Posted on 07/23/2013 4:59:08 AM PDT by Kaslin
The first volume of Charles Moore's authorized biography of Margaret Thatcher, covering her life up to Britain's victory in the Falklands, is out. It takes its place among the finest political biographies of all time.
Thatcher gave Moore full access to her papers and to all her friends and relatives, on condition that she never see the book. It was a wise precaution.
Moore is a conservative, more traditionalist than Mrs. Thatcher (as he always calls her) and broadly sympathetic to her causes. But he was able to get frank responses from relatives, friends, and colleagues that might never have been forthcoming had they thought the book would be published in her lifetime.
Moore catches her in some lies and omissions. A cache of letters to her sister showed she had four boyfriends before she married the rich businessman Denis Thatcher. She always wanted to wear fetching clothes and have her hair done.
The most important single fact about her, he says, is not that she was a conservative but that she was a woman, ready to use her charms as well as her intellect in dealing with men.
That's not quite in sync with the common understanding of her in this country, particularly among conservatives, who saw Thatcher as the Iron Lady, fearlessly putting her ideas into effect, eschewing compromise and never flinching from principle.
Such an approach, Moore indicates, would have been doomed to failure and was usually not her way. Her ideas developed slowly and changed over time. She waited to fight for many of her great victories -- over the coal miners, in privatizing government entities, subjects for volume two -- until she had laid the groundwork and was fully prepared. Hers was a strategy of conviction tempered by prudence, compromise in pursuit of later success.
Consider her early parliamentary career, unfamiliar to American admirers. As education secretary, she acquiesced in phasing out grammar schools which provided upward mobility to brainy lower-class children.
She didn't like the policy, but support was too strong. She ended up being cheered by the teachers union.
Nor was she was an early opponent of the European Union (then called the Common Market). Like most centrist politicians of both major parties, she supported British entry. As a tourist I watched the debate on the issue in the House of Commons in October 1971. West Country gentlemen with plummy pronunciation and Scots and North of England Laborites in incomprehensible regional accents spoke out against the Common Market. Thatcher may well have been in the hall, but I have no recollection of her speaking.
Four years later, after Edward Heath led the party to defeat, Thatcher was elected Conservative Party leader. Most senior party leaders voted against her.
In four years as leader of the opposition, Thatcher was a strong debater but not always a propagator of new ideas. Then Prime Minister James Callaghan made the miscalculation to delay the election until May 1979.
The 1979 Winter of Discontent -- strikes by coal miners, public employees, garbage men, even gravediggers -- turned voters away from Labor. The Conservatives ran a negative campaign, with the slogan "Laboor isn't working," and won a solid majority.
As prime minister, Thatcher did not always spur her colleagues to go as far as she liked. She acquiesced in tax increases until she got a budget with deeper spending cuts in 1981.
She started the process of privatizing public housing and privatized one public company by time of the June 1982 Falklands victory. She stocked up on coal and gave the miners union a lavish settlement; confrontation would come later.
Argentina's capture of the Falklands in April 1982 came as an unwelcome surprise at a time when Conservatives were running third in polls, far behind the new Social Democrats, led by four former Labor ministers.
Moore shows how she made the decisions that led to victory. And contrary to American conservatives' assumptions, she was angered at times by Ronald Reagan's support of U.S. mediation efforts and by the pro-Argentina stance of Jeane Kirkpatrick.
Charles Moore leaves off with Thatcher speaking at a dinner of 120 all-male officials celebrating victory in the Falklands. Spouses were in another room. At the end she rose and said, "Gentlemen, shall we join the ladies?"
"It may well have been," he writes, "the happiest moment of her life."
I just requested this from the library. There are a lot of authors named “Charles Moore”!
Finally an accounting of Baroness Thatcher’s life that can be respected. She deserves the truth to be told. She was a GIANT among world leaders.
And then there is this:
Moore catches her in some lies and omissions. A cache of letters to her sister showed she had four boyfriends before she married the rich businessman Denis Thatcher.
I guess that's considered scandalous. Seems kinda dull to me. Why does Barone put this in his review?
If you’re interested, I would highly recommend: “Margaret Thatcher - The Downing Street Years”, the best autobiography I’d read since “Benjamin Franklin”.
Thanks, I have that. We bought it when it first came out ... back in the days when I bought books, instead of patiently waiting on the library reserve list ;-).
If by “having four boyfriends” he means she was screwing around around, that would considered scandalous in a lady of her generation.
But back to Thatcher: If she had four serious boyfriends, but kept it very discrete, than that seems to adhere to the norms of her time. I think people did have sex in the 1940s. But if they kept it under the radar, it wouldn't be scandalous, and for people (us) to find out about it more than 50 years later probably shouldn't be scandalous either.
Barone seems to indicate that this falls into the "lies and omissions" category and that strikes me as needlessly judgmental.
Perhaps “scandalous” is the wrong word, because nobody really gives a hoot these days, it seems. However, if the future Mrs. Thatcher had four sex partners before her marriage in 1942, that would have been very unusual for a young woman of her class, no matter how discreet she was. Most girls didn’t screw around then. First, they were brought up with morals, and second, they didn’t want illegitimate babies and Mister Love-the-Free-Milk nowhere in sight.
Maybe the author was just trying to say there is new, not previously revealed, information in the new biography. This makes perfect sense: what’s the point of a new biography if it has no information that wasn’t in the previous ones?
Whoops, I don’t know why one link said the Thatchers married in 1942; it was 1951.
So she didn't talk about former boyfriends. And she liked to look her best.
If that is the worst they can say about her then she must have been very very good.
I’m reading that right now. I bought it at a goodwill store for a couple of bucks. I love the photos!
Hmmmm.
I bought mine at a library book sale - 5 bucks a bagfull, with Newts "Gettysburg" and a few other gems. (Our tax dollars at work).
Enjoy 10 Downing!
Thanks Kaslin.
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