Preface

At his trial, Socrates famously said that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’. He had not, of course, met Margaret Thatcher. From childhood, through the whole of her life until the infirmities of old age prevented her, Mrs Thatcher worked without cease. For her, work had a semi-religious significance, and it was the only way of life she knew. Even after she had left politics, she would always say ‘There’s so much to do!’ She hated the fact that she no longer had the chance to do it.

Such people do not look back. Even as they act, they do not pause to observe how they are acting. They focus always on their goals, and have a horror of wasting time. Almost the only sense in which Margaret Thatcher examined her own life was to criticize her conduct on a particular occasion – such-and-such a speech had not been good enough, she had not prepared herself properly for such-and-such a meeting. She did this out of a puritanical desire for self-improvement, to make sure that she performed better next time. She hardly ever sat down to reflect upon the past. It is true that, when she became the leader of the Conservative Party, she ransacked her memory for the small-town stories and paternal precepts which were the foundations of her beliefs, but she did so in order to advance her cause, not in any spirit of autobiographical inquiry. Much of her astonishing energy derived from this lack of detachment: if she had spent time looking back, she would have had less time to press forward. Just by watching Mrs Thatcher in action, noting what the novelist Alan Hollinghurst (in The Line of Beauty ) called her ‘gracious scuttle’, her hurrying gait as she moved from meeting to meeting, you could see that hers was a life with no space for self-examination.

Once she had left office in November 1990, however, Lady Thatcher (as she then became) was forced to think about her own story. Publishers were knocking on her door, clamouring for her memoirs. She did not really want to write them, because she always disliked personal disclosure. Indeed, she had no real idea how to set about such a task. She was utterly unlike, for example, Winston Churchill, for whom the books he wrote about what he had done were almost as important as the deeds themselves. But, furious at the way she had been forced from office, she did want to set out the accomplishments of her eleven and a half years as prime minister. She wanted to produce a book which vindicated her beliefs. Her publishers, of course, were more interested in her intimate memories and juicy revelations, so it was a mighty task for her loyal and able team of literary assistants to square this circle. Members of the team recall how difficult it was to persuade Lady Thatcher to come up with the telling anecdotes, personal touches and clear narrative on which good memoirs depend. She found it hard to concentrate on the past, and she disliked the whole idea of revealing anything which had taken place privately. And although her memoirs were written well before the decline in her mental powers which became apparent by the end of the twentieth century, she was not naturally accurate in the account she gave of her own life. Her memory, so amazingly retentive when it came to mastering the facts and figures of government, failed when asked to pin down the details of her own history. She had been too busy living it to have recorded it in her own mind. The two volumes of memoirs which emerged, The Downing Street Years and The Path to Power , were highly professional accounts. They skilfully replicated on the printed page the tartness which Mrs Thatcher often used in oral expression but which tended to desert her when she wrote things down formally. They coaxed out of her much more than she would ever have produced if she had worked alone. They represented her thoughts and attitudes authentically. But they could never quite overcome the problem that they were the autobiography of someone who did not think autobiographically.

Once the memoirs were out of the way, the question arose of what should happen to the Thatcher papers – the huge number of records accumulated over her political career. Although offered a very large sum of money by an American university, Lady Thatcher declined it, and gave an undertaking to the then Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robin Butler, that her papers would not be disposed of without her first offering them to the nation. Given that her own university, Oxford, had refused her an honorary degree when she was prime minister, she turned instead to Cambridge. In 1997, with the agreement of her family, she offered the papers, on permanent loan, to Churchill College, which has the best archive of modern British political documents. Once this was accomplished, her advisers then raised the matter of a biography. After some discussion, Lady Thatcher reached the view that, since her biography would undoubtedly be written, it would be best not to stand aside from the process, but to choose an author who, in her judgment, could be trusted with paper that had not yet been seen by the public and with the testimony from colleagues and family which the public had not yet heard. In 1997, the choice fell upon me. My impression was that I was chosen mainly for two reasons. As an editor, political journalist and commentator who had followed the period closely, I knew the dramatis personae. And, although my writing had generally been sympathetic to Mrs Thatcher, I was never part of her ‘gang’.

