Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography

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Enoch wanted Britain to be strongly defended, but to exist in Lord Salisbury-style ‘splendid isolation’” 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: The Authorized Biography, Volume One: Not Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume One: Not

Ironically, this is where Hayek thought welfarism was leading. Hayek believed—and Mrs Thatcher believed all this, as well—that socialism was about control and liberalism, in its true sense, was about letting people fend for themselves, to make their own decisions and go as they wished. And it’s absolutely crystal clear that Mrs Thatcher based her whole approach to government on that Hayekian principle. Oddly enough, Enoch didn’t like Hayek. Enoch thought he was an unduly rigid foreigner who didn’t understand our ways and customs. But actually, they agreed on most things, although they came to it from different angles. 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. The first volume covers her early life through to her initial period as prime minister. Volume two covers her at the peak of her powers: the five years between the Falklands War and her 1987 general election victory. And the third volume covers her final term in power and the decades that followed. Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount. One thing that really motivated me to be a supporter of hers is that I will never forget this country on its knees in three feet of snow and six feet of rubbish in February 1979. It was just completely paralysed. I went up to Cambridge that October. It’s amazing how my generation was affected by it. Of course, there was a Fabian Society and a Labour Club at Cambridge in my day. There was even a little Liberal Club in those days. But the Conservative Association was the most active and powerful political association in the university. And most of the people who ran the Cambridge Union were Conservatives. Our generation had been so profoundly affected by the incompetence of governments and the tyranny of trade unions that we knew something had to change.

Absolutely fantastic. I second Michael Barone's review that this is one of the best political biographies ever written. The number of people and documents which Moore consulted make the book absolutely fascinating. It is a sympathetic and admiring, but not hagiographic portrayal of Mrs. Thatcher. It is more interesting than a novel (and I generally prefer novels!) I was thinking of her the other day when Des O’Connor died. She wrote a piece about the Maastricht Treaty in The European that caused huge trouble with John Major. This would have been in 1992, probably, and the paper was owned by the Barclay brothers. She asked me to write the article for her. So I wrote it and took it round to Chesham Place, where she worked after leaving office. We were going through it when one of her secretaries came in and said, ‘Major’s said something this afternoon. It’ll be on the news at 5:45 on ITN’—in about five minutes. No, she was. He made that speech when he was shadow defence minister. He says that there was no point in Britain being east of Suez. The point of being east of Suez was India. He took the view that, once India had gone, we should be realistic about where we were. This also ties in with his anti-Americanism. He believed, with some justification, that one of the main aims of American foreign policy from Versailles onwards had been to dismantle the British Empire. A newly edited, single-volume commemorative edition of ‘The Path to Power’ and ‘The Downing Street Years’; this is Margaret Thatcher in her own words. Readers not familiar with the British system of government (where the Prime Minister and the Cabinet are all elected members of Parliament) it will seem amazing that from the beginning Thatcher had to fight not only with the opposing Labour party, but with members of her own cabinet. Many in her cabinet considered her as nothing more than a fluke and wanted to remove her from power so that they would be able to resume the game of politics as normal. That was not to happen. At least not for a long time.

Margaret Thatcher Whole - The New York Times Seeing Margaret Thatcher Whole - The New York Times

With unequaled authority and dramatic detail, the first volume of Charles Moore’s authorized biography of Margaret Thatcher reveals as never before the early life, rise to power, and first years as prime minister of the woman who transformed Britain and the world in the late twentieth century. Moore has had unique access to all of Thatcher’s private and governmental papers, and interviewed her and her family extensively for this book. Many of her former colleagues and intimates have also shared previously unseen papers, diaries, and letters, and spoken frankly to him, knowing that what they revealed would not be published until after her death. The book immediately supersedes all other biographies and sheds much new light on the whole spectrum of British political life from Thatcher’s entry into Parliament in 1959 to what was arguably the zenith of her power—victory in the Falklands in 1982. She wasn’t a woman of ideas,’ Alfred Sherman developed his theory about Mrs Thatcher’s intellectual character. ‘she was a woman of beliefs, and beliefs are better than ideas.’” Keith Joseph 谈到英国二战后的经济政策：“We made things worse when, after the war, we chose the path of consensus. “ They had promised too much and been guilty of ‘subordinating the rule of law to the avoidance of conflict.’’In short, by ignoring history, instincts, human nature and common-sense, we have intensified the very evils which we believed, with the best of intentions, that we could wipe away.’” I think Hayek will ultimately be proved right everywhere. Incidentally, one reason I think Enoch didn’t like him was that Enoch did believe in a national health service. His father had been very ill in the late 1920s and they had had a real job finding all the money to pay for his care. That had a big effect on him. And I think for both him and Mrs Thatcher, the National Health Service became a bit of a no-no.

The miners' strike was one of the most violent and long lasting in British history. The outcome was uncertain, but after many turns in the road, the union was defeated. This proved a crucial development, because it ensured that the Thatcher reforms would endure. In the years that followed, the Labour Opposition quietly accepted the popularity and success of the trade union legislation and pledged not to reverse its key components.

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In October 1984, when the strike was still underway, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) attempted to murder Margaret Thatcher and many of her cabinet by bombing her hotel in Brighton during the Conservative Party annual conference. Although she survived unhurt, some of her closest colleagues were among the injured and dead and the room next to hers was severely damaged. No twentieth-century British Prime Minister ever came closer to assassination. 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).

A complete, detailed account of Margaret Thatcher's life and career in politics, from Grantham to No. 10 Downing Street. Everyone knows the one-liners she produced and the public image she cultivated. This book goes beyond the image and reveals the real Thatcher: her doubts and fears, her womanhood, her pragmatism, her occasional pettiness. Moore does so in a nuanced way, careful to judge her in her own times and the challenges of her days and not necessarily through the all too comfortable lens of today. Personally, I found the asterisks and extra notes, which this volume contained aplenty, rather redundant at times. It is truly a definitive account. And Keith Joseph, on Enoch’s suggestion, took all these IEA pamphlets home, read them, and realized that Powellism, as it was then known, was the way forward. By the time you get to 1974, Powell had left the Conservative Party, but Mrs Thatcher remained in awe of him, not least because she knew that when she and Keith Joseph set up the Centre for Policy Studies, they were doing it based on a Powellite platform. In the process, Margaret Thatcher became one of the founders, with Ronald Reagan, of a school of conservative conviction politics, which has had a powerful and enduring impact on politics in Britain and the United States and earned her a higher international profile than any British politician since Winston Churchill. The English law was fundamentally different from the Continental in that, on the Continent, ‘all laws take into account human rights’ whereas English law ‘took the view that you took into account the rights of individuals.’” “On the Continent, rights existed only when proclaimed by law. In Britain, they existed automatically, without government fiat, unless the law abridged them.” Her response was characteristic: at the Conservative Party's annual conference in October 1986, her speech foreshadowed a mass of reforms for a third Thatcher Government.With the economy now very strong, prospects were good for an election and the government was returned with a Parliamentary majority of 101in June 1987.