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Summary
Summary
In June 1983 Margaret Thatcher won the biggest increase in a government's parliamentary majority in British electoral history. Over the next four years, as Charles Moore relates in this central volume of his uniquely authoritative biography, Britain's first woman prime minister changed the course of her country's history and that of the world, often by sheer force of will.
The book reveals as never before how Mrs. Thatcher transformed relations with Europe, privatized the commanding heights of British industry and continued the reinvigoration of the British economy. It describes her role on the world stage with dramatic immediacy, identifying Mikhail Gorbachev as "a man to do business with" before he became leader of the Soviet Union, and then persistently pushing him and Ronald Reagan, her great ideological soul mate, to order world affairs according to her vision. For the only time since Churchill, she ensured that Britain had a central place in dealings between the superpowers.
But even at her zenith she was beset by difficulties. Reagan would deceive her during the U.S. invasion of Grenada. She lost the minister to whom she was personally closest to scandal and faced calls for her resignation. She found herself isolated within her own government. She was at odds with the Queen over the Commonwealth and South Africa. She bullied senior colleagues and she set in motion the poll tax. Both these last would later return to wound her, fatally.
Charles Moore has had unprecedented access to all of Mrs. Thatcher's private and government papers. The participants in the events described have been so frank in interviews that we feel we are eavesdropping on their conversations as they pass. We look over Mrs. Thatcher's shoulder as she vigorously annotates documents and as she articulates her views in detail, and we understand for the first time how closely she relied on a handful of trusted advisers to carry out her will. We see her as a public performer, an often anxious mother, a workaholic and the first woman in Western democratic history who truly came to dominate her country in her time.
In the early hours of October 12, 1984, during the Conservative party conference in Brighton, the IRA attempted to assassinate her. She carried on within hours to give her leader's speech at the conference. One of her many left-wing critics, watching her that day, said, "I don't approve of her as Prime Minister, but by God she's a great tank commander." This titanic figure, with all her capabilities and her flaws, storms from these pages as from no other book.
Author Notes
CHARLES MOORE was born in 1956 and educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read history. He joined the staff of The Daily Telegraph in 1979, and as a political columnist in the 1980s covered several years of Mrs. Thatcher's first and second governments. He was editor of The Spectator from 1984 to 1990; editor of The Sunday Telegraph from 1992 to1995; and editor of The Daily Telegraph from 1995 to 2003, for which he is still a regular columnist. The first volume of his biography of Margaret Thatcher, published in 2013, has won multiple awards for distinguished achievement in biography and history.
Reviews (6)
Booklist Review
Moore (Margaret Thatcher: From Grantham to the Falklands, 2013) continues his monumental, authorized biography (this is the second of three planned volumes) of the longest-serving, and first female, prime minister of Great Britain. In this comprehensive study, he focuses on the period between 1982 and 1987, during which Thatcher was reelected not just once but twice. Using the abundant and illuminating sources he had full access to, including government and personal papers, private diaries, personal notes, and so much more, Moore creates a carefully detailed portrait of a leader he characterizes as more famous on the world stage than any British prime minister except for Sir Winston Churchill. With admirers and detractors galore, Thatcher was a lightning rod in the realm of British and international politics, and both groups will find much to appreciate here. A chronology of world events, copious notes, and an extensive bibliography enhance an exhaustive narrative that will fascinate students of contemporary British history and politics.