A forthcoming book reveals Thatcher at the height of her powers

THE second of Charles Moore’s epic three-volume authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher covers the period between the aftermath of the Falklands war in 1982 and her third (and final) election victory in 1987, when her powers were at their zenith. It is an extraordinary story of how personal dominance combined with constant political insecurity and admirable moral courage could often contrast with appalling behaviour towards colleagues. Mr Moore, a distinguished Tory journalist who began this great project 18 years ago, is a sympathetic and sensitive observer. But while clearly convinced of Thatcher’s greatness, he is no cheerleader. His political judgments throughout are shrewd and balanced.

It is often asserted that the Falklands victory was the reason for the Conservative victory in 1983. That is not true. The polls, and even the economy, had begun to turn before the Argentines launched their attack. With the opposition split thanks to the emergence of the SDP and Labour’s suicidal leftward lurch, Thatcher would have won anyway. The main political effect of the Falklands was hugely to boost Thatcher’s self-confidence both in her dealings with the cabinet, where her authority became absolute, and in her conviction that thanks to her leadership Britain could reclaim its place on the world stage as an upholder of individual freedom and international order. Her earlier caution was replaced by a mix of economic radicalism and flag-waving patriotism; the sentimental “I Vow to Thee My Country” was her favourite hymn. This approach became known as Thatcherism, which Mr Moore describes as a vision of national revival rather than a doctrine. It was, he writes, “more restorationist than revolutionary, though the restoration would sometimes require revolutionary methods”.

There was not much that was revolutionary in the programme on which Thatcher was re-elected in 1983 with a majority of 144. Beyond controlling inflation and getting the deficit down, there was little inkling of the major tax reforms that her new chancellor, Nigel Lawson, was planning or the assault on trade union power that was to come. Thatcher saw it as her mission to roll back socialism at home and to confront it, in the form of communism, abroad. But she did not want to frighten the horses more than was necessary.

Gallingly, however, one of the first tasks of the new government was to negotiate the terms of the handover of Hong Kong to the Chinese because of the expiry of Britain’s lease. The idea of surrendering the free people of the colony to communist totalitarians was anathema to Thatcher. But the negotiation was characteristic of her unique style of diplomacy. Strident statements of principle would be tempered by diplomatic realism, but only intermittently. To the bafflement of the Chinese, she treated the all-powerful Deng Xiaoping as an equal (in contrast to the recent kow-towing in Beijing of George Osborne). The other side never knew quite what to expect. Her “unreasonableness”, Mr Moore claims, resulted in a much better deal than could have been extracted by more conventional means. When asked by her long-time foreign policy adviser Charles Powell whether she had warmed to Deng as a human being, she replied, no, he was a communist and a tyrant.

Foreign affairs figure extensively in the period after 1983. As the West’s longest-serving leader and as a woman, she became a globe-trotting celebrity. Another key to her status was her unique relationship with Ronald Reagan, who was elected president during her first term. Although very different personalities—she, relentless, intense; he, relaxed to the point of indolence, but the personification of easygoing charm—they recognised in each other shared values on the things that mattered most to them, in particular fighting the good fight against communism.

Mr Moore rates Thatcher’s bold approach to Mikhail Gorbachev and what it led to as perhaps her finest foreign-policy achievement. At the height of the cold war in 1984, she invited the ambitious young politburo member and his glamorous wife, Raisa, to lunch at Chequers in the week before Christmas. Gorbachev had been identified by British intelligence as a reformer, but he was still a communist and Thatcher proceeded to lecture him on the ills his ideology was responsible for. He gave as good as he got, but instead of a blazing row, they ended the meal enjoying each other’s company. Thatcher saw something in him which made her believe that he was a man the West “could do business with”, particularly his willingness to negotiate seriously on reducing nuclear weapons, and set about persuading “Ron” to her point of view.

After meeting Gorbachev on December 16th, she flew to Beijing the next day to sign the deal on Hong Kong, then to Washington via Honolulu to brief Reagan at Camp David on the 22nd, staying awake for the whole 24-hour journey to study the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty that Reagan’s “star wars” programme was threatening. She returned to London on the 23rd. It was an impressive demonstration of her growing clout as a statesman and her terrifying indefatigability.

For all its warmth, the relationship with Reagan was not always smooth. The low point was his failure in 1983 to keep her informed of American plans to invade the Caribbean island of Grenada, a member of the British Commonwealth. He feared that she would browbeat him into stopping the invasion, but he played her false, Mr Moore concludes, and he felt the full icy blast of her fury. Three years later, in October 1986, he horrified her again by appearing to agree with Gorbachev’s proposal at a summit of Reykjavik to abolish all ballistic nuclear missiles. Thatcher raced to Washington to deflect him from the folly of this idealistic nonsense, which, she believed, would fatally undermine the security of Europe. Mr Moore believes she was often exasperated with what she regarded as Reagan’s sloppiness. Regularly after international meetings she would tell her private secretary, Robin Butler: “But Robin, he didn’t know anything about it!”

Somewhat closer to home, she fought untiringly for and eventually won the rebate on Britain’s contribution to what was then the European Economic Community. Although there was a cost to Britain in terms of bruised relationships with Europe’s leaders, again, her sheer bloody-mindedness achieved far more than more sophisticated diplomacy could have. But it was not just a question of hectoring European “partners”, such as France’s François Mitterrand and Germany’s Helmut Kohl, until they could stand it no longer. She was also the master of detail and forensic in the way she made her case. The saving to Britain has been estimated at £78 billion so far, making it, one Foreign Office mandarin says, the “most valuable financial agreement this country has ever negotiated”.