The arrangement that Lady Thatcher offered me was that I would have full access to herself, for interview, and to her papers. She would assist all my requests for interviews with others, including access to members of her family. Her writ also extended beyond Britain’s shores, particularly across the Atlantic, where numerous friends, acquaintances and former officials agreed to share memories, diaries and documents, many of which had never before seen the light of day. As a result of her support for the book, the then Cabinet Secretary, Sir Richard Wilson, gave permission for all existing and former civil servants to speak freely to me about the Thatcher years, and allowed me to inspect government papers, held back from public view under the thirty-year rule. The permission to study government paper was granted on the understanding that all quotations from them used in my manuscript should be submitted to the relevant departments before publication to make sure that they did not compromise national security. A few minor changes were made, but nothing of substantial importance to the book was removed. The book is not an official history, and so the Cabinet Office had no remit (and no inclination) to influence or suppress any of its views. It is described as the ‘authorized’ biography, because Mrs Thatcher asked me to write it, but our agreement also stipulated that Lady Thatcher was not permitted to read my manuscript and the book could not appear in her lifetime. This was partly to spare her, in old age, any controversy which might result from publication, but mainly to reassure readers that she had not been able to exert any control over what was said. It was helpful to some of the people I interviewed to know that she would never read what they told me. I was paid not by Lady Thatcher, but by my publishers, Penguin.

It is fair to say that, when Lady Thatcher and I first discussed the project in 1997, she regarded it with the same lack of interest which she usually showed in her own past. Always keen to stick to whatever she had undertaken to do, she granted me several lengthy interviews, and was invariably co-operative. In later years, as her memory declined and long, formal interviews became impossible, she would join me for friendly lunches at which I would extract small nuggets of information from our chats. But what was extraordinary, when one compares it with the way male politicians so often pick over the tiny details of their past achievements, was that she never once urged me to take a particular line, or even inquired what I intended to say about anything. Like all remarkable leaders, she had a great egotism. She always believed that she, and she alone, had rescued Britain from its post-1945 years of semi-socialist decline. She believed that the ‘-ism’ which derived from her married name would make a permanent difference to the story of human freedom. But she was not at all touchy, or even anxious, about what history might say about her.

This put her biographer in an unusual position. Most biographers working on a living subject have to deal with his or her intrusion, overenthusiasm or hostility. It is difficult for them not to write in their subject’s shadow. I kept expecting to come under hers, but I never did. This gave me enormous freedom. On the other hand, Lady Thatcher’s lack of aptitude for this sort of work could make her a frustrating source. She could rarely advise me on whom I should talk to about X or where I might find Y. (Luckily, many of those close to her could.) She had turned the key in the lock for me, but seldom seemed to know what was in the room beyond. And when I interviewed her, she found it hard to understand that historical inquiry is not the same as political combat. Her tendency, when asked a question about her past – what her father’s political views had been, say, or whom she had known best at Oxford – was to rush from the particular to the general. On one occasion, I asked her a question about her mother’s occupations. She replied that her mother had been a good seamstress and ‘she did wonderful voluntary work. And that’s the thing about the women of Britain – they do wonderful voluntary work – not like French women,’ and before I could stop her, she had made her escape from an uncongenial private subject to the area of political generalization which she preferred. Often, when all I wanted was a simple piece of information, I would find myself treated to a disquisition on some great matter like the rule of law, unintentionally provoked by a chance word. Sometimes, when her blood was up, Lady Thatcher would decide to ignore altogether the fact that I was her biographer and would treat me as if I were one of those television interviewers, such as Robin Day, with whom she had jousted over the years. ‘You only say that because you’re a socialist!’ she might shout when she felt in a tight corner, though (as she well knew) I was never a socialist in my life. She had a way, as Alan Clark once noted, of ‘jumping the rails’ in conversation. This was fascinating to experience, but not easy for the historian.

For most of her career, Margaret Thatcher showed the same lack of interest in her own papers as in her life story. She was one of those tidy people who get a positive pleasure from throwing things away. She saw it as one of the housewifely virtues of which she was proud. Before any general election, she made a point of clearing her desk in case she did not return to it. Whenever she moved house or office, which was fairly often, she threw away great piles of documents. She kept almost nothing from her childhood, and allowed a large number of family papers to be destroyed after her father died in 1970. Very little was retained from Oxford, or from early married life. As well as being uninterested in her own records, Mrs Thatcher was naturally secretive and guarded. She did not believe that others had a right to know about her life outside the public sphere. When, in the course of this work, I discovered more than 150 letters that Margaret had written to her sister Muriel between the end of the 1930s and the beginning of the 1960s, I learnt much more about her private life than had previously been revealed by all the other sources put together. She did keep some press cuttings of her early speeches, but tended to throw away things which she considered more personal. By her own account, she did not see the point of keeping many political papers while she was a young MP, or even when she was secretary of state for education, because ‘I just didn’t think I was going to be important.’ It was only when she stood for the party leadership in November 1974, winning it in February 1975, that she began to keep serious political files. This is attributable more to the fact that she had more people around to organize such things than to any interest of her own in keeping records.

