Thatcher was interviewed with David Frost on Breakfast with Frost about her memoirs, [15] and she promoted her book with radio and television interviews, book signings, a question and answer session at the Barbican chaired by Jeffrey Archer and a four-part BBC television series. [14] In 1950, Margaret was chosen to stand as the Conservative candidate for Dartford, a tough industrial seat just outside London. It was a safe Labour seat and she didn’t really stand a chance. She lost, but she did reduce her Labour opponent’s majority from 20,000 to 14,000 votes. British policy in Northern Ireland had been a standing source of conflict for every Prime Minister since 1969, but Margaret Thatcher aroused the IRA's special hatred for her refusal to meet their political demands, notably during the 1980-81 prison hunger strikes.

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Let’s move on to Robin Harris’s book. I think he was Margaret Thatcher’s speech writer and helped her write her memoirs. But what does he add to this story that is not in the official biography? Charles Moore focuses very much on her private decision making processes, rather than discussing the broader social and political landscape. Does Harris do more of that? British productivity hadn’t kept up with other industrial countries, and economic growth stalled. The oil crisis shut down factories, causing a spike in unemployment. In the meantime, different administrations were spending huge amounts of money propping up inefficient state-owned industries. Now, no one knew better than Margaret that women could get on in British politics. She was a trailblazer, after all. She’d become just the fifth woman to hold a senior government position in 1970. But, she did wonder if women like her could rise to the very top. When a journalist once asked her if she could imagine herself leading the country one day, she responded saying that she didn’t expect to see a woman prime minister in her lifetime – the male population was simply “too prejudiced.” Robin first met her when he was in the Conservative Party Research Department in the late 1970s and saw her regularly right through the 1980s as prime minister. When she went into internal exile after November 1990, he was with her every day, working in her private office. He was so close to her that he knew what she was thinking. When he drafted her memoirs for her it was a completely synthesised process because they more or less became each other.

Critics and supporters alike recognise the Thatcher premiership as a period of fundamental importance in British history. Margaret Thatcher accumulated huge prestige over the course of the 1980s and often compelled the respect even of her bitterest critics. Indeed, her effect on the terms of political debate has been profound. Whether they were converted to 'Thatcherism', or merely forced by the electorate to pay it lip service, the Labour Party leadership was transformed by her period of office and the 'New Labour' politics of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown would not have existed without her. Her legacy remains the core of modern British politics: the world economic crisis since 2008 has revived many of the arguments of the 1980s, keeping her name at the centre of political debate in Britain.

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During her term of office she reshaped almost every aspect of British politics, reviving the economy, reforming outdated institutions, and reinvigorating the nation's foreign policy. She challenged and did much to overturn the psychology of decline which had become rooted in Britain since the Second World War, pursuing national recovery with striking energy and determination. Thatcher's close friend Woodrow Wyatt recounted in his diary on 3 February 1989 a conversation he had with Rupert Murdoch who wanted Thatcher to write her equivalent of Mikhail Gorbachev's Perestroika, explaining her philosophy and that John O'Sullivan could do all the "donkey work" for her. Wyatt countered this by stating that the chairman of the publishing house Collins had tried to get him to persuade Thatcher to publish her memoirs with Collins and Thatcher herself seemed favourable to this option. [1] The next day Wyatt put Murdoch's idea to Thatcher but she claimed she did not have the time. [2]

That said, she had to win the next election to have a chance of seeing her vision through. Would she be able to swing the 1983 general election? In early 1982, that was anything but certain. The second cause was rising business costs. Trade unions enforced high wages and the state crowded out private investors by running large parts of the economy itself. This set me thinking: perhaps the reason for Thatcher’s clearer explanations is the fact that she defended her policies more often and in greater detail than Blair. The long-form wide-ranging radio and television political interviews in which Thatcher participated simply did not exist in Blair’s day. I think that represents something lost at the heart of modern democracy. But I digress.

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This is not just one of the great libertarian texts of all time—and Mrs T was to an extent a libertarian, certainly in economic matters—but it’s one of the great counter-cultural texts of all time. Hayek, when he wrote it, was a professor at the LSE. The Beveridge Report had come out two years earlier and it was the year of the 1944 Education Act. He sees the state growing and growing and imposing its will and influence in all sorts of areas. Some sources believe that Thatcher wrote at least part of the book at the Manor House Hotel, in Castle Combe, in the Full Glass bar. [12] [13] Reception [ edit ] Thank you for creating this reading list of the best books on Margaret Thatcher. You knew her quite well; was there anything remarkable about meeting Thatcher in the flesh that you couldn’t have understood from seeing her as a public figure on television, or discussed in the press? The electorate was impressed. Few British or European leaders would have fought for the islands. By doing so, Margaret Thatcher laid the foundation for a much more vigorous and independent British foreign policy during the rest of the 1980s.When the General Election came in June 1983, the government was re-elected with its Parliamentary majority more than trebled (144 seats). Anyway, we always got on very well. Until she became an ex-prime minister, I always called her ‘prime minister’ and she always called me ‘Mr Heffer’. And then, suddenly, when she was out of Downing Street, she started calling me ‘Simon’ and I called her ‘Mrs Thatcher.’ But she said, no, I must call her ‘Mrs T.’ All her friends called her Mrs. T. And that’s what I called her until the day she died. I never called her ‘Lady Thatcher’ or ‘Lady T’—always Mrs T.Margaret Thatcher is the towering political figure of late-twentieth-century Great Britain. No other prime minister in modern times sought to change the British nation and its place in the world as radically as she did. I think she enjoyed humiliating these people, particular white-collar trade unions like the BMA. She found that amusing. But she knew there was a limit to which she could go. So, she brought some sort of internal market into the health service and abolished area health authorities in the early 1980s. She looked for places where there was a duplication of bureaucracy and overspending and tried to cut those but, actually, breaking the fundamental vow of ‘a health service, free at the point of use’ was never going to happen. The first priority of Margaret Thatcher’s government was to curb inflation – there was too much money chasing too few goods. As her government saw it, inflation in Britain had two causes. I’ve recommended it on the know-thine-enemy principle. Charles is quite even-handed, despite being very pro-Mrs T. And, obviously, Robin is pro-Mrs T. But this shows you what the North London intelligentsia really thought of her and why they hated her. And if anyone wanted to understand—years later—the failings of anti-Thatcherism, this book brings them out absolutely perfectly. Hugo did know her; I’ve been at press conferences with him when he was talking to her. But he didn’t know her well. She wouldn’t have trusted or liked him. But, in this book, he never really comes up with what the alternative was to Thatcher’s programme. No-one can deny that Margaret Thatcher was a divisive figure. As so often, I’m somewhere in the middle. To me, Thatcher has qualities that one can admire, even if one isn’t supportive – to put it mildly – of everything she did. As an autobiography, it’s wholly unsurprising that it is her positive attributes that tend to shine through here.