As time wore on her feelings about “Europe” grew ever cooler. She hated what she saw as the windy rhetoric of people like Kohl, who suffered, in her view, from being a bit too German. As Mr Moore says, she “never shared the religion of Europeanism”. Watching on television in 1984 Mitterrand and Kohl standing together on the field of Verdun, the terrible first world battle, hand in hand to symbolise their countries’ reconciliation, Thatcher was asked whether she found it moving. “No, it was not,” she replied. “Two grown men holding hands!”

Arguably her most important battle was that against the leadership of the mineworkers union, above all, the insurrectionist Arthur Scargill, whom she later described as “the enemy within”. A miners’ strike had toppled the government of her predecessor as Tory leader, Edward Heath in 1974. In 1981 Thatcher had declined a similar confrontation with the miners, but it was only a tactical retreat. Mr Moore believes that Thatcher did not want a fight with Mr Scargill, but that she reckoned he was seeking one with her and that it was prudent for the government to make preparations for when the time came. By 1984 coal stocks were high and the police were ready to prevent intimidation by so-called flying pickets.

Even then, the government might not have won had it not been for miners in areas such as Nottingham who, outraged by the failure of Mr Scargill to call a strike ballot, went on working. Thatcher was right to have been nervous, but even more right to realise that once battle was joined a defeat for the government would be a shattering blow to liberal democracy itself. Yet when the miners did eventually go back to work after more than a year, Mr Moore notes, the feeling within government was more of melancholy than triumphalism.

The queasiness of ministers in the strike’s aftermath to explain why defeating it was so essential may be one reason why it has become such a powerful part of left-wing mythology. Through films such as “Billy Elliot” and, more recently, “Pride”, that romanticise the strike, it lives on. It also remains the main example of Thatcher’s supposed vindictive hatred of the traditional working class and one of the reasons that leftish intellectuals and writers, both during and after her time as prime minister, feel justified using violent and extreme language about her. Some of the abuse also seems motivated by snobbish dislike of her lower-middle class, provincial background. Sir Jonathan Miller, a theatre director, called her “loathsome, repulsive in almost every way”; Sir David Hare, a playwright, said that when voters realised she stood only for the promotion of greed, her influence would fade “leaving nothing but the memory of a funny accent and an obscure sense of shame”.

Mr Moore is at his best in describing the various ways in which Thatcher maintained her dominance over male colleagues. She frequently felt (often unfairly) they lacked her appetite for the struggle or the basic competence needed to carry out her orders and who she feared (less unfairly) were plotting to undermine her. Her treatment of Geoffrey Howe, her first chancellor and later foreign secretary, was excruciating. A clever and decent man, Lord Howe, who died on October 9th, was bullied and humiliated for no good reason other than his appearance and manner irritated her.

Her falling out with Norman Tebbit (later Lord Tebbit), although far more of an ideological soul-mate, is also painful to read. Badly injured in the IRA bombing of the Grand Hotel at the party conference in Brighton in 1984, and with a wife who was paralysed from the neck down after the explosion, he returned as party chairman. But he earned Thatcher’s wrath by taking the wrong side in the Westland helicopter affair in 1986 that led to Michael Heseltine’s dramatic resignation and by opposing later that year the use of British bases by American aircraft bombing Libya. What may have damaged him even more was a slide presentation setting out problems the imminent election campaign had to overcome. Chief amongst them was voters who thought of the prime minister as “TBW”—that bloody woman. Some people close to Thatcher suggested that Lord Tebbit had been changed by the bombing: an unkind inference she did nothing to dispel.

Mr Moore is surely right in believing that Thatcher’s behaviour towards the men in her government (and in the cabinet, they really were all men for most of this period) was profoundly related to her sex. She felt intensely insecure, a permanent outsider unable to share the clubbable social lives and experience of the men she worked with. Yet she unhesitatingly used her femininity when it served her purpose, either through displays of high emotion, maternal lecturing or slightly scary flirting.

She was not, however, censorious of sexual peccadilloes (she fought to keep Cecil Parkinson in the cabinet after he confessed to fathering a child with a former secretary) or even homosexuality, which she appeared to regard as an affliction to be sympathised with. When Matthew Parris, a young MP, came to see her about taking gay rights more seriously and told her that he was homosexual himself, all she said was: “There, dear…that must have been very hard to say.” Despite all this, she was still more comfortable with men than with women. Mr Moore establishes that her relations with another powerful woman, the Queen, were as strained as they were rumoured to be.

Readers hoping to find insights into Thatcher’s private life will be disappointed. It is not so much that Mr Moore is reluctant to go there—he addresses briefly her angst-ridden feelings for her neglected children—but the fact is that this driven woman scarcely had, or wanted, a private life. Nor does he attempt to make Thatcher seem any more likeable than might previously have been thought. Even the loyal Robin Butler says: “My heart always fell when I had to sit next to her,” dealing with her face to face was “like feeding a fierce animal”. But what this elegantly written, often witty, superbly researched book does convey is what an extraordinary person she was. If only she had resisted the temptation, in her own fateful words just before the 1987 election, “to go on and on and on”.