Leadership Quote by Kenneth Baker

Privatization, Baker suggests, wasn`t a thunderclap of ideology so much as a fog that rolled in while everyone was busy elsewhere. The line needles a favorite habit of historians and economists: the craving for grand causal stories with clean beginnings, towering motives, and a single mastermind. Baker is pushing back on the idea that Thatcher-era privatization was simply the inevitable expression of free-market doctrine or a heroic corrective to state overreach. His point is more unsettling: transformative policy can be the result of accumulation, not epiphany.

The subtext is political self-protection as much as historical correction. If privatization "came on slowly", responsibility diffuses. No one vote, memo, or minister bears the full moral weight. That framing also reframes public consent: not a decisive democratic mandate, but a sequence of steps that normalized a new relationship between the state, markets, and citizens. Big change becomes less like a referendum and more like a remodeling job conducted room by room.

Context matters: Baker, a Conservative minister in the 1980s, is speaking from inside the machine that delivered those sales and reforms. He knows how policy actually moves - through budget constraints, administrative tinkering, opportunistic deal-making, and narratives adjusted after the fact. The quote works because it punctures both the left`s "neoliberal coup" storyline and the right`s "bold revolution" myth. It trades drama for process, and in doing so, it hints at how easily a society can wake up living under a different set of assumptions without ever feeling the moment of conversion.