The Iron Lady: Michael White looks back at the life of Margaret Thatcher

The UK's first female prime minister changed the way Britons viewed politics and economics and the way Britain was viewed around the world

 

 Margaret Thatcher, who has died at the age of 87, was the first woman to rule rather than merely reign over the British state since Elizabeth I in 1603.

 

Though she lacked the great queen's personal popularity and defter political skills, Thatcher's sheer willpower and courage sustained her ascendancy over male rivals for a turbulent 11 and a half years. It was the longest premiership since 1812-27 and the most formidable since Churchill in his wartime prime.

More than the exercise of political power at a time when Britain's fortunes had reached a postwar low in the winter of industrial discontent of 1978-79, "Thatcherism" changed the way Britons viewed politics and economics, as well as the way the country was regarded around the world.

As a result, the "Iron Lady" was more admired abroad than at home, where even many of those who voted Conservative recoiled from her apparent lack of compassion for those whose lives and careers were disrupted by her policies.

Her frequent assertion that "there is no alternative" to the economic medicine she administered to a reluctant country is disputed to this day.

But Thatcher's outlook had been formed by her modest background, where families lived carefully and within their means, worked hard and did not resort to credit. Many voters could identify with it – and with her.

In contrast to the grandees who had long dominated the party, she, like Edward Heath before her and John Major later, was a child of the respectable working class, a grocer's daughter, born above the Grantham shop. Sheer hard work and the austere, high-minded influence of her father, councillor Alfred Roberts took her to Oxford, where she read chemistry and caught the eye of Tory talent spotters.

A parliamentary candidate in Kent at 23, she married Denis Thatcher, a party activist, rugby referee and divorced businessman of robust rightwing views. He funded his wife's switch to the law and smoothed her route to Westminster, as the MP for safe Finchley in 1959, by which time she was the mother of twins. Their intensely loyal marriage remained the sheet anchor of her hard-driven life until the death of Denis – by now a baronet – in 2003.

Far shrewder than his boozy Private Eye image suggested, he would wait up for his wife in the Downing Street flat, offering her late-night sympathy and a large Scotch as she kicked off her shoes and sounded off.

In her determination to reverse what she saw as the ruling liberal elite's fatalistic acceptance of "managed decline" in the home of modern liberty, Thatcher overthrew much of the Attlee government's welfare state – the NHS alone defeated her – and reversed widespread nationalisation, including local authority council housing stock, sold off in vast numbers. A new process, which became known as "privatisation", was copied around the world.

Under her loyal first chancellor, Geoffrey Howe, out too went interventionist Keynesian economic policies such as macroeconomic demand management, fixed exchange rates and high levels of personal taxation that included a notional 83% top rate inherited from Labour. It took until the late 1980s for Howe's successor, Nigel Lawson, to get that rate below 60%, to 40%. Meanwhile VAT, paid by all consumers, was almost doubled to 15%.

In place of the flagging social democratic settlement came a high-risk, deregulated market-orientated system in which the poverty gap widened rapidly and "loadsamoney" rewards at the top rocketed in ways frowned upon in Europe and Japan. With "big bang" deregulation of the City in 1986 paralleling developments in Ronald Reagan's United States, the path was open to the financial crisis that engulfed Anglo-Saxon capitalism in 2007.

In the process Thatcher also defeated a series of challenges by major trade unions, most conspicuously by militant miners. Their defeat in the 1984-85 strike reversed the NUM's victory that toppled the government of Ted Heath in which she had served from 1970-74. Union powers, including wildcat strikes and the closed shop, were sharply curtailed in ways Labour did not reverse after 1997. Most deep-mine pits in Britain closed.

Thatcher handed out similar medicine to Argentinian generals who took her ill-judged defence cuts of 1981-82 as their cue to seize the long-disputed Falkland Islands. Over a 10-week drama a 40,000-strong British task force sailed 8,000 miles into a South Atlantic winter and retook the islands after US-led diplomacy failed to find a compromise.

It was both reckless and brave, but it consolidated Thatcher's reputation as a politician who meant what she said: "You turn if you want to; the lady's not for turning." In reality she was often beset by doubts and hesitation, and until her final years in power more than capable of burying her prejudices in the face of hard facts on the ground.

As such, she faced down the IRA hunger strike at the Maze prison, which saw the deaths of Bobby Sands and nine other prisoners, yet remained prepared to be flexible when need arose.

The IRA's intermittent bombing campaign on mainland culminated in a time-fused bomb that detonated in the Grand hotel in Brighton at 2.45am during the Conservative conference in October 1984. It was meant to murder Thatcher – she survived because she was still working at the time – and killed four people, including one MP, Anthony Berry.

Thatcher carried on and delivered her conference speech the next day, largely unchanged. But the following year, she signed the Anglo-Irish agreement that allowed the Dublin government a role in steering the affairs of Northern Ireland, then in its second decade of low-intensity warfare.

Similar pragmatism was evident in her 1984 agreement with Beijing to return Hong Kong to China when Britain's 99-year lease expired in 1997, her signing of the federalising European Single Act (1986) despite her growing Euroscepticism and her willingness to promote the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev, the reforming general secretary of the Soviet Union after 1985.

He was a man she "could do business with", she told the world. Under the leadership of her friend Reagan, US president from 1981 to 1989, Washington followed her lead.

Both were convinced cold warriors, but sought to encourage Gorbachev's policy of perestroika – openness. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 – which led to the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the USSR itself – was claimed as a western triumph, but centrifugal forces were already hard at work inside the Soviet camp.

By the time the triple election winner was forced from office by her own party as over-mighty and out of touch in November 1990, her face and voice were known around the world. It was not what colleagues would have predicted when Harold Macmillan first appointed her junior pensions minister in 1961. It was notoriously a grind of a job, suitable for her workaholic talents, the whips doubtless thought.

But Thatcher was gradually developing more flair and more ideas of her own.

As education secretary, the only woman in Heath's cabinet, she cut school milk for 11-year-olds rather than the school budget and earned her first nickname, "Thatcher the milk snatcher".

She learned to accept the inevitability of unpopularity. More importantly, she saw Heath back away from what would later be seen as Thatcherite free market policies as unemployment passed 1 million. Subsidies, nationalisation – even Rolls-Royce in 1971 – and a reasoned approach to the unions did not work, she concluded.

Disillusioned she was, but she did not resign as she fell under the influence of philosophers such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, the economic high priest of monetarism, of tight monetary policy as the key to containing the growing scourge of inflation. But when Heath lost two general elections to Labour's Harold Wilson in 1974, and Thatcher's intellectual mentor, Sir Keith Joseph, proved too frail to run, she picked up the gauntlet.

In a campaign where expectations were brilliantly manipulated by Airey Neave, the ex-MI6 MP later to be murdered by Irish terrorists, she beat Heath and forced him out in February 1975. Male colleagues, led by Willie Whitelaw, had assumed she was their stalking horse. She beat them all.Equally significantly, she took advice on how best to neutralise her negative image with many voters. Out went the hats, down came her voice into something huskier.
Thatcher's sex appeal, rarely remarked upon, was tangible and became one of her weapons.
Over the next decade she slowly reshaped her cabinet and party to her own liking, promoting proteges, sacking or moving fainthearts and One Nation "wets" who questioned her divisive policies.

"Is he one of us?" became a stock Thatcher question, asked of impartial civil servants and even would-be bishops. Her critics retaliated in kind. In a rare discourtesy, her old university refused her an honorary degree.

