Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume 3

The third installment in Moore's densely packed, endlessly revealing life of the Iron Lady. Continuing a story that, though skillfully told, runs very long, Moore begins in the late spring of 1987, when Margaret Thatcher has just won her third victory in the general election. Electoral contests in Britain, he reminds us, are "parliamentary, not presidential, and are based on parties, not individual leaders." Nevertheless, it is indisputable that Thatcher won on the strength of steely charisma and achievements that lifted British spirits, from overseeing the end of a long recession to securing victory in the Falklands War. Things were vastly different in 1990, when British voters took an overwhelmingly different view of her: They were, Moore writes, "unimpressed by divisions over Europe, the return of double-digit inflation and the perceived injustices of the poll tax." Worse yet, Thatcher had become personally unpopular as well, seen as someone who had simply stopped listening to the people. When she entered her third term, her approval rating was 52%, but at the end, it was below 33%. Spy scandals and the morale-sapping conflict in Northern Ireland did not help matters. Engineered out of the leadership of the Conservative Party by challengers such as John Major and Michael Heseltine, Thatcher was not shy about nursing grudges, considering Major to be "a nice, useless man, who cannot lead." Moore shows that her last years in office were not without their own accomplishments, including cementing a renewed relationship with the United States and helping bring about the fall of the Soviet Union and an end to the Cold War. Nonetheless, the author also points to the failures of Thatcher's brand of libertarianism, characterized by the mantra "diffuse, disperse, devolve." That strain of politics has lingering effects in a Conservative Party still tinged with Thatcherism, with such results as Brexit and the specter of a U.K. that will perhaps soon be disunited. Very likely the last word on the late prime minister, whose legacy is still playing out in Britain today.

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October 21, 2019
Journalist Moore (Margaret Thatcher: At Her Zenith) depicts the final decades of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s life, including her third consecutive general election victory in 1987 and the intraparty discord that led to her ouster as Conservative Party leader in 1990, in this impressive conclusion to his multivolume authorized biography. Moore presents Thatcher’s last years in power thematically, analyzing the prime minister’s beliefs and actions on the AIDS crisis; climate change (according to Moore, Thatcher did “more than any other non-American to encourage the United States towards a global, well-funded approach to climate change”); the democratization of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany; the poll tax; and the debate over England’s entry into the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, among other issues. Though Moore handily dissects these political matters, his narrative structure occasionally obfuscates their interdependence as well as the wobbly nature of Thatcher’s popularity at the time. The chapters depicting her fall from power, however, are expertly wrought. Moore concludes with a portrait of Thatcher’s long health decline in her post–Downing Street years. Drawing on primary historical documents as well as firsthand interviews with key players in Thatcher’s personal and political lives, Moore delivers a frank and weighty testament to the impact of a stateswoman whose “vices were inseparable from her virtues.”