Nor was Mrs Thatcher like those Victorian leaders who wrote voluminous diaries and recorded their thoughts in incessant letters to one another. She never kept a diary. She dashed off enormous numbers of letters (very rarely fully dated), often in her own hand, and with a warmth and charm which delighted the recipients, but these rarely revealed her thoughts in detail. Much more often, they were a few words of thanks, condolence or sympathy. They sometimes contained casual remarks which shed an interesting light on her views, but they almost never set out her reasoning on public questions at any length, or analysed her colleagues closely. She was interested in both these things, but felt safer expressing herself orally. Very occasionally, she put aside time to write her own private account of some important matter. The most striking of these, discussed in this volume, is her account of the Falklands War, which she wrote a year after the Argentine invasion. But, on the whole, the press of business and the fear of leaks reined in any desire she might have had to commit herself on paper. By far the most revealing written records of her political views are the notes she scribbled, as prime minister, on the vast volume of paper which poured across her desk. These were immediate reactions, to be picked up and interpreted by her private secretaries, normally seen by them alone. They are full of her urgent, often angry style, punctuated more by exclamation marks than by full stops, and emphasized by heavy underlining. She wrote hardly any memos herself.

So Mrs Thatcher’s biographer finds himself examining a life unexamined by the person who lived it. To me, this makes the work more fascinating. In her story of constant activity, one tries to discern the great themes – the nature of her ambition, the foundations of her beliefs, the development of her political skills, her attitude to love, marriage and family, and her methods of rising and surviving as a woman in a world almost completely controlled by men. The fact that she was the first and only woman leader of a British political party made everything different. It is for this reason that I refer to her, throughout her public career, as ‘Mrs Thatcher’: that is what people called her, and the word ‘Mrs’ was very important in their minds. The attitudes of colleagues, rivals and voters towards her – and her approach to them – were radically affected by her sex. Her handbag became the sceptre of her rule. She hardly analysed any of this at all, but she lived it out, often in situations of high drama. My task is to tell this exciting story, and to try to explain – as she never did or wanted to or could – what lies behind it.

There is so much to tell that the biography requires two volumes. I decided that the obvious break which she made in her autobiography – her victory in the general election of 1979 – would be the wrong one. It would make volume two, which would have to contain the whole of her crowded time as prime minister, unnecessarily dense. The break comes, instead, with her victory in the Falklands War in 1982. This was the decisive experience which made her leadership unquestioned within her party. Because of it, she reached her zenith. It provides the natural, climactic moment with which to end the first half of her story.

Readers will see that, once Mrs Thatcher becomes prime minister, there is no easy way to organize the narrative. This is always a problem with the lives of people acting simultaneously in different fields. In many ways, it is preferable to try to tell the story purely chronologically. In politics, as in life, one thing leads to another. It is also valuable, in rendering the life of a prime minister, to show how disparate events cut across one another – a terrorist attack, a bad by-election and a run on the pound may happen all on the same day, and the occupant of 10 Downing Street must deal with all of them at once. In general, I have followed this method. But there are times when a particular subject is so intense, and so separated from the ordinary run of other events, that it has to be treated in a separate chapter. In this volume, I have treated Northern Ireland, the Cold War and the Falklands in this way.

I am also conscious, in writing volume one, that volume two will follow. There are some themes which, though already present in the period covered in the first volume, became more important later. To avoid duplication, therefore, I have given rather little space in volume one to privatization and to Mrs Thatcher’s dealings with intelligence. Both of these will be discussed more fully in volume two. The same applies to what might be called the myth of Margaret Thatcher. She became a hate-figure to the left, a heroine to the right, and a leader of immense prestige abroad, particularly in the United States and Eastern Europe. This, too, will be dealt with more fully in the second volume.

Although I have spent my career in journalism, following politics closely, I must admit that I often find political biography dull. The amount of detail can seem disproportionate to the rather moderate interest of the character whose life is related. In the life of Margaret Thatcher, the amount of detail is huge, but the interest of the character does not fail. In the reaction to her death, it has intensified. She is someone about whom it is almost impossible to be neutral. People are fascinated, appalled, delighted by her. Many think she saved Britain, many that she destroyed it. The only thing that unites them is their interest. As she passes from current controversy into history, this interest is undimmed. Mrs Thatcher is becoming a national archetype round whom argument will forever swirl, like Henry VIII, or Elizabeth I, or Nelson, or Winston Churchill. And because of her sex, her beliefs and her character, she is also a global archetype – a leader against whom all others are measured: for some, a cautionary tale, for others, a lodestar.