Luck was a commodity Thatcher purported to despise. But she had her share, not least the priceless political asset – as predicted by Jim Callaghan, the man she drove from No 10 in 1979 – that whoever won that election would inherit the arrival onshore of North Sea oil.
The black gold proved a miracle that would ease Britain's notorious balance of payments problems and finance the huge cost of mass unemployment and economic restructuring caused by the collapse of old, inefficient industries. With the rise of Asia, all western states faced such problems.

Thatcher's critics protested that her aggressively monetarist policies damaged British manufacturing more than it need have done.

She was also lucky in her opponents. The miners' leader, Arthur Scargill, was a vain and often foolish strategist. So was General Leopoldo Galtieri, the Argentinian president who launched his Falklands invasion in the winter.

Jacques Delors, the small and fierce French socialist whom she came to see as embodying the ambitions of Brussels – "the Belgian empire" in Thatcher-speak – to destroy British sovereignty, was also a good whipping boy.

Most important was her good luck with events in domestic politics, whose unfolding dynamics helped Thatcher, deeply unpopular as recession and inflation worsened in 1981, survive early challenges. Michael Foot succeeded the wily Callaghan as Labour leader, triggering the breakaway from Labour of the "Gang of Four" who formed the SDP. Its leader, Roy Jenkins, won the Hillhead byelection promising to "break the mould'' of British politics just days before the Falklands crisis broke it in quite a different fashion.

Thatcher emerged from the recapture of Port Stanley and the 1983 election with a majority of 144, Labour almost beaten into third place in the popular vote, but well ahead of the SDP-Liberal alliance in seats. Neil Kinnock succeeded Foot and began the long modernisation that culminated in Tony Blair's three victories of 1997-2005.

But Kinnock was never comfortable dealing with an aggressive older woman and lacked both her experience and her command of detail. Thatcher held him at bay, crucially so when he failed to land the killer blow that might – just – have ended her premiership in the 1986 Commons debate over Westland.

That followed Michael Heseltine's resignation as defence secretary over the fate of a Yeovil-based helicopter company: should it be merged into Europe or US partnership? Thatcher was mixed up in leaks and skullduggery, but escaped, damaged but still in charge.
In the longer term, Westland did bring her down by making Heseltine an implacable foe, stalking her for the leadership he had long coveted. She won the 1987 election with a smaller 100-seat majority off the back of what proved to be Lawson's unsustainable boom. But tensions and internal contradictions were mounting.

Norman Tebbit, still suffering from the Brighton bomb wounds that crippled his wife, quit the cabinet. Nicholas Ridley, her ideological soulmate, was forced to resign for indiscreet remarks about German domination. Lawson sought to steady the pound by secretly making sterling shadow the German mark. He and Geoffrey Howe wanted a commitment in principle to take the pound into the embryonic single currency, known as the Exchange Rate Mechanism or ERM, something she resisted until a showdown at the European Madrid summit of June 1989.

In November that year, enraged by her reappointment of the economist Alan Walters to shadow him, Lawson walked out of the cabinet. John Major, fast emerging as the latest of her would-be successors and proteges, became chancellor. Howe, so long her loyal lieutenant – author of the 1981 budget that slashed spending in a recession – was sidelined and humiliated.

All the while Thatcher's nemesis was creeping up on her in the shape of the poll tax. The community charge represented her ambitious plan to replace the unpopular household rates with a headcount tax that even council tenants would pay: it would dampen their enthusiasm for services paid for by others, she reasoned.

Ideologues, by now firmly in the ascendant, encouraged her to pilot the scheme in Scotland, which had stubbornly resisted both her analysis and English nationalist tone, then to introduce it in one fell swoop south of the border.

More unpopular even than water privatisation, the poll tax prompted riots in Trafalgar Square. There had been riots before in Brixton and Liverpool, triggered by unemployment and deprivation in the early 80s, but the rioters now were expressing doubts shared by mainstream voters.

A further sign of Thatcher losing her grip came when, as a frequent defender of the apartheid regime in South Africa, she dismissed Nelson Mandela as a "terrorist'' not long before he emerged to become the hero of the peaceful transition to majority rule.
With Labour ahead in the polls for more than a year, Conservative MPs began to feel restless. In November 1989 an obscure backbencher called Anthony Meyer ran as a stalking horse against her, winning 33 votes and 27 abstentions.

Wounded, Thatcher fought on, ever more dramatic in her pronouncements – "We are a grandmother" – and even in her choice of evening dress.

The final trigger was not the poll tax, but Europe. Major persuaded her to join the ERM in return for an interest rate cut in October 1990. Days later she said "no, no, no" to the suggestion that she might eventually join a full single currency. The long-suffering Howe resigned and surprised everyone – including himself – with a devastating resignation speech.

Heseltine launched his long-awaited challenge. Thatcher beat it off, but not convincingly.
Faced with the prospect of serving Hezza, the cabinet told her to her face she should consider stepping down and backing someone who could beat him. She did – and backed Major over Douglas Hurd, her foreign secretary. When Major won and she left Downing Street, photographers captured a rare tear.

The moment was brief, and Major inevitably proved a disappointment to such a dominant predecessor, for whose self-certainty nostalgia grew among Tory activists. The treacherous manner of her overthrow rankled, fuelling a civil war within the party that raged intermittently for 15 years.

Thatcher, who had left office just as the first Gulf war of 1990-91 was brewing, could not bear to remain silent when her words – and two volumes of memoirs – still commanded such attention. She remained a political player, often a disruptive one, on the world and domestic stages for a decade until ill health forced her to retire to a quiet private life she had abandoned 50 years before.

 

Obama says fiscal cliff deal is 'within sight' as Congress continues to haggle

President says deal is close but House of Representatives to let midnight fiscal cliff deadline pass without a vote

Monday 31 December 2012 19.54 GMT

 President Barack Obama, surrounded by 'middle-class Americans', said it appears that an agreement to avoid the fiscal cliff is 'in sight'. Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/AP

The White House and Congress were close to reaching a deal Monday to resolve the fiscal cliff crisis that threatens the fragile US economic recovery.

With only hours left until a midnight deadline for automatic tax rises and spending cuts, Barack Obama said agreement was within sight but discussions were continuing.

If no deal was concluded, every taxpayer in America would be hit with steep rises from Tuesday. These would be accompanied by deep cuts in federal spending programmes, ranging from defence to welfare, in particular unemployment benefits.

Obama, who flew back from holiday in Hawaii to deal with the crisis, told a press conference at the White House: "Today it appears that an agreement to prevent this New Year's Eve hike is within sight, but it is not done. There are still issues left to resolve but we are hopeful that Congress can get it done. But it is not done."

It appeared that the midnight deadline would pass without a vote on any deal: a Republican leadership aide said the House of Representatives would not consider a bill until Tuesday. "We still don't have a bill from the Senate and we want members to read it before they vote on it," the aide told Reuters.

Earlier on Monday, surrounded by what the White House described as ordinary Americans, Obama said such people could not afford the tax rises – an average of about $2,000 for every US taxpayer – that would result if a deal was not reached. "The economy can't afford it," he added.

Obama said the framework of the deal was that tax would not go up for most Americans. Unemployment benefits, help with university tuition and tax credits for clean energy companies would all be protected.

Tax rises would be imposed only on those earning $450,000 a year or more. The Democrats had been pushing for $250,000 while the Republicans had wanted the limit set at those earning $1m or more.  

The Democrats appear to have secured protection for continued payments of unemployment benefits, which the Republicans had wanted cut. Democrats were pushing for the automatic cuts on spending across the board be postponed for at least a few months.

Obama said his preference would have been for a bigger deal, what he termed a "grand bargain" that would have dealt more broadly with America's economic problems, especially its huge deficit. But, showing his exasperation with Republicans who control the House, he said this was not possible with this Congress.

