a governmental machine that was in any case, like such conveyances the world over, constantly in danger of running out of control. But it certainly assisted the process of prime ministerial domination, and the weakening of what the textbooks call the British system of cabinet government. «Temporarily we don't have cabinet government», one anonymous Whitehall figure told Peter Hennessy. «We have a form of presidential government in which she operates like a sovereign in her court.»

But this was not manifested solely by the downgrading of formal cabinet business. Temperamental factors also played their part. One of the earliest commonplaces of the Thatcher style was that she was a chairman who invariably led from the front. Not for her the preference of Wilson and Callaghan, and also Heath, for silently listening to the voices before exercising the prerogative of summing up. Within this leadership method, however, other habits also emerged which did not make for collegial harmony.

6 Ministers' tales of misery at the hands of Mrs. Thatcher's standard forensic technique were legion — and consistent. One senior man told me, after years of exposure, that the leader wasn't seriously interested in rational discussion. Although she thirsted for argument, «arguing with her is an extremely unsatisfactory experience». It had never changed, he went on. «She doesn't have discussions, she states opinions.» This did not mean that she would never change her mind. In fact she would sometimes change it quite suddenly. But this rarely happened after a deep process of reflective reasoning, and invariably involved unpleasantness. He instanced two decisions he had been involved in: the surrender of Hong Kong to China in 1997, and the formulation of a British response to Star Wars. Over Hong Kong, it took «many long and very bitter sessions to get her off her line» — which was that she could not contemplate «giving in» to China when the lease over the colony expired. On Star Wars, her initial reaction, tenaciously clung to through several abrasive meetings with Foreign Secretary Howe, was to offer far more strident support for Reagan's dream than Britain eventually gave.

A characteristic of this method was often its futility. It was as though she simply needed to blow off steam. Ministers found it insufferably time-wasting, not because they lost the argument but because, win or lose, the argument had to take place, and often on a point which was far from central to the decision. This was another propensity that didn't change with age. «These battles are totally exhausting», a minister reflected to me, an hour after enduring one in July 1986. «They can't be good for government. They're a quite unnecessary expenditure of energy. They almost never result in any clarification, mainly because of her habit of going off at a wild tangent and worrying away for half an hour at a minor detail.»

This was not the most orderly of governing methods; it was personal and headstrong, permanently straining at the seams of the collective. Because Conservative politicians are usually better than their Labour counterparts at preserving a united front and concealing the chaos that is sometimes called government, few public glimpses were afforded of the costs of these reckless emanations from 10 Downing Street. After the first two and a half years, the Thatcher Government, with occasional exceptions, was not one which featured a great deal of ministerial leaking and counter-leaking. But the prevailing style was, nonetheless, dangerous. It could lack strategic foresight. It risked things being overlooked. And nemesis lay in wait.

NOTE

Saatchi & Saatchi - a British advertising and public relations 1 company, which was hired by Britain's Conservative Party in 1978 for the election campaign of Margaret Thatcher, its candidate for prime; minister.

III. Summarise the text using the words in bold type.

IV. Translate into Russian the items in brackets.

V. Answer these questions (use the words in bold type).

1.What did Thatcher's neglect of certain technical skills of politics bring about?

2.Was her performance that of winning brilliance?

3.In what way was M. Thatcher's image contrived?

4.The chosen style was a great success, wasn't it?

5.Did ministers enjoy discussions within the offered leadership?

VI. 1) Explain in English the meaning of the words and phrases:

political leadership is about more than thinking (1); almost never did she allow herself as prime minister to be placed in front of a neutral, let alone a hostile, audience with a view to moving them by the power of her speech (2); seasoned with an occasional vivid image contrived for her by a hired hand (2); who were often brought together only semi-formally under her aegis (5); other habits did not make for collegial harmony (5); nemesis lay in wait (6).

2) Find in the text synonyms to the words and phrases:

to speak without preparation (2); dispute (6); to elapse (6); time and again (6); inclination (6).

3) Find in the text antonyms to the words and phrases:

to prepare one's speech after long preliminary preparations and rehearsals (4); to have smth. under strict control (5); rise (4); to help Smb. to take a line on smth. (6).

WAS SHE ONE OF US?

1. Write the transcription and memorize the following words:

supplicant to evolve to mesmerize burgeoning asset to emaciate to drench perennial to sneak meticulous zeal pious ambiguously abrasive infamy		проситель, умоляющий развиваться гипнотизировать расцветающий ценность; актив изнурять смачивать, орошать многолетний делать что-л. тайком мелочный, дотошный усердие, рвение набожный, благочестивый двусмысленно жесткий бесчестье, позор, низость, подлость
to have guts		иметь силу воли («кишка не тонка»)
the span		миг, мгновение, короткое расстояние