Margaret Thatcher

"John Campbell is a brilliant writer. So much has been written about Thatcher, much of it highly admiring and Campbell has gone into great detail and given us a very clear view of Thatcher which is different from the picture you get from the right-wingers who tend to write about her. It is refreshingly different. Yes, but what Campbell manages to do is be reasoned in his criticism, not just vitriolic and hostile. It is a very nuanced insight into Thatcher. Now, of course, when Thatcher dies we will get the two-volume biography from Charles Moore, which has the superb Daniel Collings as the senior researcher. This is going to have a flood of information in it and it will be immensely exciting when that book comes out. But I think Campbell’s book will still be read about Thatcher in 50 years’ time because he writes extraordinarily well and has a brilliant insight into the minds of prime ministers. I wrote a two-volume biography. In the first book I tried to say that he was made up kaleidoscopically, who, at school or university, most unusually, had not had political interests or particular world views, and who was forged by the imprint of different people and different events on him. So it was a book written around the 20 people who had made him what he was and the 20 events that had made him what he was – this supremely pragmatic, ambitious, power-hungry person whose overarching idea was to reconcile differences and try and triangulate them, to find a certain point between two opposing points of view. This was the pragmatic vision that the modernised Labour Party had. It was much clearer about modernising Labour than having a programme for office. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter In volume two I looked at how that came to be a disadvantage. I think it was only towards the end of his premiership that he was able to find his defining policy plans. If he had been able to do that early on it would have been a much more developed programme. I don’t feel I want to change any of that. I am highly critical of him over Iraq. I am sure I will revise some things but the essential judgment that he took a long time to come to his policy and he largely squandered his first term as a result of it, because he wasn’t clear what he wanted to do domestically, remains the same. His clearest policy achievements came in those areas where he was able to use his extraordinary triangulation skills, as we see with the results he got in the Northern Ireland peace agreement."