The Democratic leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, said negotiations were continuing to protect working-class families from tax increases. Addressing the Senate when it opened on Monday morning, he said: "There are a number of issues on which the two sides are still apart but negotiations  are continuing as I speak. We really are running out of time. Americans are still threatened with tax hike in just a few hours," Reid said.

It is the first time Congress has met on New Year's Eve since 1995 when Washington was confronted by another Democratic-Republican economic showdown.

Obama, in spite of having won a second term, desperately needs this victory over the Republicans to prevent that second term being destroyed by repeated stand-offs with Republicans in Congress.

The danger for the Obama administration in the present showdown is that a combination of sudden tax rises and government spending cuts would have a negative impact on the country's sluggish rise out of recession. Countries that rely on trade with America could also potentially suffer.

If a deal is reached, there will be a push to have legislation rushed through the House and the Senate before Wall Street reopens on Wednesday.

The Democrats should have little problem getting a bill through the Senate where they have a majority but the House is much more difficult, given the size of the Republican majority. The Obama administration hopes that a combination of Democrats and moderate Republicans will see it pass.

The Republicans and Democrats have been struggling since Obama's re-election in early November to find a compromise. The Democrats want to see tax rises only for the wealthiest, which the Republicans have resisted. The Democrats want to see the Defense Department take the brunt of the spending cuts while the Republicans have pressed for the onus to be shifted to welfare spending.

Obama and the Republican leader in the House, John Boehner, came close to reaching a "grand bargain" in the run-up to Christmas but the talks collapsed. The Democrats blamed Boehner for being unable to secure the support of Tea Party-backed Republicans in the House, while Boehner blamed Obama for failing to give him enough concessions on tax and spending.

The baton after Christmas was passed to Reid in the Senate, and his Republican counterpart Mitch McConnell. But talks between them broke down over the weekend.
Next up were talks between McConnell and vice-president Joe Biden who negotiated throughout Sunday and into the early hours of Monday morning, resuming again at dawn.
Reid, speaking in the Senate, said: "Whether or not we reach an agreement in the short time we have left will need co-operation on both sides to protect taxes going up tomorrow for every family in America. I repeat there are still some issues that  need to be resolve before we can bring legislation to the floor."

If no deal is in place on January 1, a single person earning $100,000 a year will face a $5,314 rise in taxes, and draconian spending cuts will be imposed across the board, in particular military spending and welfare benefits.

With the war in Iraq over and US combat involvement in Afghanistan winding down, the Pentagon is vulnerable to spending cuts, in particular expensive equipment programmes.  If no deal is in place on January 1, the Pentagon, as a first step, will have to inform its 800,000 civilian employees to prepare to take mandatory leave to save money.

UN general assembly makes resounding vote in favour of Palestinian statehood

Overwhelming majority votes to recognise Palestine as non-member state as US and Israel are left to condemn decision

Palestinians celebrate in Ramallah after the general assembly voted to recognise Palestine as a non-member state. Photograph: Ahmad Gharabli/AFP/Getty Images

The United Nations general assembly voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to recognise Palestine as a state, in the face of opposition from Israel and the US.

The 193-member assembly voted 138 in favour of the plan, with only nine against and 41 abstentions. The scale of the defeat represented a strong and public repudiation for Israel and the US, who find themselves out of step with the rest of the world.

Thursday's vote marked a diplomatic breakthrough for Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and could help his standing after weeks in which he has been sidelined by Palestinian rivals Hamas in the Gaza conflict.

Abbas, who flew from Ramallah, on the West Bank, to New York to address the general assembly, said: "The moment has arrived for the world to say clearly: enough of aggression, settlements and occupation."

A Palestinian flag was unfurled on the floor of the general assembly after the vote.
Several hundred people turned out in Yasser Arafat square in Ramallah on the West Bank, waving flags and singing along to nationalist music to mark the occasion.

In his address, Abbas noted the symbolism of the date, the 65th anniversary of the UN partitioning what had been British-ruled Palestine into Jewish and Arab countries. In the decades that followed, the idea of an independent Palestine had often been in danger of disappearing but had been "miraculously" kept alive, he said.

The general assembly resolution had finally given legitimacy to Palestine, he said. "The general assembly is called upon today to issue a birth certificate of the reality of the state of Palestine."

Israel and the US immediately condemned the resolution. The office of the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, described Abbas's speech as incitement and full of lies about Israel.
Ron Prosor, Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, said: "Because this resolution is so one-sided, it doesn't advance peace, it pushes it backwards."

The only way to a Palestinian state was through direct negotiations, he said.

Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, described the vote as "unfortunate and counterproductive". She said: "Only through direct negotiations between the parties can the Palestinians and Israelis achieve the peace that both deserve: two states for two people, with a sovereign, viable and independent Palestine living side-by-side in peace and security with a Jewish and democratic Israel."

Thursday's resolution raises Palestine from being a "non-member observer entity" to a "non-member observer state". The key is the final word, which confers UN legitimacy on Palestinian statehood and, while it cannot vote at the general assembly, it will enjoy other benefits, such as the chance to join international bodies such as the International Criminal Court (ICC).

While important, the resolution is limited, elevating Palestine only to the status of the Vatican, which until Thursday had been the only other non-member observer state. For Palestinians, the idea of an independent state bears little reality on the ground, given the degree of Israeli involvement in the West Bank and Gaza.

The US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, speaking after the vote, disputed that the resolution conferred statehood on Palestine. "Today's grand announcements will soon fade and the Palestinians will wake up to realise that little in their lives has changed," Rice said. "This resolution does not establish Palestine as a state."

But the coalition against the vote was thin. Apart from Israel and the US, those voting against were Canada, the Czech Republic, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau and Panama.

European countries such as France, Italy, Spain, Norway, Denmark and Switzerland all voted yes. Britain and Germany both abstained, with Britain saying Abbas had failed to promise he would resume peace negotiations with Israel.

Some countries, especially in Europe, switched from abstention to support out of a feeling that Abbas needed to be bolstered after eight days of conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians earlier this month. An estimated 158 Palestinians died in Gaza, and six Israelis were killed.

The Israeli and US governments had put pressure on the Palestinians not to press the issue to a vote and threatened significant retaliation –  mainly in the form of punitive financial measures. They have since largely backtracked over the threats, concerned that withdrawal of major funding might undermine Abbas at a time when he is particularly vulnerable.

The prospect of the Palestinians applying to bodies such as the ICC is one of the main reasons for Israeli opposition, fearful that the Palestinians might try to launch a case over Jewish settlements on the West Bank or over military attacks on the West Bank and Gaza.
Palestinian officials say they have no immediate plans to do so but it remains a new and useful lever for the future.

The Obama administration, in an effort to try to persuade the Palestinians to drop the vote, sent deputy secretary of state Bill Burns to see Abbas on Wednesday. But Abbas turned down his pleas.

The US, Israel and Britain wanted the Palestinians to give explicit pledges they would not seek to join the ICC any time soon and also to resume peace negotiations with the Israelis that were abandoned in 2010 over a settlement expansion.

In Ramallah, hundreds watching on a television in the square cheered enthusiastically for Abbas as he denounced Israel's most recent assault on Gaza.

When the Israeli ambassador began addressing the UN, the crowd in the square watching on a giant television screen began booing. Prosor's speech was suddenly cut, and nationalist music fired up.

But the mood of the crowd did not appear to be that of people who thought they were marking a great national moment, or who had hope that the general assembly's recognition of Palestinian statehood amounted to anything like the birth of a real country.

