I was thinking of her the other day when Des O’Connor died. She wrote a piece about the Maastricht Treaty in The European that caused huge trouble with John Major. This would have been in 1992, probably, and the paper was owned by the Barclay brothers. She asked me to write the article for her. So I wrote it and took it round to Chesham Place, where she worked after leaving office. We were going through it when one of her secretaries came in and said, ‘Major’s said something this afternoon. It’ll be on the news at 5:45 on ITN’—in about five minutes. She became increasingly skeptical about the EC as time went on, though. The more powers that were delegated to Brussels, the more she worried that the EC was eroding democracy in member states.

Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography - Google Books

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. Margaret threw herself into politics. She took part in debates, gave speeches, and campaigned for the Conservative party in the general election of 1945. Thatcher had eighteen months to write the book covering her premiership. She hired a previous director of the Conservative Research Department, Robin Harris, to do most of the writing, the Oxford academic Christopher Collins to do the research and O'Sullivan to help polish the drafts. Just like with her speeches, Thatcher would "edit, criticise and exhaustively rewrite the drafts" until she was happy. [10] 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? The miners' strike was one of the most violent and long lasting in British history. The outcome was uncertain, but after many turns in the road, the union was defeated. This proved a crucial development, because it ensured that the Thatcher reforms would endure. In the years that followed, the Labour Opposition quietly accepted the popularity and success of the trade union legislation and pledged not to reverse its key components.The National Union of Mineworkers played a key role in those strikes. They stopped coal production and caused severe fuel shortages. Heath’s government collapsed the following year. She was touchy because she knew it was something that, as part of her programme, she ought to have done. She also knew that with three million people unemployed, you couldn’t just cut them off at the knees and say, ‘Well the state’s not going to help you.’ But I think she had a view that, had she been able to stay in power for 20 years, which I don’t think she ever dreamed of doing, the time would come when there would be high levels of employment. Then she could have started to reform the welfare state. It would have attracted the same criticism that David Cameron got when Iain Duncan Smith was doing it in the coalition government. That wasn’t Margaret’s world. She was the daughter of a grocer. She grew up above the family shop in a provincial town, and attended a modest grammar school, though only after winning a scholarship. British policy in Northern Ireland had been a standing source of conflict for every Prime Minister since 1969, but Margaret Thatcher aroused the IRA's special hatred for her refusal to meet their political demands, notably during the 1980-81 prison hunger strikes.

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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. She also started studying political philosophy. It was at Oxford, for example, that she first read Friedrich Hayek – one of the twentieth century’s most influential opponents of socialism. Does he land any telling blows in the book, or are there aspects of Margaret Thatcher’s programme that ultimately failed that he was particularly prescient about?

British sailors first landed here in 1690, but the islands were only incorporated into the British empire in 1833. The first permanent inhabitants arrived shortly after that. 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. The union’s leader, a Marxist called Arthur Scargill, declared war on the government. It wasn’t the first time he’d done that – Scargill was on the frontlines of the strikes which toppled Heath in ’74. 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.’ Hard work, self-reliance, and private initiative – those were the values which Margaret admired. No faction in Oxford was more committed to those values than the Conservatives.

Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography - Goodreads

I don’t know how far the Chinese economy is capitalist. Nor do I know how long the present model of the Chinese economy will be able to survive and grow without greater liberties being given to people. Singapore has an authoritarian capitalist system, or it did when I last went there and Harry Lee was still prime minister, but there’s obviously infinitely more liberty in Singapore than there is in China. There has to be proper mobility of labour and there has to be the means of spreading ownership, which you don’t have in China. The country’s economy grew steadily after the showdown with the miners, and Margaret Thatcher was rewarded with a third general election victory in 1987.

I believe, The greatest prime minister that Britain has seen and her strength and focus was truly inspiring given what she had to stand up to. She took us out of the brink of the dark ages and contributed to us completely turning around our economy - we are now prosperous.