#236 Always Right (2013)

Author: Niall Ferguson
Title: Always Right
Genre: Kindle Single
Year: 2013
Pages: 30
Origin: bought for 99p on the Kindle
Nod Rating: 1 nod out of 5

 

There is a saying that one learns more about someone at the end of a relationship than at the beginning. O, how fitting this is for the Worm’s very own relationship with Niall Ferguson. Back in the salad days of 2009 the Worm devoured a fair number of Ferguson books. These included The War of the World (4 nods), Empire (3 nods), and his edited volume Virtual History (4 nods), gaining Ferguson a total of eleven fruitful nods from the Worm during the first book-reading season. Then, silence…

Once seemingly so energetic, bringing history and debate to life, Ferguson became stale and stagnant. The warning signs were there, particularly in his television series Civilization: The West and the Rest (and his annoying use of the “killer apps”). However, the Worm decided to plunge right in and pay the ninety-nine pence needed to download Ferguson’s Kindle Single centred on Margaret Thatcher. After all, at least one retrospective read on one of Britain’s defining Prime Minister’s was in order… right?

Always Right – as the title loudly declares – is a fawning defence of Thatcher’s time in government. Within the space of thirty pages Ferguson manages to raise the bar of sycophantic prose, wagging his finger and telling the poor reader to remember the good of Thatcherism, and to ignore the left-wing propaganda spouted through the conduits of social media. As Ferguson writes:

‘this little book is unapologetically based on the great woman theory of history….she was right much more often than her critics… Those who have had the bad taste to celebrate her death will probably not read this book, not least because it will remind them of just how wrong they were in the 1980s.’

Used as evidence is the decline in living standards. ‘Nothing worked’, he argues. ‘The trains were always late. The payphones were always broken… Worst of all were the recurrent strikes. Strikes by coalminers. Strikes by dockers. Strikes by printers. Strikes by refuse collectors. Strikes even by gravediggers.’ Thankfully for us all, Britain economically recovered, putting an end to tense industrial relations and by bringing back employment. And what of privatization? Ferguson, wisely, remains coy: ‘How far it succeeded in this continues to be debated.’

Yet Ferguson over-eggs his pudding. All progress of the past three decades is assigned to Thatcher: car ownership, holidays abroad, telephone communications, colour television, the growth of gyms and health culture. All of which completely ignores the vast advances made in technology and media communications in this period. Sorry, Mr Ferguson, but Thatcher is not responsible for digital media, for mobile phones, for the ability to travel to Spain on low-budget holidays. Unfortunately, Ferguson is so far up the anal cavity that he is unable to see or speak sense.

Describing himself unconvincingly as a ‘punk Tory’, the author states that Thatcherism was ‘so impressive’ due to its ‘aggressiveness’. Ferguson recounts parties of his youth and various debates, as if his undying support for Thatcher’s vision of Britain was something to be proud of.  He uses Thatcher’s “triumph” as a way to gain his own revenge against left-wing historians and other schools of historical thought. They, he argues, were wrong to attack her: ‘her legion of left-wing academic critics were just part of hat she attempted to save Britain from.’ It is as if tired of years of ridicule for support of the Tories, Ferguson has decided to hit back, using Thatcher’s death as a vehicle in which to trumpet his own conservative values.

Regrettably, Ferguson appears to have lost any sense of balance. All of which has the Worm rather worried: was balance and reliance of real evidence ever apparent in the earlier reads? Perhaps, the Worm has been taken in on a scam all along. Such is the disappointment in this slim volume that the Worm has come to the conclusion that his relationship with Mr Ferguson is at an end.

Buy it here