Full text of Mahmoud Abbas’s speech to the UN General Assembly, November 29, 2012

The Guardian: US elections: a victory for Barack Obama and good judgment

His victory wasn't big. It wasn't pretty. It certainly wasn't inspirational in the way that his win in 2008 was. But it was a win all the same
 

Getting re-elected after a grittily difficult four years was always going to be much harder than getting elected after the economic and military incompetence of the George Bush era. But that is what Barack Obama achieved after a hard pounding campaign and a nail biting contest. His victory wasn't big. It wasn't pretty. It didn't break the mould. It certainly wasn't inspirational in the way that his win in 2008 was. In places it was wafer-thin. But it was a US presidential win all the same. And the win in 2012 matters just as much as the earlier win did in 2008. In difficult times, it is even, arguably, a greater political achievement. Mr Obama's win is good for Americans, good for America, and good for the world.

Sometimes in politics, getting re-elected is a much tougher assignment than winning first time round. That is especially true in grim economic times and where early promise has been followed by disappointments, as happened with Mr Obama. Across the world, incumbency has been a lightning conductor rather than a magic wand for a whole generation of politicians who tried to get re-elected when the music of global prosperity stopped. When the downturn happened on their watch – whether they were leaders of the left like Gordon Brown or José Luis Zapatero, or of the right like Nicolas Sarkozy or Silvio Berlusconi – they all paid the price. Times have been just as hard on Mr Obama's watch. But a combination of fear of Mitt Romney's alternative and the disciplined resilience of most of the Democratic vote has enabled him to buck the trend, even though he gave a lacklustre performance at times.

Mr Romney came very close to making Mr Obama a one-term president. He did this by performing well in the first televised debate but, more significantly, by shamelessly shifting to the centreground after allowing his earlier campaign to be dominated by the conservative Tea Party agenda. For Republicans, the lesson of Mr Romney's campaign ought to be that they will only be nationally competitive if they speak for the squeezed middle. When Mr Romney did that he prospered. When he concentrated on the conservative anti-government agenda his vote withered. Tragically for the Republicans – but encouragingly for the Democrats – the party seems almost certain to conclude that the problem in this election was that Mr Romney wasn't conservative enough. Republicans will be boosted in that error by their successes in the rest of this week's elections.

Many will look at the narrowness of the 2012 result and conclude that the tribal divide is as strong as ever in American politics. Wednesday's outcome, after all, had many echoes of the divisively partisan 2000 result. This conclusion may be too pessimistic. The demographics of US politics are moving in the Democrats' direction if they are smart enough to profit from them. The closeness of this year's result may in fact reflect the difficult times in which Mr Obama has sought re-election, and a disappointment with his own limitations, not a renewed appetite for governmental gridlock.

In the end Mr Obama owes his second term more to his vast campaign war chest and the ruthless professionalism of his get-out-the-vote machine than he did first time around, when hope and idealism did more to carry him to the White House. It is clear that the ground campaign at local level must have made the difference in the key contests yesterday.

The opinion polls, which have had a good election, picked that up. How much scope Mr Obama now has to pursue a progressive second-term agenda – especially in the face of an undaunted Republican Congress – will remain to be seen. It seems unlikely that Republicans will have learned enough uncomfortable lessons for much to change on Capitol Hill.

Nevertheless, if Mr Obama's first presidential election victory was a triumph of the audacity of hope, his second is a triumph for the audacity of good electoral judgment in difficult times. The rest of the world will celebrate that. We join Americans today in wishing Mr Obama every success the second time around.

 

Gary Younge: Obama fires and Romney falters but third debate fails to find a flourish

The president did better than an unconvincing Romney – but it's difficult to imagine this debate changed minds or won hearts

Obama and Romney: both men tried to steer the debate back to the economy.

 

If the world could vote on 6 November, Barack Obama would win by a landslide. A global poll for the BBC World Service revealed that 20 out of 21 countries preferred the president to his challenger. But when you watched the presidential debate on foreign policy on Monday night you had to wonder why. Not because Mitt Romney was better, but because on matters of policy, Obama was almost as bad. It takes a friend to reveal the harsh truth to the global community, so here it is: "Obama's just not that into you."

No one could love Israel more, care less about the Palestinians, put more pressure on Iran or be a greater fan of drone attacks or invading Libya. Both candidates agreed that America's task was to spread freedom around the world: nobody mentioned Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib or rendition. "Governor, you're saying the same things as us, but you'd say them louder," said Obama. It was a good line. The trouble was it condemned them both.
It was one of many lines Obama delivered that sought not just to correct Romney but belittle him. "When it comes to our foreign policy, you seem to want to import the foreign policies of the 1980s, just like the social policies of the 1950s and the economic policies of the 1920s."
When Romney complained that America had fewer ships in the US navy than in 1916, Obama answered: "We also have fewer horses and bayonets."

Obama's task was to cast his opponent as an opportunist out of his depth, not waving at the electorate but drowning before them. Promising to be "strong and steady not wrong and reckless," he painted Romney at every opportunity as a flip-flopper.

Romney had a tougher task. With the race tightening and just two weeks to go until polling day, he had to focus the national imagination on the prospect of a President Romney. His problem was that Obama had left no room to the right on foreign policy that would not have left Romney sounding like Herman Cain (who would probably bomb Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan if only he had known where it was).

So after a month of shape-shifting, fact-mangling and question-dodging Romney finally morphed into a peacenik. "But we can't kill our way out of this mess," he said, with a plausibility that would have had him booed off stage in a Republican primary.

He spoke of promoting peace and democracy as though that had been the idea all along, and America's benevolent instincts had been blown off course by some freak wind. He parried Obama's slights as though they were beneath him. "Attacking me is not an agenda," was one retort. "I've got a policy for the future," was another.

But there are only so many times you can shake an Etch A Sketch before its capacity to form an image starts to falter. Romney was less than convincing. And while Obama's put-downs were well-rehearsed, they also worked. He came out on top although it's difficult to imagine he changed any minds or converted any waverers.

Both men, when given half a chance, tried to steer the debate back to the central issue in the election – the economy. Viewers could be forgiven for thinking the answers to issues relating to Iran, Afghanistan, the Middle East, Iraq or China were Obamacare, educational reform, tax rates and loopholes.

This was the last set-piece of the campaign. After the primaries, conventions and two previous debates, all that's left now are doors to knock, phones to ring and rallies to attend. On the ground and in the heartland there is still everything to play for. But from the podiums and the spin rooms the campaign has played itself out.

 

 

The Telegraph: Norodom Sihanouk

Norodom Sihanouk, the former King of Cambodia, who has died aged 89, was only intermittently a monarch; for more than half a century, though, he played a leading part in the tragic post-war history of his country.

Sihanouk with French generals in Paris in 1946

As king from 1941 to 1955 he outwitted the French government to win independence for Cambodia, before abdicating to gain political power. As ruler between 1955 and 1970 he strove to make Cambodia “a haven of peace” amid the fury of the Vietnam War.
Subsequently, as an exile, he conspired with Chinese communists to liberate Cambodia from “the imperialist clique” which had replaced him. He must therefore bear some responsibility for the murderous domination of the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1978.

Even so, during the 1980s, when a Vietnamese government ruled Cambodia, Sihanouk remained the sole figure capable of uniting the opposition. In 1991 he finally returned to Phnom Penh as chairman of the Supreme National Council. Two years later, after an election under United Nations auspices, the National Assembly restored him as monarch, albeit one who would “reign not rule”.

