Offering a riveting firsthand version of the critical moments of her premiership – the Falklands War, the miners' strike, the Brighton bomb and her unprecedented three election victories, the book reaches a gripping climax with an hour-by-hour description of her dramatic final days in 10 Downing Street. 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. In October 1984, when the strike was still underway, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) attempted to murder Margaret Thatcher and many of her cabinet by bombing her hotel in Brighton during the Conservative Party annual conference. Although she survived unhurt, some of her closest colleagues were among the injured and dead and the room next to hers was severely damaged. No twentieth-century British Prime Minister ever came closer to assassination. rapid rebuttal）跟Joseph Keith的软弱形成鲜明对比。”The Thatcher camp, which had retained discipline throughout, now suffered a lapse of taste.””It looked as though they were rubbing Heath’s nose in his defeat.”

The Downing Street Years - Wikipedia The Downing Street Years - Wikipedia

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. I think what she instinctively knew was that all empires fail. There was evidence of that during her reign because the Soviet bloc collapsed. Hugo was taking a very ahistorical point of view by saying that this empire, uniquely, was inevitably going to be a thousand-year Reich—my words, not his. And it was balls. It was never going to happen. To me, consensus seems to be: the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that need to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner ‘I stand for consensus’?” In her mid-twenties she ran as the Conservative candidate for the strong Labour seat of Dartford at the General Elections of 1950 and 1951, winning national publicity as the youngest woman candidate in the country. People like Hugo just didn’t seem to get that. They lived in great splendour in Islington and would go down to the Guardian in their sedan chairs and live an existence in which many of the realities of life didn’t really impinge upon them. It’s very easy to be grand and idealistic and say, ‘Oh, the poor miners.’ Yes, the poor miners. I was very sorry for them. I’m sorry for anybody who loses his job. Mrs Thatcher offered re-training schemes. There were regeneration schemes. There were enterprise zones. She did make an attempt to do things better. But she encountered the same problem that the national government encountered in the 1930s; the economic revival had to start somewhere. After 1931, after the slump, it started around London and in car factories in the West Midlands. It didn’t start in the places where the old industries had lost their export markets and their products were no longer required.

In international terms, her effect on bringing down the Berlin Wall and her relationship with Gorbachev were very important. It’s just a shame that he’s been replaced with another form of tyrant, but at least it’s a tyrant who has, as yet, not moved too far beyond the boundaries of his own country. Margaret Thatcher was an amazing political leader. In her own lifetime she was both admired and reviled by many. Even on the occasion of her death the responses could be quite loud. Margaret Thatcher: From Grantham to the Falklands is the first volume in a two volume biography of the Iron Lady by author Charles Moore. Moore spent many years working on this project. Lady Thatcher gave him access to her own material and encouraged others to talk to him. The only stipulation was that the book be published after her death. Moore is quite thorough in his work. He covers Thatcher’s life in great detail. He also covers her personality. This is not an attempt to canonize the subject. Thatcher is shown to be stubborn, difficult, and at times even a bit abusive of her colleagues. Moore points out her many weaknesses as well as her strengths. The overall image is not flattering, but it does show a very human Thatcher, something that we do not see very often when she is portrayed. Hayek started writing The Road to Serfdom in the 1930s, I think. He was terrified of both communism and fascism. Partly as a result of that, he has this very tight identification in his argument between personal freedom and economic freedom and you can totally see why that was very persuasive throughout most of the 20th century. I was just wondering whether, with the emergence of China as a capitalist, but highly authoritarian state, Hayek’s work is less immediately relevant on that account. Or would you argue that it is perennially important and can be used to criticise the kind of authoritarian capitalism that we see now? 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. Robin spent years with her, day after day. Charles didn’t. And Robin knew her better than anybody who will ever write a book about her. Charles does capture her perfectly. But if you want the absolute character verification of Mrs T, you read Robin’s book.

