Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography

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In the process, Margaret Thatcher became one of the founders, with Ronald Reagan, of a school of conservative conviction politics, which has had a powerful and enduring impact on politics in Britain and the United States and earned her a higher international profile than any British politician since Winston Churchill. But when Mikhail Gorbachev emerged as a potential leader of the Soviet Union, she invited him to Britain in December 1984 and pronounced him a man she could do business with.She did not soften her criticisms of the Soviet system, making use of new opportunities to broadcast to television audiences in the east to put the case against Communism.Nevertheless, she played a constructive part in the diplomacy that smoothed the break-up of the Soviet Empire and of the Soviet Union itself in the years 1989-91.

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume One: Not Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume One: Not

No, not really. What you saw was what you got. The one thing that everybody says, which is true, is that she was very good with what the Labour party patronisingly calls ‘ordinary people’. She came to our house for Sunday lunch on about half a dozen occasions from the late 1990s until she became too infirm. Whenever she came here we would ask two old treasures, Vera and Edna, in from the village to help wait at table and she would always say, ‘Now, the ladies will want their photographs taken with me.’ And she would go into the kitchen. I would obediently follow with a camera. She’d stand by the Aga with Vera and Edna and I’d take a photograph of the three of them. But, anyway, Charles brings all that out in the books and if you read them you will—slightly dangerous thing to say—know everything you need to know about her. Above all, Charles has presented to the world a completely honest and accurate account of Margaret Thatcher. They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations.” ( transcript of interview) Thank you for creating this reading list of the best books on Margaret Thatcher. You knew her quite well; was there anything remarkable about meeting Thatcher in the flesh that you couldn’t have understood from seeing her as a public figure on television, or discussed in the press? Robin is a very clever man. He’s a highly intelligent, highly educated man, who was ‘present at the creation.’ And then he followed the story through. That’s the advantage of his book—it’s based on immersion in the life of Mrs Thatcher. It’s a more spontaneous book.Mrs T wasn’t grand, but she knew that her coming into some people’s lives was a big deal for them and she wanted them to be happy. One of the things that is truthful about her portrayal in the latest series of The Crown is the picture of her cooking small dinners for various people in the flat in Downing Street. Margaret Hilda Roberts was born 13 October 1925 in Grantham, Lincolnshire. Her father owned a grocery store and was active in the local Methodist Church and Liberal politics. Margaret won a scholarship to the local Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School, where she became head-girl. She applied to Somerville College, Oxford University, and was accepted to study chemistry in 1943. She graduated in 1947 with second-class honours. During her time at Oxford, she was elected President of the Oxford University Conservative Association in 1946. Since I already finished volume 3, volume 1 is a much easier read. Of course, her early life with many anecdotes is also more interesting than the dense political life in later years. What strikes me is her strong sense of purpose since young age. “Her faults, in the eyes of her contemporaries,concerned her tendency to come top, to be right and to rub it in.” I find the last point very amusing.

Margaret Thatcher Whole - The New York Times Seeing Margaret Thatcher Whole - The New York Times

The Downing Street Years is a memoir by Margaret Thatcher, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, covering her premiership of 1979 to 1990. It was accompanied by a four-part BBC television series of the same name. Margaret Thatcher had a rough ride as Education Minister. The early 1970s saw student radicalism at its height and British politics at its least civil. Protesters disrupted her speeches, the opposition press vilified her, and education policy itself seemed set immovably in a leftwards course, which she and many Conservatives found uncomfortable. But she mastered the job and was toughened by the experience. Her response was characteristic: at the Conservative Party's annual conference in October 1986, her speech foreshadowed a mass of reforms for a third Thatcher Government.With the economy now very strong, prospects were good for an election and the government was returned with a Parliamentary majority of 101in June 1987. Drawing on an extraordinary cache of letters to her sister Muriel, Moore illuminates Thatcher’s youth, her relationship with her parents, and her early romantic attachments, including her first encounters with Denis Thatcher and their courtship and marriage. Moore brilliantly depicts her determination and boldness from the very beginning of her political career and gives the fullest account of her wresting the Tory leadership from former prime minister Edward Heath at a moment when no senior figure in the party dared to challenge him. His account of Thatcher’s dramatic relationship with Ronald Reagan is riveting. This book also explores in compelling detail the obstacles and indignities that Thatcher encountered as a woman in what was still overwhelmingly a man’s world. The other reason that I put Robin’s book in, as well as Charles’, is for people who can’t bring themselves to read three massive volumes—although they’d be wrong to think that way. Robin’s is the best single-volume biography, without question. And it’s more intimate than Charles’s. Of course, he writes about policy and everything, but he does so in a more instinctive way than Charles does and he does so with the benefit of having been there. And if you are at the side of somebody for years, as he was, you must give a slightly more nuanced picture of her, which I think he does.

The first volume covers her early life through to her initial period as prime minister. Volume two covers her at the peak of her powers: the five years between the Falklands War and her 1987 general election victory. And the third volume covers her final term in power and the decades that followed. The final chapters on the Falklands were especially interesting as they reveal how close it all came to going horribly wrong. Book gathers steam as it explores the rot of the Wilson, Heath, and Callaghan governments. The sections on Heath are critical toward understanding Thatcher’s bold and successful challenge in 1975. This leads to the general election triumph in 1979 and the political struggles the Tories faced as they begin implementing Thatcher’s reforms. Volume 1 concludes with the British victory in the Falklands and Thatcher at the height of her own personal popularity and probably politically as well. In foreign policy, she got on well with American President Ronald Reagan. They often met and talked of a ‘special relationship’ between the US and the UK. Mrs Thatcher also expressed respect for Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev. She famously said of Gorbachev, that ‘he was a man who we could do business with’