--Mulac, Carolyn Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN FEBRUARY 1984, during that period when a succession of decrepit Soviet leaders were dropping like flies, the British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, traveled to Moscow to attend the funeral of Yuri Andropov. There she made an extremely positive impression on her hosts. Not only did she remain outside in frigid temperatures during the entire ceremony, but her personal security man, who shadowed her in his vast overcoat with immense bulging pockets, drew many admiring glances. "Russian security were deeply impressed by this heavily armed man," one British official recalled. When, however, Thatcher returned to the Kremlin, she removed her own coat and unzipped her fur-lined boots, "whereupon Detective Superintendent Parker produced a pair of high-heeled shoes from his pockets." A firearm or a stiletto: Both seemed to have potential in the hands of a leader the Soviets had once christened the "Iron Lady." But the story is indicative of the way the matter of her gender would often surprise and unsettle Thatcher's contemporaries. The excellent first volume of Charles Moore's official life of Britain's only woman prime minister made the question of Thatcher's gender the animating force behind the story: how this grocer's daughter from an unfashionable part of England overcame the prejudice of the times and her party to become Conservative leader, and then battled the skepticism and constant slights that implied that as a woman, not least a lower-middle-class one, she wasn't up to the job of running the country. By the end of Volume 1, Thatcher had triumphed over those doubters, not least in leading Britain to victory in the Falklands war - a conflict during which, inevitably, some had suggested that a female leader might lack the moral fortitude to direct British forces in wartime. This new volume opens with Thatcher reaping the political rewards of her success, winning a thumping 144-seat parliamentary majority at the 1983 general election, and covers the four-year period up to another comprehensive victory in 1987 when Thatcher became the first British prime minister since Lord Liverpool in the 1820s to win three successive elections. Those two landslides in 1983 and 1987 tell us something of the challenge facing Moore as biographer. Whereas the first volume was in many ways a bildungsroman - the education of Margaret Thatcher - this latest volume takes us from electoral triumph to electoral triumph, with not much to challenge her between times. It was, in the words of the Wham! pop song that Moore uses for the subtitle of the British edition of this book, a time when Thatcher had "Everything She Wants." There were moments of drama, of course - the national coal miners' strike and a cabinet scandal known as the Westland affair, for example - but during such times, even when she was vulnerable, Thatcher's ascendancy was such that she was only occasionally stirred, and rarely shaken. In this she was helped by the poor quality of her opponents - the miners' leader, Arthur Scargill, who took his members out on strike as winter ended and without the mandate of a national ballot, and the verbal circumlocutions of the Labour leader, Neil Kinnock. ("It needed a scalpel," said Tony Blair, one of Kinnock's young backbenchers. "All she got from Neil was a rather floppy baseball bat.") In the end, it was the Provisional I.R.A. that came closest to taking Thatcher down with a bomb attack on her hotel during the 1984 Conservative party conference in Brighton. Had she been in the bathroom rather than the sitting room of her suite when it went off, she almost certainly would have been injured. For Thatcher, many of the most exacting moments of the period came abroad rather than at home. There was the wooing of Mikhail Gorbachev as the coming man in the Soviet hierarchy, and the presentation of him to the Americans as a man with whom "we can do business." Surprisingly, Gorbachev was in many ways easier to do business with than President Reagan, the man who claimed her as a conservative soul mate. Thatcher fell out badly with the president over the American invasion of Grenada in 1983, and again in 1986 over what she saw as his naïveté on nuclear weapons at the Reykjavik summit. Her answer to these and other difficulties was relentlessly to pursue her point of view in a way that was uniquely her own. "Almost any other British leader would have let himself be overcome by boredom, embarrassment, good manners or sycophancy towards his powerful hosts," Moore, in his characteristically laconic style, observes of one such occasion at Camp David in 1984. "But Mrs. Thatcher was impervious to boredom if she thought a point mattered, . . . and she almost never considered repetition a fault." It was a performance that left the Americans "impressed and exasperated in equal measure." Reagan admired her greatly, but never let the prime minister get in the way of everything he wanted. Asked why he had humiliated Thatcher by not telling her in advance about the invasion of Grenada, Reagan said simply, "Because I didn't want her to say no." It was, Thatcher said afterward, a bitter lesson in "how large powers behave." THE FRUSTRATIONS OF life as a junior partner provide some much needed grit in the oyster of what is otherwise a story of essentially unbroken success. The sense of struggle and triumph over adversity that made the first volume so compelling is inevitably missing here. The ground is already well trodden, so there are fewer surprises. Moore had exclusive access