Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography

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At long last, I’ve finished this magnificent biography. Dedicated, dense, detailed study of a truly fascinating woman and leader. 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?”

Margaret Thatcher : The Autobiography - Google Books Margaret Thatcher : The Autobiography - Google Books

It’s very thoroughly researched. And I can’t imagine that there’s very much anyone would want to know about Mrs Thatcher that’s not in it. These days, to have a monumental three-volume life like that is pretty unusual. But, unlike a lot of those multi-volume politicians’ lives, it isn’t boring.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. In the process, Margaret Thatcher became one of the founders, with Ronald Reagan, of a school of conservative conviction politics, which has had a powerful and enduring impact on politics in Britain and the United States and earned her a higher international profile than any British politician since Winston Churchill. Mrs T wasn’t grand, but she knew that her coming into some people’s lives was a big deal for them and she wanted them to be happy” He also says things like, ‘You don’t tax a loss, you can only tax a profit, so we need rich people. We need to create money. If you are a Labour adherent and you want to welfare state, then you have to accept that that welfare state has to be paid for and, it’s only paid for by rich people and rich companies.’

Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography - Google Books

These are the Dead Sea Scrolls of Powellism. This is Powellism, red in tooth and claw. It’s got the Birmingham speech in it and other speeches on immigration which, by the way, are really worth reading for people who believe Powell was a racist, because Powell doesn’t talk about race once. All he talks about is immigration and he doesn’t specify who’s doing the immigrating. So, it’s useful for that reason. But, anyway, Charles brings all that out in the books and if you read them you will—slightly dangerous thing to say—know everything you need to know about her. Above all, Charles has presented to the world a completely honest and accurate account of Margaret Thatcher. She is over-innocent about her attitudes to her own fortunes at this time.””If that time comes and people thought I was that woman, I would accept the challenge and do the job-as I have tried to do everything in my life- to the utmost of my ability.” Margaret Thatcher's home and early life in Grantham played a large part in forming her political convictions. Her parents, Alfred and Beatrice Roberts, were Methodists. The social life of the family was lived largely within the close community of the local congregation, bounded by strong traditions of self-help, charitable work, and personal truthfulness. That’s probably quite a good moment to move on to Enoch Powell because I wanted to ask you about his views on the US in relation to his influence on Mrs Thatcher. At least ostensibly, it seems to be an area where they might have had profound disagreements. But, anyway, tell us why you’ve chosen Freedom and Reality in particular, which is a collection of his speeches that were published in 1969, which would have been the year after his highly controversial ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech and the year before Heath was elected prime minister.I wonder whether he’ll do a second edition in a few years’ time. I think there were some cabinet papers he was unable to access under the 30-year rule. That’s the only thing that’s missing from the book, simply because when he was writing the first volumes not everything was out. Everything’s out now. It’s certainly one of those rare books that, if more information arises, it should be updated. It didn't hurt that Britain in the 70s was a mess. I'm still amazed at the amount of top-down control the government had, and how it stifled growth and innovation while encouraging inflation and unrest. And the immense power granted to labor unions in government-controlled industries only doubled the problem. I laugh at the PM's cabinet sitting around discussing what the interest rate should be, but that is what they did. Britain was desperate for a breath of free, fresh air, and Thatcher provided it. This is not just one of the great libertarian texts of all time—and Mrs T was to an extent a libertarian, certainly in economic matters—but it’s one of the great counter-cultural texts of all time. Hayek, when he wrote it, was a professor at the LSE. The Beveridge Report had come out two years earlier and it was the year of the 1944 Education Act. He sees the state growing and growing and imposing its will and influence in all sorts of areas. I first met her in 1986. I was 25, the US Air Force had just bombed Libya, and Mrs T had—somewhat controversially as it turned out—given permission for the US planes to take off from bases in the UK. 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.”

