The Downing Street Years

Product Information

I had thought I might find 'The Downing Street Years' unwatchable: four hours of self-justification by Brtian's controversial (and recently deceased) former Prime Minister. In fact, the programme is studiously neutral in its political conclusions, but ruthlessly incisive in its personal ones; and the person who wields the knife is in fact Thatcher herself, though she is its main victim. For most of the other interviewees, like most former politicians in such documentaries, come across as rueful, thoughtful, reflective. Maybe this cuddliness is just an act; but it does make you wonder what the political process does to have made them seem quite so inhuman when in the heat of government. But Thatcher is the exception, and when asked to comment on the events of the recent past (the programme was made in 1993), she does so without showing the slightest hint of humanity. It's not just her regal tone; but the fact that her opponents are so uniformly condemned as wrong, deceitful, cowardly and (in most cases) actively trying to make Britain a worse place. There's not a hint of nuance in her world-view; no willingness to concede that she might not have always been right, or even that others might have been wrong but nonetheless acting in good faith. It's almost like watching old film of Adolf Hitler: it makes you wonder, how did this person ever get to become leader of a country? What did people see in her? Perhaps people really did think that the problems of her time required an unusual personality to deal with them. Because, while the programme can not and does not offer a definitive answer, say, on the correctness of her monetary policy or her actions in the Falklands conflict, it fairly unambiguously paints the great leader as someone with a sense of self-righteousness verging on the lunatic. When the movement for Irish independence became increasingly violent, it was decided to retain the barriers, which were raised and strengthened. On 26 November 1920 construction commenced on a wooden barricade, 8 feet (2.4m) high at the end of the street. They were described as being of a "substantial character" mounted on proper foundations and incorporated vehicle gates. [16] [17] The barriers were taken down in 1922 when the Irish Free State was created. Mrs. Thatcher described the economic problems Britain faced as having evolved from the ideal of a "democratic socialist society" that Labour espoused. a b Department of the Official Report (Hansard), House of Commons, Westminster. "House of Commons Hansard Debates for 9 Jan 1990". Publications.parliament.uk. {{ cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list ( link) Of particular amusement to me as an educator was the way she scoffs alarmingly at "extreme" movements in education which are now accepted as basic tenets of the institution.

BBC Two - Thatcher: The Downing Street Years

The building then came into the possession of George Downing. A rather unpleasant individual (Samuel Pepys described him as a “perfidious rogue”) he was nonetheless responsible for the street, its name and for the buildings we know today. These welcome interruptions occur mostly when she is delivering a personal judgment upon some colleague or international statesman. But even here there is a frequent feeling that the pieces are not in her idiom. A good example is the sentence: 'In following Peter Carrington with Francis Pym as Foreign Secretary I had exchanged an amusing Whig for a gloomy one.' It is a nice aphorism, but my immediate reaction was to wonder which of the collaborators wrote it. Whigs, amusing or gloomy, are not part of the natural small change of her vocabulary. Official residences and offices of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office and the Chancellor of the Exchequer

Help

The substance of her judgments, however, is very much her own, and quite often shrewd, particularly about people with whom she did not have close relations, although it is a specialised taste to put Haughey above Fitzgerald and Mulroney above Trudeau amongst Prime Ministers.

The Downing Street years : Thatcher, Margaret - Archive.org The Downing Street years : Thatcher, Margaret - Archive.org

Downing Street in London has one of the most photographed front doors in Britain. Since 1735, it has been the official residence of the Prime Minister of Great Britain. Prime Ministers and world leaders have been photographed outside this famous door and important announcements have been made to the nation from here. This book looks at the decade plus that she was in power. It's an interesting book, because she talks about the things that drew me to student politics in the late 1980s. But anyone who reads it now will find it reads more like a historical treaties than it does anything else. I say this because much of what she writes about have become settled facts that everyone agrees on. Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuthOnly the most partisan and deluded of her critics will deny that the country Mrs. Thatcher inherited in 1979 was in shambles. Her election victory came on the heels of Britain’s “Winter of Discontent”—a period between 1978-79 when strikes by public sector trade unions brought the country to its knees. But the struggles had begun much earlier. The British economy was chronically ill throughout the 1970s—so bad by 1974 that Foreign Secretary James Callaghan warned of an impending “breakdown of democracy.” Inflation reached a crippling 26.9% in late 1975, leading Harold Wilson’s Labour government to adopt an incomes policy that capped pay increases for public sector workers at government-mandated limits. Sanctions were levied to persuade private companies to follow suit. But while inflation had halved by 1978, Mr. Callaghan (now the PM) and his minority Labour government kept wage increases capped below 5%. The Trades Union Congress (TUC), which had played nice with their Labour allies for three years, finally revolted. When Mr. Callaghan announced that the general election anticipated for September would be postponed until the next year, he set off the largest disruption of British labor since 1926. I briefly dipped into this at various places of interest and looked at 'The World Turned Right Side Up': visit to Washington in July 1987, at a time when MT's political fortunes were riding high and President Reagan was reeling under the continuing 'Irangate' revelations.

