The story of Margaret Thatcher at the peak of her powers is extraordinary
Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography, Volume Two: Everything She Wants. By Charles Moore. Allen Lane; 880 pages; £30. To be published in America by Knopf in January; $35.
THE second part of Charles Moore’s epic three-volume authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher covers the period from the Falklands war in 1982 to her third (and final) election victory in 1987, when her powers were at their zenith. It is an extraordinary story of personal dominance combined with constant insecurity, in which admirable moral courage often contrasted with appalling behaviour towards colleagues. Mr Moore, a distinguished Tory journalist who began this great project 18 years ago, is clearly convinced of Thatcher’s greatness, but he is no cheerleader. His judgments throughout the book are shrewd and balanced.
Rather than following a strict chronology, Mr Moore addresses key themes of Thatcher’s tumultuous premiership in roughly sequential order. One is her close but often fraught relationship with Ronald Reagan, who was elected president during her first term. He played her false over the invasion of Grenada, and shocked her by appearing to favour abolishing nuclear weapons in 1986. Yet they saw each other as champions of the free world against communism. Despite this, she gritted her teeth in tough talks with Deng Xiaoping over the return of Hong Kong to China and invited Mikhail Gorbachev, then an ambitious young politburo member, to lunch at Chequers. Thatcher saw something in him which made her believe he was a man the West “could do business with”.
Her premiership was also defined by conflict: the battle with Arthur Scargill, the leader of the striking miners; the horror of the IRA bombing of theConservative Party conference in Brighton and the painful compromises required by the Anglo-Irish Agreement that followed; the growing tensions over economic policy, especially over the European exchange rate mechanism; and her obsession with introducing a poll tax, which, along with her increasing hostility towards “Europe”, eventually brought her down.
This is an account of a public rather than a private life. Although Thatcher often fell back on Denis, her loyal husband, and felt intermittently guilty about the impact of her ambition on her twin children, she was not a politician with much hinterland. But the personal always informed the political for her. Above all, Thatcher’s sex profoundly influenced her behaviour towards male colleagues and foes (some, of course, were both at the same time). Apart from the queen and Indira Gandhi, she hardly ever encountered other powerful women. The sense of being alone made her see herself as a permanent outsider, unable to share the clubbable social lives and experience of the men she worked with. Yet she also unhesitatingly used her femininity when it suited, either through high emotion, maternal lecturing or slightly scary flirting.
She could also be alarmingly capricious. Thatcher came to believe that many of her male colleagues lacked her appetite for the struggle, or indeed basic competence. She also worried constantly about plots to undermine her: her distrust of Michael Heseltine, who eventually challenged her for the leadership in 1990, was not unjustified. But her treatment of Geoffrey Howe, her first chancellor and later foreign secretary, was excruciating. A clever and decent man, Lord Howe, who died last week, was bullied and humiliated for no good reason other than that he irritated her. These and other fallings-out were symptomatic of the atmosphere of strife and tension she thrived on.
Mr Moore, for all his admiration, does not attempt to make Thatcher any more likeable than previously thought. But this elegant, often witty, superbly researched book conveys what a truly extraordinary person she was. If only she had resisted the temptation, in her own fateful words, “to go on and on and on”.
This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "Missionary zeal"
