Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography

"Political memoirs are sometimes a little bit dull. Margaret Thatcher’s are not. They were partly ghosted by one of her colleagues, Robin Harris, but she certainly set the parameters and they are highly readable. They’re not gossipy in the sense that Tony Blair’s memoirs, for example, are. Blair’s was a splurge. It was like they’d been written by a sixth former, almost. I mean, he even talked about having conceived one of his children while at Balmoral with the Queen. I’m thinking: do we really need to know that? You don’t get that kind of detail in Margaret Thatcher’s memoirs—thank goodness. But, they are historical documents, two volumes. The first volume goes up to the moment she took power in 1979. I think they help you understand her motivations. Obviously, when you write an autobiography, it is your one opportunity to get your version of events on the record. It’s often said about political biography or autobiography that they are works of fiction about yourself. I don’t think hers are. There is a certain rawness to certain parts of it. The chapter where she describes how she was ousted in 1998 was very emotional for a woman who wasn’t that emotional. In the section on the Falklands War, she writes about all of the letters that she wrote to the families of the soldiers who were killed—255 handwritten personal letters. They were all different. She describes how when HMS Sheffield was sunk, and she was told the news, she sat there in tears. Now, in theory, you don’t really want a prime minister who will get very emotional having made decisions over military strategy. But it belied her reputation as the Iron Lady. She was the Iron Lady, but she did show emotions from time to time. We have to remember that there had not been a woman prime minister before her. Even on the day before she was elected, she did a party political broadcast to reassure voters that while there may not have been a woman prime minister before, ‘I’m capable of doing this, trust me.’ And, obviously, people did. She was there for 11 and a half years and it was a tumultuous time. She was the politician that got me interested in politics. And it’s a cliche to say, but we’ll never see the likes of her again. Even people who really hated her, I think have now come to respect the fact that she did what she thought was right, even if they disagreed with it. The fact that this book is still in print is testament to the fact that, thirty years after her departure from office, she still, as you said, extends a massive influence over British politics."