Not for Turning: The Life of Margaret Thatcher

"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. Robin first met her when he was in the Conservative Party Research Department in the late 1970s and saw her regularly right through the 1980s as prime minister. When she went into internal exile after November 1990, he was with her every day, working in her private office. He was so close to her that he knew what she was thinking. When he drafted her memoirs for her it was a completely synthesised process because they more or less became each other. “Robin’s is the best single-volume biography, without question” 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. 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 don’t think they’re objective. They’re a good enough book, but everything that’s in them is in Charles’s work. It’s never occurred to me that they’d be worth reading, which is an awful thing to say. They give the impression of being written by a committee, which they were. When they came out in 1993, ’94, they were the first statement of what she had done—the Old Testament. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I review books all the time by politicians and so few of them are worth reading. Oddly enough, there are only two political memoirs that I’ve read that I thought were really brilliant. Both will surprise you. First, Jim Prior’s memoirs, which had the the most boring title in the world, A Balance of Power . He attacks Thatcher, which is fair enough; they didn’t get on. But he spends an awful lot of time in his memoirs saying what a complete fool he had been. He’s always saying how he made yet another mistake or did something else wrong. It’s so refreshing. When he’s covering his period working as Ted Heath’s permanent private secretary, he’s constantly saying, ‘I mucked something else up at this point,’ and, ‘I got this wrong,’ and, ‘Oh Jesus, why did I do this?’ It’s just really heartening. The other one is by John Peyton, a junior minister in Ted Heath’s government and then Mrs Thatcher’s. He wrote a book about his life called Without Benefit of Laundry . Apparently it was an Army phrase—it referred to the practice of very junior officers having to do their own laundry. That book, too, is about the sheer absurdity of political life. But most political books are truly bloody awful and all about justifying themselves. Mrs T didn’t have as much to justify as some people did. Much of what she had done already justified itself by the time she wrote her memoirs. But they’re just a boring read."