to Thatcher's private and state papers, but any correctives to fine earlier biographies by the likes of Hugo Young and John Campbell are principally those of nuance rather than revelation. This is not to underplay Moore's remarkable achievement. He writes clearly and honestly, never letting his essentially positive view of Thatcher get in the way of his "public interest" duty to present us with the evidence as he finds it. Occasionally his broadly thematic approach means that we miss the drama of living in the moment, such as when in December 1984 Thatcher is balancing the miners' strike, a visit to China to sign the Hong Kong Agreement and a trip to Camp David to berate President Reagan about the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars). One of Thatcher's greatest strengths was her ability to master astonishing amounts of detail without losing a sense of strategic vision. That achievement is lessened by the inevitable smoothing-out process of Moore's thematic analysis, which makes events seem clearer than they actually were in the chaos of the day-to-day. Such cavils, however, are made possible only because Moore himself has set the bar almost impossibly high. His mastery of the vast range of topics with which Thatcher herself had to grapple is absolute, his marshaling of evidence adroit, and his judgments deliberate and fair. Moore remains on target to produce the definitive "case for the defense" of this titanic and still controversial figure. His work will very likely stand alongside that of John Morley, official biographer of Gladstone, as one of the masterpieces of British political history. Margaret Thatcher was only occasionally stirred, and rarely shaken. RICHARD ALDOUS, the author of "Reagan and Thatcher: The Difficult Relationship," teaches history at Bard. He is writing a life of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
Choice Review
Volume two of the authorized biography of Margaret Thatcher covers her second triumphant term as prime minister, from 1983 to 1987. It is a massive and magisterial study, stunning in its completeness and legitimate in devoting so many pages to so few years. The previous volume, subtitled From Grantham to the Falklands (CH, Nov'13, 51-1696), concluded with her victory in the Falklands War. The present volume recounts her efforts to dismantle the welfare state to the degree possible, destroying the previous consensus of the parties. Though strongly anti-communist, she got on well with the Russians, particularly Gorbachev, and was on good if at times bumpy terms with Reagan. Moore had access to all relevant material, interviewed many, and was given total freedom in what he might write. Though generally sympathetic, he does not hesitate to point out what went wrong, and provides many rich details of political intrigues. There is a strong sense of Thatcher's personality and her significance as the first woman Prime Minister. Thatcher was both formidable and vulnerable, but Moore does not explain why she became for many the most hated prime minister of the 20th century. The third volume will cover Thatcher's far less successful third ministry and her death in 2013. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. --Peter Stansky, Stanford University
Guardian Review
A few major revelations, some lapses into Tory triumphalism, and something still missing -- an insider's portrait of a prime minister in her pomp Is Charles Moore a lucky biographer? Britain's best-connected rightwing journalist has been working on his study of modern Britain's most relentless rightwing politician for 18 years so far. He has published more than 1,700 pages, an intended two volumes have become an intended three, and he still has a quarter of a century of her workaholic life to go. With political biographies becoming shorter and scarcer in a country that increasingly dislikes politicians, this could be one of the last big commissions. When, in 2013, the first instalment, Not for Turning, came out, shortly after Margaret Thatcher's death, as she and Moore had agreed it would, it was helped by the political situation in Britain. The economy was struggling; the coalition was unpopular and it seemed possible that David Cameron 's days were numbered -- the parallels were there with the often beleaguered first Thatcher premiership, which Moore's book covered at length. Now, with the Conservatives, unexpectedly, in sole command of the country once more, and gliding around their party conference this week with some of their old mid-80s confidence, Moore has produced his version of Thatcher's life during exactly those years. The book begins in June 1982, a few days after Britain's victory in the Falklands war, with her lecturing the UN 's general assembly on "peace with freedom and justice". It ends with her winning her third successive general election, in 1987 -- "I must have an 80 majority," she tells David Young, one of her Tory favourites, "I must have it" -- with a