Sihanouk’s character was as unpredictable as his fortunes, for he combined the characteristics of an educated Frenchman and an Oriental despot. His generosity and good humour were genuine, and enabled him to pose with some conviction as the father of his people. On the other hand he was capable of ruthlessness and a disregard for the processes of law, as in the execution of political opponents.

In his palmy days Sihanouk edited magazines, directed films, conducted jazz bands, and crooned songs of his own composing. Yet he was shrewd enough to remember, even in the wake of his metropolitan indulgences, that the source of his power lay in the loyalty of the Cambodian peasantry.

If his evenings were dedicated to hedonism, the next morning would find him listening patiently to the complaints of villagers, for whom he represented the quasi-religious authority of his ancestors, the “god-kings” of Angkor.

Samdech Preah Norodom Sihanouk was born in Phnom Penh on October 31 1922, the scion of two much-intermarried royal families, the Norodoms and the Sisowaths, who had ruled Cambodia for several hundred years. His father, Prince Suramarit, was the grandson of King Norodom, ruler of the turbulent vestigial kingdom when the French first imposed their protectorate in 1863.

The boy’s mother called him “Thoul”, or “Tubby”. All his life he would be obliged to alternate his gourmet indulgences with slimming sessions in French health clinics.

Sihanouk was educated in Saigon, Vietnam and Paris. In 1941, when he was chosen to succeed his grandfather, King Monivong, he was still at the Lycée Chasseloup Laubat in Saigon; his fellow pupils remembered him as friendly and timid, and far from enthusiastic at the prospect of becoming king.

French Indo-China was then under Japanese hegemony, though the influence of Tokyo was kept precariously at arm’s length by the pro-Axis policy of Vichy. Sihanouk had been trained by his advisers to support Marshal Pétain, but after the end of the Second World War, as Indo-Chinese independence became imminent under the auspices of the Viet Minh communists, he skilfully disentangled himself from the French.

The Cambodians, regarded by the French as too backward and incompetent to conduct their own affairs, were agitating for freedom. But the main group making this demand, the Democratic Party, combined its anti-French stance with hostility to the monarchy, which it regarded as a tool of Paris.

Sihanouk exchanged the easy, futile life of puppet king for the risky role of national leader. Aware that the national assembly, in which the Democratic Party held a massive majority, was effectively powerless, he highhandedly dismissed them.

But though he did not hesitate to use French help in the form of Senegalese troops brought from Saigon, he promptly embarked on his own “Crusade for National Independence”.
At first the French refused to give Cambodia the full independence which Sihanouk was demanding. But in February 1953, after they had tried to fob him off with a lunch at the Elysée with President Auriol, he flew to Canada, the United States and Japan to ventilate his grievances, notably in a flamboyant interview with The New York Times.

Back in Cambodia, Sihanouk stayed out of French control and moved to his villa at Siem Rep, close to Angkor, the capital of his ancient Khmer ancestors. There, in a daring bluff, he stirred up the population in his support.

His threat sufficed to persuade the French to give in, and to grant Cambodia full independence on November 9 1953. They had been vanquished by the theatrical antics of a king whom they had believed to be their own creature. And by 1955, when Cambodia became financially viable in its own right, Sihanouk’s reputation had been further enhanced.

Sihanouk, though, proceeded to abdicate his throne in favour of his father, Prince Norodom Suramarit. His aim, to give himself a more solid political base, abundantly succeeded, for the Sangkum Reastr Niyum, or Popular Socialist Community, which he set up, won 83 per cent of the vote in the election of 1955.

From then until 1970 Sihanouk ruled supreme. When his father died in 1961, he assumed the office of Head of State, but retained only the title of Samdech Upayuvareach, “His Royal Highness the former King”, styled as Monseigneur. His mother became the ceremonial representative of the ancient monarchy.

Sihanouk strove to solve Cambodia’s economic and social problems through the idiosyncratic ideology of “Royal Buddhist socialism”. His aim was “a democracy comprehensible to the people”, in which the untutored masses would exercise “a real, direct and continuous control of institutions”.

At the biennial national congresses of Sangkum Reastr, citizens were encouraged to pillory officials and ministers with their grievances. The proceedings were dominated by the ebullient Prince, whose high-pitched voice could be heard through loudspeakers (and on the national radio system), goading officials and sharing jokes with his rustic audience.
Throughout the late 1950s and the 1960s Sihanouk’s most serious concern was to keep Cambodia out of the escalating war in Vietnam. This aim involved a hardening of the anti-American prejudice he had inherited from the French — even if he continued to accept American aid, and to proclaim himself “friend to all, ally of none”.

Jealous of Cambodia’s neutrality, Sihanouk refused to place the country under the protection of SEATO. Instead, he tightened relations with Prime Minister Nehru of India, President Sukarno of Indonesia and President Tito of Yugoslavia. Zhou Enlai, the Chinese Communist leader, became a close friend.

In November 1963 Sihanouk, convinced that the South Vietnamese and the Thais were preparing, with American approval, to invade Cambodia, ordered an end to the US military aid programme, so cutting off 15 per cent of the national budget. In March 1964 he organised a “spontaneous” demonstration of anger against the British and American embassies. The British chancery building and the premises of the British Council were sacked by mobs carrying cane-knives.

Trade was nationalised; private banks were closed. As a result the business community traded clandestinely, and a large part of Cambodia’s rice crop was smuggled out and sold at inflated prices to the communist insurgents in Vietnam.

To prevent this, the army was ordered in 1967 to collect much of the rice harvest at an official price, and to store it in government warehouses. At Samlaut, near Battambang, peasant resentment turned into armed revolt during which some 10,000 fleeing farmers were killed.

Sihanouk was convinced that the Vietnamese communists and Cambodian leftists were behind these troubles. He tried in vain to renew relations with Washington and to obtain the restoration of economic and military aid to a country now sinking into an economic morass.
As the situation deteriorated, Sihanouk seemed to lose his political instinct. He cancelled valuable West German aid when Bonn criticised his recognition of East Germany. He allowed Chinese from Macau to open a casino in Phnom Penh which became a ruinous temptation to its citizens.

He also devoted much time to making sentimental feature films, of which he was author, producer, director and principal actor, and awarded himself an Oscar for his film Twilight.
In March 1970, during Sihanouk’s absence in Europe, the National Assembly in Phnom Penh withdrew its support, and he was removed from office by a coup d’état planned by his pro-Western cousin Prince Sisowath Sirik Matak and executed by the previously loyal General Lon Nol, the Prime Minister and Minister of Defence. The monarchy was abolished and Cambodia declared a republic. Sihanouk fled to Beijing , and Sihanouk proceeded to denounce “the tools of American imperialism” and to ally himself with the extreme pro-Chinese communist group of Cambodian revolutionaries, the Khmer Rouge, whom he himself had driven into exile. His “Royal Government of National Unity” (known as GRUNK), based in Beijing, was dedicated to the defeat of Lon Nol.

Sihanouk’s Khmer Rouge minder was Ieng Sary, later one of the most feared men in Cambodia. In Beijing, Sihanouk amused himself by embarrassing the puritanical communist with pornographic films, borrowed from the French embassy. “Ieng Sary will have to go through terrible self-criticism tomorrow”, he would say.

In 1975 the Khmer Rouge, with North Vietnamese military assistance, captured Phnom Penh and instituted their genocidal regime. The city population was forced out into the countryside — “the Killing Fields” — where perhaps more than a million Cambodians died in massacres ordered by the Khmer Rouge President Khieu Samphan and his Prime Minister Pol Pot.