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume 1: Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume 1:

Ironically, this is where Hayek thought welfarism was leading. Hayek believed—and Mrs Thatcher believed all this, as well—that socialism was about control and liberalism, in its true sense, was about letting people fend for themselves, to make their own decisions and go as they wished. And it’s absolutely crystal clear that Mrs Thatcher based her whole approach to government on that Hayekian principle. Oddly enough, Enoch didn’t like Hayek. Enoch thought he was an unduly rigid foreigner who didn’t understand our ways and customs. But actually, they agreed on most things, although they came to it from different angles. 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. These are the arguments that Mrs Thatcher set out in her Bruges speech. I went to Bruges with her that day. I read the speech on the plane going over and I remember just saying to the journalist next to me, ‘Enoch wrote this 20 years ago. This is Enoch.’ Margaret Hilda Roberts was born 13 October 1925 in Grantham, Lincolnshire. Her father owned a grocery store and was active in the local Methodist Church and Liberal politics. Margaret won a scholarship to the local Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School, where she became head-girl. She applied to Somerville College, Oxford University, and was accepted to study chemistry in 1943. She graduated in 1947 with second-class honours. During her time at Oxford, she was elected President of the Oxford University Conservative Association in 1946.Critics and supporters alike recognise the Thatcher premiership as a period of fundamental importance in British history. Margaret Thatcher accumulated huge prestige over the course of the 1980s and often compelled the respect even of her bitterest critics. Indeed, her effect on the terms of political debate has been profound. Whether they were converted to 'Thatcherism', or merely forced by the electorate to pay it lip service, the Labour Party leadership was transformed by her period of office and the 'New Labour' politics of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown would not have existed without her. Her legacy remains the core of modern British politics: the world economic crisis since 2008 has revived many of the arguments of the 1980s, keeping her name at the centre of political debate in Britain. 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. 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. She wasn’t a woman of ideas,’ Alfred Sherman developed his theory about Mrs Thatcher’s intellectual character. ‘she was a woman of beliefs, and beliefs are better than ideas.’” Keith Joseph 谈到英国二战后的经济政策：“We made things worse when, after the war, we chose the path of consensus. “ They had promised too much and been guilty of ‘subordinating the rule of law to the avoidance of conflict.’’In short, by ignoring history, instincts, human nature and common-sense, we have intensified the very evils which we believed, with the best of intentions, that we could wipe away.’” 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.

Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography – HarperCollins

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. Charles Hilary Moore is an English journalist and a former editor of The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph and The Spectator. He still writes for the first and last of these publications. The Roberts family ran a grocery business, bringing up their two daughters in a flat over the shop. Margaret Roberts attended a local state school and from there won a place at Oxford, where she studied chemistry at Somerville College (1943-47). Her tutor was Dorothy Hodgkin, a pioneer of X-ray crystallography who won a Nobel Prize in 1964. Her outlook was profoundly influenced by her scientific training. Moore is certainly a fan but avoids slipping toward hagiography. He provides a fine introduction to Lady Thatcher: her early years are well covered, as is her time as an undergrad and her embrace of the Conservative ethos.But when Mikhail Gorbachev emerged as a potential leader of the Soviet Union, she invited him to Britain in December 1984 and pronounced him a man she could do business with.She did not soften her criticisms of the Soviet system, making use of new opportunities to broadcast to television audiences in the east to put the case against Communism.Nevertheless, she played a constructive part in the diplomacy that smoothed the break-up of the Soviet Empire and of the Soviet Union itself in the years 1989-91. He also talks extensively about monetarism in this book. He says it’s no good governments blaming trade unions for inflation. Inflation is caused by printing money and, if the growth in the supply of money exceeds the growth in GDP, we’re going to have inflation, because there will be too much money chasing too few goods. It’s as simple as that. Drawing on an extraordinary cache of letters to her sister Muriel, Moore illuminates Thatcher’s youth, her relationship with her parents, and her early romantic attachments, including her first encounters with Denis Thatcher and their courtship and marriage. Moore brilliantly depicts her determination and boldness from the very beginning of her political career and gives the fullest account of her wresting the Tory leadership from former prime minister Edward Heath at a moment when no senior figure in the party dared to challenge him. His account of Thatcher’s dramatic relationship with Ronald Reagan is riveting. This book also explores in compelling detail the obstacles and indignities that Thatcher encountered as a woman in what was still overwhelmingly a man’s world. 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.