majority of 102. Leftwing readers of a sensitive disposition may want to look away now. Yet writing about a period of dominance -- "the zenith of her power", Moore correctly calls it -- has its challenges. First, this is the Thatcher phase everyone already knows about: beating the miners, handbagging her way unstoppably through international summits, browbeating even her most senior colleagues. "It was important to invoke her name very sparingly in Whitehall," recalls an aide indirectly and tellingly quoted by Moore. "People would respond excessively to whatever they thought might be her will." Moore evokes this power and fear vividly; but readers familiar with the longer arc of her story may still be left feeling that the more vulnerable, threatened Thatcher of the early 80s and early 90s is a more promising, less worked-over subject. Even the memorable cover image of Everything She Wants, a photo of her standing, arms proudly outstretched, wearing a Tory-blue dress and a triumphant smile, in front of a huge industrial door painted with the union jack, has been used before, in almost identical form, on the front of another book about her, Thatcher's Britain (2009) by Richard Vinen. Sometimes the storytelling in Everything She Wants also lacks shape and tension. It starts a bit slowly and underwhelmingly, weighed down by detail and the apparent assumption that readers have already been drawn in by volume one and require little further seduction. On page 77 we learn that "In parliamentary affairs [in mid-1983], Mrs Thatcher faced two thorny difficulties -- the speakership and MPs' pay". One of the aims of Moore's biographical epic is to be a journal of record; and one of the strengths of both volumes is that he has used his unique access to Tory Britain, from interviews with long-silent witnesses to caches of the most private papers, to build up an at times awesomely thorough and authoritative portrait. But there are stretches when all but Westminster anoraks will want more selectivity and shorter paragraphs. Moore divides his chosen period roughly into three. There is Thatcher's post-Falklands surge from late 1982 to early 1984, including the start of her great privatisation gamble and her general election landslide in 1983; then a more turbulent stage from mid-1984 to early 1986, including the miners' strike and her attempted assassination in Brighton by the IRA; and finally, a renewed supremacy from mid-1986 to mid-1987, which brought a feverishly growing economy and the deregulatory Big Bang in the City of London. This boom-and-bust narrative is presented as a new interpretation of the high-Thatcher era. "Only by writing this book did I come to understand just how insecure Mrs Thatcher's position often felt in these years -- not least to her." It's an important insight, and gives the book a welcome underlying drama. But it's not new. The idea that her ascendancy was both dynamic and brittle, regularly punctuated by crises -- real, imagined and deliberately confected -- has been around since at least the 1993 BBC documentary series about her, The Downing Street Years. Thatcher was a melodramatic politician, who often needed crises to energise her. And was she absolutely honest about these crises, even in private? If you read her most personal writings, such as her secretly composed 1983 memoir of the Falklands war, recently released after years of anticipation by historians, you often just find more informally worded versions of the same hopes and fears she expressed in public. For all the quality and quantity of Moore's sources, and the expertise with which he sifts and arranges them, you wonder if he has got to the bottom of her -- or whether anyone ever will, or ever has, including Thatcher herself. Everything She Wants does have some revelatory moments. The American invasion of the tiny Commonwealth island of Grenada in 1983, against her explicit wishes, is given almost 20 pages. Moore uses them beautifully to rescue important themes from obscurity: that the US president, Ronald Reagan, while an ideological and personal soulmate of Thatcher's, was also an unreliable ally; and that the Iron Lady, for all her warlike rhetoric, could be surprisingly inept in military matters. The amphibious attack on Grenada was similar in its execution and buildup to the Argentinian seizure of the Falklands 18 months earlier, but it still surprised and threw her. The vicious internal Tory battle in 1985-6 over rival foreign bids for an ailing British military helicopter manufacturer, Westland, was another episode in which events slipped dangerously out of her control. Moore intricately reconstructs the cabinet and Whitehall row that the confrontational, stubborn prime minister could not resist escalating. It almost left her fatally exposed in the House of Commons (until the Labour leader Neil Kinnock infamously failed to ask the right questions), and culminated instead with the resignation of two key ministers, Leon