Sihanouk, though nominally head of state, had become a catspaw in their hands. He was allowed to return to Phnom Penh, but confined with his wife Monique to a modest villa in the Royal Palace compound, where he was required to do his own cooking. Six of his children, as well as other members of the royal family, were either killed or died from maltreatment.

In 1978 Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia, in a war provoked by Pol Pot. Only hours before the Vietnamese occupation of Phnom Penh, Sihanouk was freed, probably at Chinese instigation, and flown to Beijing, where he gave a six-hour press conference in which he denounced both the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnam invasion.

His attitude to the ousted Khmer Rouge was unpredictable: one day he promised to serve them; soon afterwards he would attack Pol Pot as a murderer. In truth, he had no illusions about the Khmer Rouge — “I don’t believe you can turn a tiger into a cat,” he remarked when the Chinese urged that they might behave more gently in future.

Nevertheless, he believed that co-operation with the Khmer Rouge was necessary if the People’s Republic of Kampuchea, the puppet regime which Cambodia’s traditional enemy Vietnam had established in Phnom Penh, was to be removed.

Sihanouk retreated to a palace provided by the North Korean government in Pyongyang — he even succeeded in making friends with President Kim Il Sung — but remained the focus of Cambodian national resistance to the Phnom Penh regime.

Under pressure from Beijing, he agreed in 1982 to a political marriage of convenience with Khieu Samphan, chief of the Khmer Rouge, whom he had condemned to death in the 1960s, and Son Sann, a Right-wing Buddhist who expressed a profound contempt for his former king.

Their squabbles continued through a series of abortive international negotiations until, in June 1991, at the Thai seaside resort of Pattaya, Sihanouk finally persuaded the various Cambodian factions — including the Vietnamese puppet government, the People’s Republic of Kampuchea — to declare a ceasefire.

It was a considerable achievement, which Sihanouk celebrated by treating the delegates to showings of two of his old films. That October the accord was ratified at a Paris conference, which restored Sihanouk as head of state.

It was also agreed that, while elections were being organised, the UN should take over the functions of government, and that Cambodian refugees should be repatriated. Soon afterwards Sihanouk returned in triumph to Phnom Penh.

His attitude to the Khmer Rouge remained equivocal. One Monday he advocated trying their leaders for genocide; on Wednesday he called them “monsters... but intelligent”; on Thursday he called for an exhibition of their atrocities to be dismantled; and on Saturday (after they had recognised him as head of state) he pronounced himself “touched and moved” by their loyalty.

As the violence continued throughout 1992, Sihanouk protested against the terrorist tactics of his opponents; nevertheless, in the election of May 1993 Funcinpec, the royalist party led by his son Ranariddh, won 45 per cent of the vote, although the Cambodian People’s Party gained almost as many seats.

There was a fortnight of political chaos, which Sihanouk resolved by declaring himself head of state, Prime Minister and chief of the armed forces. By early July he had succeeded in establishing an interim government, with Ranariddh and Hun Sen, leader of the Cambodian People’s Party, as joint Prime Ministers.

Sihanouk modestly pledged that he would resist the popular clamour (led by his son Ranariddh) to return to the throne, but in September, when the National Assembly restored the monarchy, he found himself compelled to accept their decision.

Already suffering from cancer, he still spoke optimistically of a liberal democracy in which human rights would be respected — but in the West his North Korean bodyguards and his continued flirtation with the Khmer Rouge did not inspire confidence. In 1997 Hun Sen led a successful coup, and remains in power to this day. Sihanouk’s influence diminished, and he abdicated in 2004, citing ill health.

Sihanouk had two official wives, Princess Thavet Norleak (his first cousin) and Princess Monique. He and Norleak separated in 1968, and they had no surviving children . Monique, née Izzi, daughter of a French entrepreneur of Italian origin and a Phnom Penh divorcee, became Sihanouk’s closest companion.

The elder of her two sons, Sihamoni (born in 1953) became a ballet coach at the Paris Opera, and succeeded his father as king in 2004. The second is Narindrapong (born in 1954) .

The young king also fathered several children out of wedlock, including two by a dancer in the royal ballet. These were Princess Bopha Devi (born 1943), who herself became the star dancer in the ballet, and Prince Ranariddh, who studied law in France.
Princess Monikessan, Sihanouk’s young aunt, bore him a son, Naradipo (born 1946) , who died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge.

Another aunt, Princess Pongsamoni, bore him four sons: Yuvanath (born 1943); Ravivong (born 1944) who died during the Khmer Rouge period; Chakrapong (born 1945); and Khemanurakh (born 1949), who was also a Khmer Rouge victim. Princess Pongsamoni had three daughters: Soriyaraingsey (born 1947) and Botumbopha (born 1951), both of whom were killed by the Khmer Rouge; and Kantha Bopha, who died in infancy — the inconsolable Sihanouk carried her ashes with him on all his travels.

Mam Manivann, a Laotian, bore him two daughters, Sucheatvateya (born in 1953), killed by the Khmer Rouge, and Arunrasmey (born in 1955).


Norodom Sihanouk, former King of Cambodia, born October 31 1922, died October 15 2012

Hong Kong ferry collision - in pictures

Rescue crews search for passengers in waters near Yung Shue Wan on Lamma Island

A survivor is carried by rescuers and taken to shore

Rescuers check inspect a half submerged boat

Passengers are taken to hospital

Fireworks explode over Victoria harbour. The boat, which was carrying more than 120 people, was en route to watch a national day fireworks display when it collided with a passenger ferry and sank off Hong Kong

Two survivors, accompanied by rescuers, are taken to hospital

A young survivor is carried by a rescuer

Rescuers approach a half-submerged boat after it collided

The Sea Smooth ferry with its bow badly damaged sits docked at the Lamma Island pier after a collision with the Lamma IV boat in Hong Kong waters

The bow of the Lamma IV boat is partially submerged during rescue operations the morning after it collided with a Hong Kong ferry, killing 36 people.

A woman in Hong Kong, whose mother was killed in the ferry collision, leaves a public mortuary with relatives of other victims

A half-submerged boat is lifted by cranes near Lamma Island

Eric Hobsbawm obituary - Historian in the Marxist tradition with a global reach

Eric Hobsbawm became Britain's most respected historian. Photograph: Karen Robinson

If Eric Hobsbawm had died 25 years ago, the obituaries would have described him as Britain's most distinguished Marxist historian and would have left it more or less there. Yet by the time of his death at the age of 95, Hobsbawm had a achieved a unique position in the country's intellectual life. In his later years Hobsbawm became arguably Britain's most respected historian of any kind, recognised if not endorsed on the right as well as the left, and one of a tiny handful of historians of any era to enjoy genuine national and world renown.

Unlike some others, Hobsbawm achieved this wider recognition without in any major way revolting against either Marxism or Marx. In his 94th year he published How to Change the World, a vigorous defence of Marx's continuing relevance in the aftermath of the banking collapse of 2008-10. What is more, he achieved his culminating reputation at a time when the socialist ideas and projects that animated so much of his writing for well over half a century were in historic disarray, and worse – as he himself was always unflinchingly aware.
In a profession notorious for microscopic preoccupations, few historians have ever commanded such a wide field in such detail or with such authority. To the last, Hobsbawm considered himself to be essentially a 19th-century historian, but his sense of that and other centuries was both unprecedentedly broad and unusually cosmopolitan.

The sheer scope of his interest in the past, and his exceptional command of what he knew, continued to humble those who talked to him and those who read him, most of all in the four-volume Age of... series in which he distilled the history of the capitalist world from 1789 to 1991. "Hobsbawm's capacity to store and retrieve detail has now reached a scale normally approached only by large archives with big staffs," wrote Neal Ascherson. Both in his knowledge of historic detail and in his extraordinary powers of synthesis, so well displayed in that four-volume project, he was unrivalled.

Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria, a good place for a historian of empire , in 1917, a good year for a communist. He was second-generation British, the grandson of a Polish Jew and cabinet-maker who came to London in the 1870s. Eight children, who included Leopold, Eric's father, were born in England and all took British citizenship at birth (Hobsbawm's Uncle Harry in due course became the first Labour mayor of Paddington).

But Eric was British of no ordinary background. Another uncle, Sidney, went to Egypt before the first world war and found a job there in a shipping office for Leopold. There, in 1914, Leopold Hobsbawm met Nelly Gruen, a young Viennese from a middle-class family who had been given a trip to Egypt as a prize for completing her school studies. The two got engaged, but war broke out and they were separated. The couple eventually married in Switzerland in 1916, returning to Egypt for the birth of Eric, their first child, in June 1917.
"Every historian has his or her lifetime, a private perch from which to survey the world," he said in his 1993 Creighton lecture, one of several occasions in his later years when he attempted to relate his own lifetime to his own writing. "My own perch is constructed, among other materials, of a childhood in the Vienna of the 1920s, the years of Hitler's rise in Berlin, which determined my politics and my interest in history, and the England, and especially the Cambridge of the 1930s, which confirmed both."

In 1919, the young family returned to settle in Vienna, where Eric went to elementary school, a period he later recalled in a 1995 television documentary which featured pictures of a recognisably skinny young Viennese Hobsbawm in shorts and knee socks. Politics made their impact around this time. Eric's first political memory was in Vienna in 1927, when workers burned down the Palace of Justice. The first political conversation that he could recall took place in an Alpine sanatorium in these years, too. Two motherly Jewish women were discussing Leon Trotsky. "Say what you like," said one to the other, "but he's a Jewish boy called Bronstein."

In 1929, his father died suddenly of a heart attack. Two years later his mother died of TB. Eric was 14, and his Uncle Sidney took charge once more, taking Eric and his sister Nancy to live in Berlin. As a teenager in Weimar Republic Berlin, Hobsbawm inescapably became politicised. He read Marx for the first time, and became a communist.

Hobsbawm could always remember the winter's day in January 1933 when, emerging from the Halensee S-Bahn station on his way home from his school, the celebrated Prinz Heinrich Gymnasium, he saw a newspaper headline announcing Hitler's election as chancellor. Around this time he joined the Socialist Schoolboys, which he described as "de facto part of the communist movement" and sold its publication, Schulkampf ("School Struggle"). He kept the organisation's duplicator under his bed and, if his later facility for writing was any guide, probably wrote most of the articles too. The family remained in Berlin until 1933, when Sidney Hobsbawm was posted by his employers to live in England.

The gangly teenage boy who settled with his sister in Edgware in 1934 described himself later as "completely continental and German speaking". School, though, was "not a problem" because the English education system was "way behind" the German. A cousin in Balham introduced him to jazz for the first time – the "unanswerable sound", he called it. The moment of conversion, he wrote some 60 years later, was when he first heard the Duke Ellington band "at its most imperial". Never satisfied to be anything less than the master of anything that absorbed him, Hobsbawm spent a period in the 1950s as jazz critic of the New Statesman, and published a Penguin Special, The Jazz Scene, on the subject in 1959 under the pen-name Francis Newton (many years later it was reissued with Hobsbawm identified as the author).

Learning to speak English properly for the first time, Eric became a pupil at Marylebone grammar school and in 1936 he won a scholarship to King's College, Cambridge, where at one point he had rooms on a staircase on which his only two neighbours were AE Housman and Ludwig Wittgenstein. It was at this time that a saying became common among his Cambridge communist friends: "Is there anything that Hobsbawm doesn't know?" He became a member of the legendary Cambridge Apostles. "All of us thought that the crisis of the 1930s was the final crisis of capitalism," he wrote 40 years later. But, he added, "It was not."
When war broke out, Hobsbawm volunteered, as many communists did, for intelligence work. But his politics, which were never a secret, led to rejection. Instead he became an improbable sapper in 560 Field Company, which he later described as "a very working-class unit trying to build some patently inadequate defences against invasion on the coasts of East Anglia". This, too, was a formative experience for the often aloof young intellectual prodigy. "There was something sublime about them and about Britain at that time" he wrote. "That wartime experience converted me to the British working class. They were not very clever, except for the Scots and Welsh, but they were very, very good people".

Hobsbawm married his first wife, Muriel Seaman, in 1943. After the war, returning to Cambridge, Hobsbawm made another choice, abandoning a planned doctorate on north African agrarian reform in favour of research on the Fabians. It was a move which opened the door to both a lifetime of study of the 19th century and an equally long-lasting preoccupation with the problems of the left. In 1947, he got his first tenured job, as a history lecturer at Birkbeck College, London, where he was to remain for much of his teaching life.
With the onset of the cold war, a very British academic McCarthyism meant that the Cambridge lectureship which Hobsbawm always coveted never materialised. He shuttled between Cambridge and London, one of the principal organisers and driving forces of the Communist Party Historians Group, a glittering radical academy which brought together some of the most prominent historians of the post-war era. Its members also included Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, AL Morton, EP Thompson, John Saville and, later, Raphael Samuel. Whatever else it achieved, the CP Historians Group, about which Hobsbawm wrote an authoritative essay in 1978, certainly provided a nucleus for many of his first steps as a major historical writer.

Hobsbawm's first book, an edited collection of documents from the Fabian era, Labour's Turning Point, published in 1948, belongs firmly to this CP-dominated era, as does his engagement in the once celebrated "standard of living" debate about the economic consequences of the early industrial revolution, in which he and RM Hartwell traded arguments in successive numbers of the Economic History Review. The foundation of the Past and Present journal – now the most lasting, if fully independent, legacy of the Historians Group – also belongs to this period.

Hobsbawm was never to leave the Communist party and always thought of himself as part of an international communist movement. For many, this remained the insuperable obstacle to an embrace of his writing. Yet he always remained very much a licensed free-thinker within the party's ranks. Over Hungary in 1956, an event which split the CP and drove many intellectuals out of the party, he was a voice of protest who nevertheless remained.
Yet, as with his contemporary, Christopher Hill, who left the CP at this time, the political trauma of 1956 and the start of a lastingly happy second marriage combined in some way to trigger a sustained and fruitful period of historical writing which was to establish fame and reputation. In 1959, he published his first major work, Primitive Rebels, a strikingly original account, particularly for those times, of southern European rural secret societies and millenarian cultures (he was still writing about the subject as recently as 2011). He returned to these themes again a decade later, in Captain Swing, a detailed study of rural protest in early 19th-century England co-authored with George Rude, and Bandits, a more wide-ranging attempt at synthesis. These works are reminders that Hobsbawm was both a bridge between European and British historiography and a forerunner of the notable rise of the study of social history in post-1968 Britain.

By this time, though, Hobsbawm had already published the first of the works on which both his popular and academic reputations still rest. A collection of some of his most important essays, Labouring Men, appeared in 1964 (a second collection, Worlds of Labour, was to follow 20 years later). But it was Industry and Empire (1968), a compelling summation of much of Hobsbawm's work on Britain and the industrial revolution, which achieved the highest esteem. For more than 30 years, it has rarely been out of print.

Even more influential in the long term was the "Age of" series, which he began with The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848, first published in 1962. This was followed in 1975 by The Age of Capital: 1848-1875 and in 1987 by The Age of Empire: 1875-1914. A fourth volume, The Age of Extremes: 1914-91, more quirky and speculative but in some respects the most remarkable and admirable of all, extended the sequence in 1994.

