POLITICAL BIOGRAPHIES

EVERYTHING SHE WANTS

by Charles Moore

(Allen Lane £30 % £22.50)

AFTER victory in the Falklands, the ever-battling Margaret Thatcher’s belligerence switched to the home front and what she saw as the enemy within — notably overweening trade union power in the guise of Arthur Scargill’s striking miners and the ‘Wets’ in her own Cabinet trying to divert her from what she knew was the right way forward.

This absorbing second volume of Charles Moore’s authorised biography, showing her at her toughest as she vanquished allcomers, is, for good reason, titled Everything She Wants.

The pro-Tory Moore, with unfettered access to her papers, is, by instinct, a sympathetic biographer but, as even critics on the Left have acknowledged, not a sycophantic one.

He plays fair, revealing weakness in her, as well as strength.

Surprisingly, she felt deeply insecure about her hold on power and, behind the Iron Lady image, there were moments of meltdown, panic and paranoia, when she ranted: ‘It’s hardly worth bothering. Let’s give up.’

Sadly for her, she could also mistake allies for enemies, inexplicably and unfairly turning against the loyal Norman Tebbit.

UNIVERSAL MAN by Richard Davenport-Hines (Collins £18.99

% £14.24)

ONE of Guy Burgess’s homosexual friends (possibly a lover, too) at Cambridge was John Maynard Keynes.

They were both members of a dubious secret society known as The Apostles.

But where Burgess sank into notoriety, Keynes became an intellectual giant and one of the most influential economists of modern times, with his very own ‘ism’ named after him.

His theories dominated accepted political and social thinking in the West for close to half a century.

What mattered most about Keynes was his mind. Bertrand Russell, no slouch himself in that department, declared Keynes’s intellect ‘the sharpest and clearest I have ever known’. Yet he also turns out to be a far more exciting personality than normally associated with the dry bones of economics, as this fascinating study shows.