Brittan and Michael Heseltine. By 1986 Heseltine was one of an increasing number of Tories who had his eyes on Thatcher's job -- as her tenure grew longer and she became more messianic and difficult to work with. In order to damage him, Thatcher and her most sharp-toothed Downing Street operatives were involved in the concoction and illicit leaking of a confidential letter from the solicitor-general that was critical of Heseltine's conduct in the Westland row. Most of this has always been denied -- not least by Thatcher at the time, in the Commons -- but Moore confirms it all by talking to the source of the leak, a steely Thatcherite civil servant called Colette Bowe, who, for almost 30 years, had "put all her personal records of the saga in a bank vault and said nothing to anyone". Had Bowe been less discreet in 1986, he concludes, "she could probably have brought the government down". I wonder. Here and elsewhere, such as in his account of the miners' strike, it feels as if Moore is straining to portray Thatcher as on the edge politically, yet he has already presented hundreds of pages of evidence of her near-impregnability. In Britain, governments with three-figure majorities can survive a lot of crises. As in the first volume, Moore's writing is mostly restrained and cool, a nice corrective to Thatcher's overheated personality. But when he allows himself to be more subjective, his language can be a touch Tory-triumphalist. At an EEC meeting in 1984, one of many international summits and negotiations in the book as Thatcher and Britain turn more and more confidently outwards, "she was the superior of all her counterparts in knowledge, argumentative skill, force of personality and perhaps even in raw intelligence". There are few leftwingers among Moore's hundreds of interviewees. He always quotes them on what the left got wrong during the mid-80s, rather than on what they got right, such as the vision of a diverse Britain successfully promoted, to Thatcher's incomprehension and fury, by the Greater London Council, which she abolished in 1986. Similarly, a chapter about cultural responses to Thatcher is so keen to castigate a handful of liberal and leftwing 80s writers for their snobbery towards her -- even non-Tory readers may find themselves a little on Moore's side here -- that it misses the way that Thatcherite ideas gradually seeped into pop culture. My Beautiful Laundrette, Hanif Kureishi's 1985 film about entrepreneurs, is misinterpreted by Moore as a pure anti-Thatcher polemic. The chapter also neglects to mention the most powerful cultural response of all: the Thatcher worship of the rightwing press. It is unrealistic to expect an authorised biography of such a tribal figure to be even-handed. For most Conservatives, Moore's monumental books will be thrilling -- the definitive explanation of the strange person who most shaped modern Britain. For the rest of us, the wait goes on. * Andy Beckett's most recent book is Promised You a Miracle: UK80-82. To order a copy of Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography Volume Two for [pound]24 (RRP [pound]30), go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over [pound]10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of [pound]1.99. - Andy Beckett.
Kirkus Review
British historian/writer Moore delivers the second volume in his authorized biography of the pioneeringand divisiveprime minister. As this volume opens, Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013) is riding high on the British victory over Argentina in the Falklands and the consolidation of power that it enabled. Inclined ever to go it alone, Thatcher abolished the policy group surrounding her, one that labored ceaselessly to keep the Conservative message strong while avoiding any overt impression of ideological purity, "which, if leaked, could cause such mayhem." But leaked it was: whether dealing with Irish nationalists, striking coal miners, or a recalcitrant European Community, Thatcher was steely and bent on uncompromising success, evidenced by her "angry will" and unwillingness to make coalitions. The real world does not often work that way, of course, and in the few places where Moore's narrative bogs down, it is in the details of bureaucracy that so maddened Thatchere.g., the matter of getting a budget passed. The author is surprisingly evenhanded: as he notes, Thatcher, like Ronald Reagan, seemed thoroughly uninterested in self-reflection, and some of the best writing in the book concerns the solid wall of cultural resistance that built up in the U.K., fueled by punk rock and Red Wedge-ish theater and writing. Stephen Frears, for instance, noted that his 1987 film Sammy and Rosie Get Laid was intended "to bring the government down." Of course, if Thatcher was ever bothered by the negative depictions, she seldom let on. Moore closes by chronicling how she closed out 1987 with a stunningly comprehensive electoral victory. "No prime minister in the era of universal suffrage had ever won a third consecutive term before," he carefully writes, though no thanks were due to Thatcher's "extreme anxiety, ill tempers, and misjudgments in the campaign." Moore will probably not change minds about the Iron Lady, but readers inclined to be as fair-minded as he will find much of interest in his account of her years in power. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Thatcher's official biographer, Moore (columnist, Daily Telegraph) divides this first volume of his two-volume biography into three parts: "The Approach, 1925-1959," "Parliament, 1959-1979," and "Power, 1979-1982." While much of Thatcher's life is already known, Moore goes deeper and reveals new details. For example, he had access to over 150 letters from Margaret Roberts (before she met and married Denis Thatcher) to her sister, Muriel, relating a young woman's obsession with appearance and discussing several beaus. Married in late 1951, mother of twins in 1953, and called to the bar in 1954, Thatcher was elected Conservative MP in 1959. Moore describes a nervous breakdown by Denis Thatcher in 1964, when he may have considered divorce. Always the ambitious, determined woman in a man's world, Thatcher emerges here as lacking emotional intelligence, a failing for which she paid a price. Moore writes fluidly, with relative objectivity (he is known as a conservative journalist), and incorporates a large number of quotations. Thatcher did not see what he wrote; the book's publication followed her death. Verdict This book is competing in Britain with Thatcher speechwriter and ghostwriter Robin Harris's Not for Turning: The Life of Margaret Thatcher. A one-volume tribute/biography by a sympathetic insider, it will have U.S. publication in September. Moore's first volume, providing insight into a leader both admired and controversial whose policies shaped late 20th-century Great Britain and beyond, will appeal to serious students of the Thatcher era.-Leslie Lewis, Duquesne Univ. Lib., Pittsburgh (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
The woman Prime Minister who flew into what The Times called a 'lavish, colourful ceremony of the kind not seen in the American capital for the past four years' had a packed schedule, but was also careful to make the right impression.* Her office set aside forty minutes each day for hairdressing (with rollers), and submitted her personal details in preparation for receiving an honorary degree at Georgetown University: 'Height 5'4";** Weight 10.5 stone; Coat 14 English; Hat size 7'. In the White House, Reagan welcomed her, declaring, 'we share laws and literature, blood, and moral fibre', and she responded, 'The message I have brought across the Atlantic is that we, in Britain, stand with you. America's successes will be our successes. Your problems will be our problems, and when you look for friends we will be there.' The private reception was equally warm, which encouraged Mrs Thatcher to be frank. In his diary, Reagan recorded: 'We had a private meeting in Oval office. she [sic] is as firm as ever re the Soviets and for reduction of govt. Expressed regret that she tried to reduce govt. spending a step at a time & was defeated in each attempt. Said she should have done it our way - an entire package - all or nothing.' But not everyone in the Reagan administration was willing to be as supportive as the President. On the same day, Don Regan testified before a Congressional committee. Mrs Thatcher, Regan said, had failed to control the money supply, produced 'an explosive inflationary surge' by her pay increases to public employees and kept taxes too high, which 'provides little incentive to get the economy started again'. 'She failed', he added, 'in the effort to control the foreign exchange market and the pound is so high in value that it ruined their export trade.' Here was a clear effort to distance the administration's policy from the perceived mistakes associated with Margaret Thatcher. Such perceptions were commonplace in US media reports throughout the visit.*** Regan then left Capitol Hill to hurry over to the British Embassy for lunch with Mrs Thatcher. She did not react unfavourably, but publicly praised President Reagan, giving a sanitized version of what she had told him privately: his attack on expenditure was 'the one thing which I could have wished that we had been even more successful at'. Reagan recorded in his diary that Mrs Thatcher 'Went up to the hill [Capitol Hill] and was literally an advocate for our ec. program. Some of the Sen's. tried to give her a bad time. She put them down firmly & with typical British courtesy.' As far as issues of substance went, the visit was fairly thin. Mrs Thatcher was a little worried by the administration's obsession with Central America, when she felt more attention should be paid to the East-West relationship. She and Reagan did, however, discuss the Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev's speech of 23 February in which he had called for an international summit and a moratorium on Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) in Europe, and they agreed on a cautious response. More important, for both sides, was the need for éclat, for the dramatization of the 'meeting of minds' of which Dick Allen had written. The state dinner for Mrs Thatcher at the White House gave Reagan's people the chance to show the difference their President made: "The Reaganauts were determined to throw off the grungy, downtrodden look of the Carter Administration . . . Some of the Carter people used to walk about the White House in bare feet. As soon as Reagan came in, out went the memos banning jeans, banning sandals and requiring everyone to wear a suit. 'Glamour' was a word often used, and 'class' too. The Reagan people thus planned the Thatcher dinner as a white tie affair. It was going to be infused with Hollywood glamour and would show the world how classy the Reagan people were." Mrs Thatcher, however, asked the White House if the dinner could be black tie, since 'some of her people would not have the requisite clothing'. She had another concern too: 'she was the grocer's daughter. She didn't want to come over here dressed up like that. It was an impoverished time in Britain after all.' Black tie was agreed, but the dinner was still grand enough in all conscience. Then there was the return match. Taking advantage of the Reagan team's inexperience, Nicko Henderson had got Dick Allen to promise that the President would come to the customary reciprocal dinner at the British Embassy the following night. This was in violation of the existing convention that only the Vice-President attended these return dinners, but the Reagan team did not know this. By the time they had realized their mistake and tried to get out of it, Henderson had sent out the invitations. Reagan came with a good grace.**** In her speech that night, Mrs Thatcher added her own passage to Henderson's draft, words about the 'two o'clock in the morning courage' which leaders have to have when faced with lonely decisions. This greatly pleased Reagan, who replied that she herself had already shown such courage 'on too many occasions to name'. 'Truly a warm & beautiful occasion,' Reagan wrote in his diary. The only disappointment for Mrs Thatcher was that the Reagans left without dancing to the band. After they had departed, Henderson invited her on to the floor: 'Mrs T accepted my offer without complication or inhibition, and, once we were well launched on the floor, confessed to me that that was what she had been wanting to do all evening. She loved dancing, something, so I found out, she did extremely well.'129 She was most reluctant to go to bed, threatening a different sort of 'two o'clock courage' by going off to see the floodlit Washington monuments, 'but Denis put his foot down, crying, "bed".' On her last night in America, after a rapturous reception for a speech in New York, Mrs Thatcher gathered with Denis, Henderson and aides in her suite in the Waldorf before taking the plane home. 'Mrs T was still in a state of euphoria from the applause she had received which was indeed very loud and genuine and burst out: "You know we all ought to go dancing again" . . . Denis' foot came down heavily.' Both sides rejoiced at the visit. 'It was a great success,' Henderson remembered. 'They saw completely eye to eye.' 'We needed a crowbar to pull them apart,' remarked Reagan's press secretary, Jim Brady. 'I believe a real friendship exists between the P.M. her family & us,' Reagan commented. The essence of this friendship was simple and effective. They believed the same things, and they both wanted to work actively to bring them about. 'I have full confidence in the President,' Mrs Thatcher scribbled at the bottom of a thank-you note to Henderson. 'I believe he will do things he wants to do - and he won't give up.' They also had compatible, though utterly different, temperaments - he the relaxed, almost lazy generalist who charmed everyone with his easygoing ways, she the hyperactive, zealous, intensely knowledgeable leader, who injected energy into all her doings but also displayed what Reagan considered to be the elegance of a typical, gracious English lady. They shared a moral outlook on the world and also, in their emphasis on formality, dressing smartly and being what Americans call classy, a sort of aesthetic. The personal chemistry was undeniable. 