The four volumes embodied all of Hobsbawm's best qualities – the sweep combined with the telling anecdote and statistical grasp, the attention to the nuance and significance of events and words, and above all, perhaps, the unrivalled powers of synthesis (nowhere better displayed than in a classic summary of mid-19th century capitalism on the very first page of the second volume). The books were not conceived as a tetralogy, but as they appeared, they acquired individual and cumulative classic status. They were an example, Hobsbawm wrote, of "what the French call 'haute vulgarisation'" (he did not mean this self-deprecatingly), and they became, in the words of one reviewer, "part of the mental furniture of educated Englishmen".

Hobsbawm's first marriage had collapsed in 1951. During the 1950s, he had another relationship which resulted in the birth of his first son, Joss Benathan, but the boy's mother did not want to marry. In 1962, he married again, this time to Marlene Schwarz, of Austrian descent. They moved to Hampstead, and bought a small second home in Wales. They had two children, Andrew and Julia.

In the 1970s, Hobsbawm's widening fame as a historian was accompanied by a growing reputation as a writer about his own times. Though he had a historian's respect for the Communist party's centralist discipline, Hobsbawm's intellectual eminence gave him an independence which won the respect of communism's toughest critics, such as Isaiah Berlin. It also ensured him the considerable accolade that not one of Hobsbawm's books was ever published in the Soviet Union. Thus armed and protected, Hobsbawm ranged fearlessly across the condition of the left, mostly in the pages of the CP's monthly Marxism Today, the increasingly heterodox publication of which he became the house deity.

His conversations with the Italian communist – and now state president – Giorgio Napolitano date from these years, and were published as The Italian Road to Socialism. But his most influential political writings centred on his increasing certainty that the European labour movement had ceased to be capable of bearing the transformational role assigned to it by earlier Marxists. These uncompromisingly revisionist articles were collected under the general heading The Forward March of Labour Halted.

By 1983, when Neil Kinnock became the leader of the Labour party at the depth of its electoral fortunes, Hobsbawm's influence had begun to extend far beyond the CP and deep into Labour itself. Kinnock publicly acknowledged his debt to Hobsbawm and allowed himself to be interviewed by the man he described as as "my favourite Marxist". Though he strongly disapproved of much of what later took shape as "New Labour", which he saw, among other things, as historically cowardly, Hobsbawm was without question the single most influential intellectual forerunner of Labour's increasingly iconoclastic 1990s revisionism.

His status was underlined in 1998, when Tony Blair made him a Companion of Honour, a few months after Hobsbawm celebrated his 80th birthday. In its citation, Downing Street said Hobsbawm continued to publish works that "address problems in history and politics that have re-emerged to disturb the complacency of Europe".

In his later years, Hobsbawm enjoyed widespread reputation and respect. His 80th and 90th birthday celebrations were attended by a Who's Who of leftwing and liberal intellectual Britain. Throughout the late years, he continued to publish volumes of essays, including On History (1997) and Uncommon People (1998), works in which Dizzy Gillespie and Salvatore Giuliano sat naturally side by side in the index as testimony to the range of Hobsbawm's abiding curiosity. A highly successful autobiography, Interesting Times, followed in 2002, and Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism in 2007.

More famous in his extreme old age than probably at any other period of his life, he broadcast regularly, lectured widely and was a regular performer at the Hay literary festival, of which he became president at the age of 93, following the death of Lord Bingham of Cornhill. A fall in late 2010 severely reduced his mobility, but his intellect and his willpower remained unvanquished, as did his social and cultural life, thanks to Marlene's efforts, love – and cooking.

That his writings continued to command such audiences at a time when his politics were in some ways so eclipsed was the kind of disjunction which exasperated rightwingers, but it was a paradox on which the subtle judgment of this least complacent of intellects feasted. In his later years, he liked to quote EM Forster that he was "always standing at a slight angle to the universe". Whether the remark says more about Hobsbawm or about the universe was something that he enjoyed disputing, confident in the knowledge that it was in some senses a lesson for them both.

He is survived by Marlene and his three children, seven grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

• Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm, historian, born 9 June 1917; died 1 October 2012

Eric Hobsbawm: a life in quotes

The influential historian on communism, capitalism, war, nations and the death of his parents

Eric Hobsbawm at his London home in 2007. Photograph: Anne Katrin Purkiss/Rex Features

On his academic career: "Every historian has his or her lifetime, a private perch from which to survey the world. My own perch is constructed, among other materials, of a childhood in the Vienna of the 1920s, the years of Hitler's rise in Berlin, which determined my politics and my interest in history, and the England, and especially the Cambridge, of the 1930s, which confirmed both." 1993 Creighton lecture

On history: "History is being invented in vast quantities … it's more important to have historians, especially sceptical historians, than ever before." 2002 Observer interview
On communism: "I was a loyal Communist party member for two decades before 1956 and therefore silent about a number of things about which it's reasonable not to be silent." 2002 interview

On socialism and capitalism: "Impotence therefore faces both those who believe in what amounts to a pure, stateless, market capitalism, a sort of international bourgeois anarchism, and those who believe in a planned socialism uncontaminated by private profit-seeking. Both are bankrupt. The future, like the present and the past, belongs to mixed economies in which public and private are braided together in one way or another. But how? That is the problem for everybody today, but especially for people on the left." 2009 Guardian article

On the death of his parents: "In the late evening of Friday 8 February 1929 my father returned from another of his increasingly desperate visits to town in search of money to earn or borrow, and collapsed outside the front door of our house. My mother heard his groans through the upstairs windows and, when she opened them on the freezing air of that spectacularly hard alpine winter, she heard him calling to her. Within a few minutes he was dead … In dying, he also condemned to death my mother … 'Something has broken inside me,' she wrote to her sister." Interesting Times, his 2002 memoir

On Tony Blair: "Labour prime ministers who glory in trying to be warlords – subordinate warlords particularly – certainly stick in my gullet." 2002 interview

On nations: "Nations exist not only as functions of a particular kind of territorial state or the aspiration to establish one … but also in the context of a particular stage of technological and economic development. Most students today will agree that standard national languages, spoken or written, cannot emerge as such before printing, mass literacy and hence, mass schooling. It has even been argued that popular spoken Italian as an idiom capable of expressing the full range of what a 20th-century language needs outside the domestic and face-to-face sphere of communication, is only being constructed today as a function of the needs of national television programming." Nations and Nationalism since 1780, published in 1990

On war in the 20th century: "I lived through the first world war, when 10 million to 20 million people were killed. At the time, the British, French and Germans believed it was necessary. We disagree. In the second world war, 50 million died. Was the sacrifice worthwhile? I frankly cannot face the idea that it was not. I can't say it would have been better if the world was run by Adolf Hitler." 2002 Guardian profile

On war in the 21st century: "A tentative forecast: war in the 21st century is not likely to be as murderous as it was in the 20th. But armed violence, creating disproportionate suffering and loss, will remain omnipresent and endemic – occasionally epidemic – in a large part of the world. The prospect of a century of peace is remote." 2002 Counterpunch article

On his writing room's bookshelves: "Most of them, however, are filled with the foreign editions of my books. Their numbers amaze and please me and they still keep coming as new titles are translated and some fresh vernacular markets – Hindi, Vietnamese – open up. As I can't read most of them, they serve no purpose other than as a bibliographic record and, in moments of discouragement, as a reminder that an old cosmopolitan has not entirely failed in 50 years of trying to communicate history to the world's readers." 2008 Guardian article