Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography. Vol. 1, Not for Turning, by Charles Moore

Abstract

Charles Moore Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography. Vol. I, Not for Turning London: Allen Lane, 2013. 895 pp. $39.00 (cloth) ISBN 978-0713992823The first volume of Charles Moore's official biography of Margaret Thatcher is in some ways surprising. Presumably picked for the task because of his Thatcherite predilections, the long-time Tory journalist wrote with exclusive access to the former prime minister and her papers, as well as many of her associates. The portrait he paints is elegantly crafted if overlong, and, while more richly detailed than the highly critical biographies by Hugo Young and John Campbell, confirms their essential findings. He too finds a leader whose fabled resolve sometimes tips into obstinacy but is as often tempered by a surprising pragmatism. Moore flirts unconvincingly with the idea that Thatcher was an embryonic libertarian from an early age, but more plausibly settles on the view that she identified with, and reflected the views of the small-business, lower-middle-class, Tory grassroots who had never fully reconciled themselves to the party leadership's acceptance of Keynesian economics and the postwar welfare state.Not all of the new material Moore has found rewards his industry. The muchballyhooed discovery of a cache of youthful letters to her sister shows the undergraduate Margaret to have been less preoccupied with politics and more with fashion, food, and previously unknown early boyfriends than other biographers have known. Likewise, is no more than mildly surprising or illuminating that her eventual husband, Denis, decamped for a time to South Africa during a midlife crisis when it was... possible that their marriage would end (175). Moore is on solid ground when he highlights the implausibility of her ascent in light of her humble origins and lack of the standard political gifts of charm and easy eloquence. Instead, she relied on remorseless labour to master her brief; for all her fabled affinity for Ronald Reagan, in her triumph of fortitude over lack of natural talent she is closer to Richard Nixon. Discipline carried her from candidate in unwinnable riding to backbencher to ministerial office in the government of Edward Heath.At crucial moments, she was lucky. In 1975 she won the leadership largely because Heath had not only lost three out of four elections but also alienated even like-minded MPs by his ham-handedness in personal relations. And in much of the run-up to the 1979 election she was significantly less popular than the Labour Party prime minister James Callaghan, who cleaved to the centre ground and himself took steps away from the Keynesian consensus Thatcher was determined to shatter. But Callaghan shied away from calling an election in late 1978, which he might well have won, and by 1979 a resurgence of trade union militancy had destroyed his standing with the electorate and made Thatcher's victory as close to inevitable as politics allows.Moore is sympathetic to the economic program of Thatcher's early years, which stressed the defeat of inflation over that of unemployment, the setting of wages by the free play of market forces rather than government incomes policy, and the control of state spending. There is no discussion here of whether a more measured version of her program (rather than what the Labour politician Denis Healey labeled sado-monetarism) might have worked better, nor acknowledgement that Thatcher never succeeded in either reducing spending or boosting the prod- uctivity of Britain's economy. Moore provides the most detailed description to date of internal debates over the government's economic direction, and plausibly argues that the public debate between Thatcherites and proponents of a return to the Keynesian consensus was less consequential for the making of policy than debates among those who were in broad agreement about the correctness of the Thatcherite course but differed over the timing and details of implementation. …