'He treated her in a very courteous and sort of slightly flirtatious way, to which she responded,' recalled Robin Butler. It turned out that they would often disagree about tactics, and that his more optimistic and her less sunny view of the possibilities of a non-nuclear future would lead to problems, but their basic personal trust and sense of common purpose never failed. Yet, for all her enthusiasm and affection for the leader of the free world, Mrs Thatcher was not blind to his limitations. Lord Carrington recalled their meeting on the first day: "After the arrival ceremony we went into the Oval Office and I remember Reagan saying: 'Well of course, the South Africans are whites and they fought for us during the war. The blacks are black and are Communists.' I think even Margaret thought this was rather a simplification . . . She came out and she turned to me and, pointing at her head, she said, 'Peter, there's nothing there.' That wasn't exactly true, because there was something there and she no doubt didn't really mean that." Mrs Thatcher came to realize that Reagan's strengths and mental abilities were very different from her own, but she never lost her underlying admiration for him. To the typed letter of thanks she sent him, she added, in her own hand: 'We shall never have a happier visit.'138 She felt she had a powerful friend. She knew that he would help in the economic and political struggles ahead. Her pleasure and gratitude were genuine. - Notes * Mrs Thatcher's nervousness before the ceremony is indicated by the row she began at Blair House, the official guest house where she and her party were staying. She fiercely attacked Lord Carrington for what she called 'your policy in the Middle East', which she considered dangerous in its attempt at a rapprochement with the Palestine Liberation Organization, adding, 'I'll lose my seat at Finchley.' By his own account, her Foreign Secretary said, 'And I'll lose my temper,' and went out, slamming the door (interview with Lord Carrington). Clive Whitmore hurriedly scribbled a note to Mrs Thatcher which said, 'This place is bugged.' She then drew a circle in the air with her finger to indicate bugging. (Interview with Sir Clive Whitmore.) ** Mrs Thatcher sometimes gave her height as 5 foot 4 inches, and sometimes as 5 foot 5 inches. *** 'A new verb has entered the Washington lexicon,' declared the New York Times. 'It is said to be possible to "Thatcherize" an economy. The verb is not precisely defined, but many see it as a bad thing to do. Since "Thatcherization" bears a conservative label, some people fear that our new conservative President will lead us down the same disagreeable path.' (New York Times, 1 Mar. 1981.) **** Although Henderson's manoeuvring annoyed the sticklers for protocol, Allen and others realized that the President's attendance at this return dinner (and others) could have its advantages. This would be one way, suggested an NSC memo, to 'underscore the substantive importance' Reagan placed on US relations with key allies, and signal a break with the discord in the transatlantic alliance seen in the recent past. (Rentschler to Tyson, 'Thatcher Visit and Related Thoughts', 26 Jan. 1981, 5. Official Working Visit of Prime Minister Thatcher of United Kingdom 02/26/1981 (1 of 8), Box 4, Charles Tyson Files, Reagan Library.) Excerpted from Margaret Thatcher: At Her Zenith, In London, Washington and Moscow by Charles Moore All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
| Preface | p. xi |
| Acknowledgements | p. xix |
| List of Illustrations | p. xxix |
| Chronology | p. xxxv |
| Part 1 Foundations | |
| 1 Liberal imperialist: 'I'm leader of this great nation, and I haven't made up my mind' | p. 3 |
| 2 A radical disposition: 'When people are free to choose, they choose freedom' | p. 20 |
| 3 Landslide: 'I live in a big house called 10 Downing Street. I'm going to live there for a long time' | p. 43 |
| 4 Jobs for her boys: 'To write the concerns and views of your Government into the grammar book of politics' | p. 64 |
| 5 Reagan plays her false: 'If I were there Margaret, I'd throw my hat in the door before I came in' | p. 104 |
| 6 The enemy within: 'If anyone has won, it has been the miners who stayed at work' | p. 136 |
| 7 Sales of the century 'Tell Sid' | p. 183 |
| Part 2 Shocks | |
| 8 Glasnost in the Chilterns: 'For heaven's sake, try and find me a young Russian' | p. 225 |
| 9 Arms and the Woman: 'Your Majesty, who do you trust - Mitterrand or Mrs Thatcher?' | p. 254 |
| 10 Irish Agreement, Brighton bomb 'The day I was not meant to see' | p. 298 |
| 11 Poll tax: 'Voter & payer' | p. 343 |
| 12 A single European: 'How dare they! We saved all their necks in the war' | p. 377 |
| 13 The death-knell of monetarism: 'She's a moral coward when it comes to dealing with people' | p. 409 |
| 14 Helicopter crash: 'Her hands were not entirely clean' | p. 449 |
| Part 3 Recovery | |
| 15 TBW: 'While she is with us, she is not with her own people' | p. 501 |
| 16 Against Queen and Commonwealth: 'Blacks and their families out of work? Moral? Poof!' | p. 544 |
| 17 Save the Bomb: 'She was the exclamation point' | p. 586 |
| 18 To Moscow: 'The light is coming from the West' | p. 614 |
| 19 What they saw in her: 'Mrs Thatcher is the point at which all snobberies meet' | p. 635 |
| 20 The last victory: 'There's a woman who will never fight another election' | p. 673 |
| Notes | p. 711 |
| Bibliography | p. 773 |
| Index | p. 785 |