The Downing Neville Chamberlain Diary Letters. Volume IV: The Downing

Downing Street, long since demolished, were at one time houses leading up to Horse Guards Road. 15-16 formerly housed the Foreign Office, which also occupied two houses on the south side of the street. 18 was occupied by the West India Department of the Colonial Office and 20 was occupied by the Tithe Commission. Department of the Official Report (Hansard), House of Commons, Westminster. "House of Commons Hansard Written Answers for 19 Dec 2001 (pt 59)". Publications.parliament.uk. {{ cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list ( link) Thatcher's close friend Woodrow Wyatt recounted in his diary on 3 February 1989 a conversation he had with Rupert Murdoch who wanted Thatcher to write her equivalent of Mikhail Gorbachev's Perestroika, explaining her philosophy and that John O'Sullivan could do all the "donkey work" for her. Wyatt countered this by stating that the chairman of the publishing house Collins had tried to get him to persuade Thatcher to publish her memoirs with Collins and Thatcher herself seemed favourable to this option. [1] The next day Wyatt put Murdoch's idea to Thatcher but she claimed she did not have the time. [2] One the things that kept me from reading this book for so long, was my fear that I was not familiar enough with British politics or government to fully appreciate this memoir. In some instances that was true. Lady Thatcher used so many acronyms that were lost on me. I had to look up many, and oftentimes, even when I understood what they now meant, the people and departments were still too foreign for me to fully comprehend. That said, those times were the minority.The appearance of Margaret Thatcher's memoirs has been one of the most eagerly awaited publishing events in many years. As this book now shows, rarely has such a sense of anticipation been so amply justified." "The Downing Street Years is, first and foremost, a brilliant first-hand portrayal of the events and personalities of her years in power. She gives riveting accounts of the great and critical moments of her premiership - the three election victories, the Falklands War, the Miners' Strike, the Brighton Bomb, the Westland Affair, her battles abroad with foreign federalists and at home with faint-hearted or misguided ministers. Her judgements of the men and women she has encountered, whether world statesmen or Cabinet colleagues, are completely, sometimes brutally, frank. She is lavish with praise where it is due; devastating in her criticism when it is not. The book ends with an account of her last days which is as gripping as anything in thriller fiction." "But The Downing Street Years is as much an argument as it is a record or a series of character portraits. No prime minister of modern times has sought to change Britain and its place in the world as radically as she did. Her government, she says, was about the application of a philosophy, not the implementation of an administrative programme. She sets out here with forcefulness and conviction the reasons for her beliefs and how she sought to turn them into action." 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. Department of the Official Report (Hansard), House of Commons, Westminster. "House of Commons Hansard Debates for 25 Oct 1989". Publications.parliament.uk. {{ cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list ( link)

Thatcher: The Downing Street Years | Complete Series | BBC

Department of the Official Report (Hansard), House of Commons, Westminster. "House of Commons Hansard Written Answers for 24 Jul 2002 (pt 41)". Parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk. Archived from the original on 13 October 2008. {{ cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list ( link) See also: Townhouse (Great Britain) Downing Street looking west. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office is on the left, the red house is No.12, the dark houses are No.11 and No.10 (nearer, and partially obscured), and the building on the right is the Barry wing of the Cabinet Office, which has its main frontage to Whitehall. The corner at Downing Street and Whitehall Moral of the story: Mrs. Thatcher’s budgetary measures brought down inflation to a steady 4-5% throughout most of her premiership. Those same policies led to a fairly consistent unemployment rate that hovered around 10%. If you were middle class, upwardly mobile, and primarily concerned with matters of consumerism, then her policies dramatically improved your quality of life over the socialist codes of Labour. If you were lower class, employed in state-supported industries, or historically dependent upon the welfare system, Thatcherism was a harsh pill to swallow.Third, there is practically no sense of perspective, still less a reflective appraisal of her own successes and failures, strengths and weaknesses. Occasionally something might have been done better, but mainly by somebody else.