Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography

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To me, consensus seems to be: the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that need to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner ‘I stand for consensus’?”

I quarrel with some of his judgments. He gives too little attention to the inner-city rioting, mass unemployment and savage deindustrialisation that disfigured her first term and is generally thin on the wider context in which she operated. He takes the conventional view about the Falklands war, the triumphant note on which this volume ends. Writing "she had indeed proved herself to be the Iron Lady", he implies that no other prime minister would have had the audacity to send the taskforce to the south Atlantic. The truth is, she had little choice. The alternative would have been her resignation. To be fair, he is balanced enough to also note why the Falkands sowed the seeds of hubris. "In her mind, it helped to create the dangerous idea that she acted best when she acted alone." And yet, Thatcher’s contains much more detailed political discussion. While Blair chooses to share his toilet habits, Thatcher writes long and detailed (though defensive) rationales for many of the policies she adopted. To give a single example from their respective autobiographies, I understand much more clearly Thatcher’s argument for defending the Falklands than Blair’s argument for invading Iraq. Where I disagree with Thatcher, I can still follow her line of argument in a way that I cannot even where I agree with Blair.Nevertheless, there's no denying that Thatcher was a highly intelligent, accomplished, capable, and impressive world leader. her career in public speaking. Denis Thatcher, her husband of more than fifty years, died in June 2003, John Major replaced Margaret Thatcher after she announced her resignation as Conservative Party leader and prime minister on November 22, 1990.

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.

The campaign in Dartford marked the beginning of an eventful decade. Margaret met her husband, Denis, a fellow scientist, and gave birth to twins – Mark and Carol. Her rise through the ranks of the Conservative party continued. In 1959, she was given a safe seat of her own – Finchley, in London.