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

Geoffrey Howe reviewed the book in the Financial Times, Nigel Lawson in the Evening Standard, Douglas Hurd in The Spectator, Norman Tebbit in the Daily Mail and Bernard Ingham in the Daily Express. Oh, I suppose you’re right,’ she said. And then, just as the adverts ended and the news was about to begin, up came a trailer for Des O’Connor Tonight. She looked at me and said, ‘Who’s Des O’Connor?’Many Conservatives were ready for a new approach after the Heath Government and when the Party lost a second General Election in October 1974, Margaret Thatcher ran against Heath for the leadership. To general surprise (her own included), in February 1975 she defeated him on the first ballot and won the contest outright on the second, though challenged by half a dozen senior colleagues. She became the first woman ever to lead a Western political party and to serve as Leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons. Yes, it was. And he did it very well. It convinced him that there had to be some sort of state provision in a properly humane society. I think when he said that Hayek didn’t really understand how Britain worked, that was something at the front of his mind, that Hayek didn’t understand that we had to have a national health service, because we weren’t a brutal country like the Austria that had invited Hitler in. Of course, it would be extremely unfair to blame Hayek for any of that. He had left Austria in 1931, but I think Enoch thought there was a middle-European mentality, that didn’t understand the British way of life. Readers not familiar with the British system of government (where the Prime Minister and the Cabinet are all elected members of Parliament) it will seem amazing that from the beginning Thatcher had to fight not only with the opposing Labour party, but with members of her own cabinet. Many in her cabinet considered her as nothing more than a fluke and wanted to remove her from power so that they would be able to resume the game of politics as normal. That was not to happen. At least not for a long time. She served in Heath’s cabinet, I think for the duration of that government, 1970-74. Was she close to Enoch Powell in the 1960s, or was she just quietly sympathetic, or was she actually not converted at that stage?

Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography – HarperCollins

It does not matter what you say or do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves.I suspect there is now such a sea-change - and it is for Mrs Thatcher.’ I remain, Your Majesty’s obedient servant”. 一堆势利眼的同事，有些是‘top of the list of snobs’。旧体制内的人对撒切尔当选为tony领袖羡慕嫉妒恨。 The Labour Government of 1974-79 was one of the most crisis-prone in British history, leading the country to a state of virtual bankruptcy in 1976 when a collapse in the value of the currency on the foreign exchanges forced the government to negotiate credit from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF imposed tight expenditure controls on the government as a condition of the loan, which, ironically, improved Labour's public standing. By summer 1978, it even looked possible that it might win re-election.

By successfully shifting British economic and foreign policy to the right, her governments helped to encourage wider international trends which broadened and deepened during the 1980s and 1990s, as the end of the Cold War, the spread of democracy, and the growth of free markets strengthened political and economic freedom in every continent. She lost both times, but cut the Labour majority sharply and hugely enjoyed the experience of campaigning. Aspects of her mature political style were formed in Dartford, a largely working class constituency which suffered as much as any from post-war rationing and shortages, as well as the rising level of taxation and state regulation. Unlike many Conservatives at that time, she had little difficulty getting a hearing from any audience and she spoke easily, with force and confidence, on issues that mattered to the voters. For me, the heart of politics is not political theory, it is people and how they want to live their lives.”

Biography Margaret Thatcher | Biography Online Biography Margaret Thatcher | Biography Online

Thatcher died on 8 April 2013 at the age of 87 after suffering a stroke. Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography You would think you were not bringing up your child properly if you said “yes” to everything they asked for. What sort of government would that be?” I was. I joined the Telegraph in February or March, 1986. She turned up for lunch at the Telegraph in May or June ’86, just after the bombings in April. She and Max Hastings, who was then the editor, had a huge row about this. She just steamrollered him. The atmosphere was very bad. It was after that that Bill Deedes wrote to her suggesting that I might work for her. Anyway, she had good reports of me. I was approached to be director of the Conservative Research Department about a year before she was defenestrated, which I turned down for all sorts of reasons. She brought that totally un-hypocritical sense of virtue, energy and hard work into her view of political life”I remember Ralph Harris saying to me—and he got this from Hayek—’If you pay people to be unemployed, you’ll have unemployment. If you stop paying them to be unemployed, jobs will turn up.’ Let’s move on to Robin Harris’s book. I think he was Margaret Thatcher’s speech writer and helped her write her memoirs. But what does he add to this story that is not in the official biography? Charles Moore focuses very much on her private decision making processes, rather than discussing the broader social and political landscape. Does Harris do more of that? The last time I saw Denis would have been March or April 2003. He died that autumn. He was just about to go to hospital. I asked him what he’d like to drink. He said he’d have a gin and vermouth. I got a large tumbler and started filling it with gin and asked him to say ‘when’. It was quite near the top when he said ‘when’. Then I put the vermouth in. It went down amazingly rapidly. we were soul mates when it came to reducing government and expanding freedom.”称撒切尔有可能成为英国9百多年来第一位女首相。撒切尔第一次访美时说“we are the same people as we were. We have the same sense of adventure. We are inventive... We are an eleventh-hour nation. We tend to wait till the last minute until we act. Well, we are at the eleventh hour now and action is being taken.” Beginning with her upbringing in Grantham, she goes on to describe her entry into Parliament. Rising through the ranks of this man’s world, she led the Conservative Party to victory in 1979, becoming Britain's first woman prime minister.