Highs, lows and haircuts
Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography. Volume Two: Everything She Wants
by Charles Moore
Allen Lane £30
Oldie price £25 (+p&p). Call 01326 555 762 to order
WHAT A well-timed publication for such a volume, twenty years in the making. That it should come out at this point in the political cycle is a victory no marketing person could have hoped for.
When Charles Moore started writing it, Tory fortunes were at their lowest-ever ebb – with two leaders to get through before their revival. Now, quite suddenly and against all odds, we have a striding Conservative government leaving behind a unilaterally disarming, union-dominated Labour Party refusing to compromise with the electorate.
So, this volume should be required reading for Leftists seeking to understand how half the country thinks. Moore says: ‘These beliefs [that Mrs Thatcher was not merely mistaken but evil] led them to make repeated, serious electoral mistakes. Since they thought Mrs Thatcher and her cronies were wicked they tended to think they had only to point this out loudly enough and voters would desert the Conservatives.’
The character of Mrs Thatcher makes an interesting debut before any account of her history begins. The author tells us how she – the most controversial figure of her age – gave access to all her papers with her marginalia intact (‘This paper is pathetic’, she wrote on one Francis Pym report). She asked colleagues, friends and family to co-operate with the author. She gave him interviews and never asked to see the text. Indeed, she insisted it was only published after her death. All the contributors thus knew they were safe to say what they wanted without fear of retribution. ‘This meant she could not be accused of trying to control [the text] – something which, to my surprise, she never seemed tempted to do,’ Moore says. It’s hard to think of any of her successors or predecessors allowing such a free verdict to be made on such private material.
So, as well as seeing her triumphant, victorious, seething with energy, we see her occasionally screaming, foaming, in- sulting. We see her anxious about losing the 1987 election. We see her ridiculous and embarrassing in the ‘Feydeau farce’ of Wobbly Thursday. We see her ‘like everyone’s mother in a bad temper’.
But the real shock to modern ears are the things she used to say in public. Her ‘grand simplicities’, as the author has them, expressed beliefs and convictions in a way no modern leader can.
‘There is no prouder word in our history than “freeholder”.’
There are ‘political systems evil enough to seek to enslave the whole world’.
‘The values of a free society derive from religion, not the state.’ Some glimpses: ‘When he noticed that Mrs Thatcher was asleep, Fitzgerald [prime minister of Ireland] paused. “Just keep talking,” said Charles Powell encouragingly, “I’ll write it all down.” ’
In a wonderfully restrained account of the Brighton bomb there were two remarks that will make susceptible eyes prickle:
‘Don’t worry, Prime Minister,’ said Amanda Colvin, ‘I’ve got the speech’, was one. And then the weightless ‘After saying prayers with Crawfie’ was another.
Other titbits are revealing at different levels. ‘She preferred serious government business to be done on paper’ on the higher, and her insistence that Nigel Lawson should get a haircut but she wouldn’t tell him herself on the lower.
To the author’s credit, many of the best lines are from the interviews. Professor John Vincent described her outsider status as ‘the point where all snobberies meet... the snobbery about scientists among those educated in the arts, the snobbery of the metropolis about the provincial, the snobbery of the south about the north, and the snobbery of men about career women.’
And John Coles, a private secretary, observing the speed of her mind, the fastest in the Cabinet, said, ‘Whether she was guided by instinct or whether her agile mind simply concertinaed the chain of thought until it almost failed to exist, I never knew.’
By contrast, Moore’s account of the famous Gorbachev encounter reads like an undigested minute of the meeting, while in an account of the visit to China, ‘Robin Butler remembered “a great diatribe” by Deng, with Mrs Thatcher being “pretty equally aggressive”.’ That’s almost not worth putting in.
For those of us who do not know him personally, reading Charles Moore is a way of spending time with him, and he is inexhaustibly good company. The varying accounts of events, communiqués, tactical positions, are invaluable source material. But it is possible to wish the book had more Moore. A better book about Thatcher might yet be written, although surely only Mr Moore could write it. Maybe his third and final Thatcher volume will be the one.