The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘She was felled by the littleness of men’
Reviewers are supposed never to use the word “definitive” about a history book or biography, but with Charles Moore’s life of Margaret Thatcher, of which this is the triumphant last volume, one has no other option. Over the past 11 years, Moore has consulted more than a million pages of documents that crossed her desk, especially at the vast Thatcher Archive at Churchill College, Cambridge, and conducted 600 interviews with everyone involved in her life – friend or foe – to produce a work that will not need revision for decades.
Mrs Thatcher was the longestserving prime minister in the era of universal suffrage, and this volume covers the period from her third election victory in 1987 until her death in April 2013. It therefore recounts worldhistorical events such as the final victory over European Communism in the Cold War, which led to the reunification of Germany, which in turn led to the economic and monetary union of the European Community. Domestically, her final years in office saw the stock market crash of 1987, the poll tax riots, the resignation of two chancellors of the exchequer and her fall from power in November 1990. This is thus an important work of history as much as it is the personal tale of a woman fighting against seemingly insuperable odds.
Because Moore had access to papers that were not open to other researchers, this book is full of revelations that force us to re-evaluate our prejudices about Mrs Thatcher, from both Right and Left political viewpoints. Far from being a covert supporter of the apartheid regime in South
Africa, as the Left has alleged, she began campaigning publicly and privately for the release of Nelson Mandela in 1984. Moore quotes her words to the South African ambassador Denis Worrall that she was “convinced that progress would only come with the release of Mandela”, with whom she had good relations. She described apartheid as “wrong, immoral and contrary to the dignity of man” and also saved from execution the Sharpeville Six, ANC terrorists convicted of the murder of the deputy mayor of Sharpeville, something for which she has not had proper recognition before now.
Mrs Thatcher was also the first eco-warrior, whose Downing
Street seminars and public campaigns in the late Eighties over greenhouse gases, CFCs and the protection of the ozone layer surprised scientists who expected little interest from politicians.
This interest derived from her scientific background and was wholly genuine.
Readers will also be surprised by the inside story of the Spycatcher affair, in which the British government had to decide whether to try to ban the autobiographical book of the retired MI6 agent Peter Wright, even though most of what it contained was perfectly true. A former intelligence agent, Victor, Lord Rothschild, emerges badly from Moore’s story, giving accounts to the government about his friend Wright which are (somewhat charitably) described as “neither
The definitive biography of Margaret Thatcher has been brought to a Shakespearean close, says Andrew Roberts
the whole truth nor nothing but the truth”. The former cabinet secretary Robert Armstrong summed up Mrs Thatcher’s attitude as that, “She had a simple conviction that a man who behaved like a traitor should be pursued.” It might not have been the correct decision in the end, but she arrived at it from good motives.
Reader might also be surprised by the coolness between Mrs Thatcher and President George HW Bush, with whom she simply could not replicate the friendship that she had enjoyed with his predecessor, Ronald Reagan. Her relationship with Bush was uneasy on both personal and strategic levels, and although she respected him, he thought she had got too much out of Reagan and was keen to distance himself somewhat, preferring instead to try to create a close rapport with the reunited Germany. Working in the Bush presidential library, Moore has found illuminating diary entries, such as when the president wrote, “I don’t feel the warmth for her as I do to say [the German chancellor] Helmut [Kohl] or even [the French president] Mitterrand.”
It was Mitterrand and EU president Jacques Delors who attempted to ambush Mrs Thatcher at the Rome Summit in October 1990. The Foreign Office, Moore has discovered, “did not expose Mrs Thatcher to the full extent and momentum of the EC integrationist ideology, perhaps for fear that she might kick over the traces completely”. The senior FO official Sir John (now Lord) Kerr was open about how much his
Whitehall colleagues favoured joining the euro, which was anathema to her. “She thought the pound was part of nationship,” Kerr told Moore. “The rest of us didn’t think that. It was not one of the stripes of the Union Jack.” Thankfully, it was for her. Although Mrs Thatcher was wrong about her fear of German reunification at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, she was right to warn Mitterrand at the Rome Summit that the euro would make Germany predominant in Western Europe. The key figure in protecting her from ambushes in summit after summit was her foreign policy adviser, Charles (now Lord) Powell. He emerges
As Alan Clark said, all politicians are ‘sharks circling, waiting for traces of blood’
from this book, as he did in the last volume, as an immensely powerful figure behind the scenes; indeed, he appears much more often in the book than anyone else besides the prime minister herself. Moore records the cabinet secretary Robin Butler’s failed attempts to dislodge Powell, who eventually became the most influential unelected figure in British history since Cardinal Wolsey. This would have been concerning, except that, as Moore repeatedly shows,
Powell had more than enough of the shrewdness and tact necessary for his pivotal role.
This is no hagiography: Moore echoes Lord Hailsham’s estimation that Mrs Thatcher was in large part responsible for her eventual downfall in November 1990, as she could not stop herself being
“so provoking”. As Moore puts it: “Her manner was often insufferable, particularly for men used to club rules in which no one dresses down a colleague in front of others.” He explains the curious dichotomy between her extreme civility towards people who worked for her, such as her staff, secretaries, detectives and drivers, and the way she treated those politicians who worked with her, to whom she could be
“suspicious, fault-finding, rude and often ungenerous”.
The chapter that covers her sensational fall from power as it was played out in the seven days of November 16-22 1990 represents an absolute masterpiece of the biographer’s art. It should be read whether one is interested in Margaret Thatcher and British politics or not, because the story of insincerity and betrayal, appalling mismanagement, ambition both secret and hidden, and (very) occasional acts of decency is a Shakespearean tale for the ages about human nature under pressure. It reminds us how politicians, in the diarist MP Alan Clark’s words of this period, “are all sharks circling, and waiting, for traces of blood to appear in the water”.
In trusting John Wakeham, Tim Renton (the chief whip) and Peter Morrison to run her leadership campaign, Thatcher made three dreadful mistakes, as the first two did not want her to stay on as premier and the last was either drunk or asleep during much of the campaign. “Does this mean a second ballot, Tim?” she asked Renton when it became clear she was two votes short on the first ballot. “Yes I’m afraid so, prime minister,” Renton replied. What he did not tell her was that he himself had abstained, and that if he and only one other person had voted for her she would have beaten Michael Heseltine.
John Major emerges as the Iago of the story, desperate for power yet afraid to be seen plotting (which he undoubtedly was). Moore’s intimate hour-by-hour account of that week in November is gripping as human drama, as in the end the Conservative ingrates clawed her down from office, and split the party with consequences that can still be discerned nearly three decades later. The greatest peacetime premier in British history – only Gladstone and
Attlee can compete for the role – was felled by what Moore calls “the littleness of men”, and usually men who owed their own seats in Parliament to her.
Andrew Roberts’ Leadership in War: Lessons from Those Who Made History (Allen Lane) is out on Oct 29. Call 0844 871 1514 to order Margaret Thatcher, Vol Three: Herself Alone for £30