The second volume of Charles Moore’s uniquely authoritative — and bestselling — authorised biography of the Iron Lady opens at a moment of triumph. Margaret Thatcher’s landslide victory in June 1983 delivered the largest increase in a governing party’s parliamentary majority in British electoral history. What followed, as Moore’s richly detailed account makes clear, was a period in which Britain’s first woman prime minister bent the course of her country’s history — and in many ways that of the world — to her will. The Miners’ Strike was faced down. British industry was transformed through privatisation. The economy was reshaped. On the world stage, Thatcher identified Mikhail Gorbachev as ‘a man to do business with’ before he had even become Soviet leader, and went on to press both him and her great ideological ally Ronald Reagan toward her own vision for a new world order. As Moore shows, only Churchill before her had placed Britain so squarely at the centre of superpower diplomacy. Yet even at the height of her power, trouble was gathering. Reagan acted behind her back over Grenada. The minister to whom she was personally closest was lost to scandal, and the Westland affair nearly forced her resignation. Europe drove a wedge between her and her own government. Her relationship with the Queen grew strained over the Commonwealth and South Africa. She bullied senior colleagues. She set in train the poll tax. Both of those last decisions would return to wound her fatally. Running through all of it is the unforgettable episode of 12 October 1984, when the IRA’s bomb at the Brighton Conservative conference narrowly failed to kill her. Within hours she was on her feet delivering her leader’s speech — and she would go on to sign the Anglo-Irish agreement. One left-wing observer watching her that morning said: ‘I don’t approve of her as Prime Minister, but by God she’s a great tank commander.’ Drawing on unprecedented access to Mrs Thatcher’s private and government papers, and interviews of extraordinary candour with those closest to events, Moore places the reader at her shoulder — watching her annotate documents, understanding for the first time how tightly she relied on a small circle of trusted advisers, seeing her as politician, anxious mother, workaholic and the first woman in western democratic history to truly dominate her era. This titanic figure, capacities and flaws alike, storms from these pages as from no other book.
ISBN 13: 9780140279627
Author: Charles Moore
