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Fear in Those Blue Eyes

David Runciman: Thatcher in Her Bubble, 3 December 2015

Margaret ThatcherThe Authorised Biography Vol. II: Everything She Wants 
by Charles Moore.
Allen Lane, 821 pp., £30, October 2015, 978 0 7139 9288 5
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... Party is never happier than when Labour has a unilateral disarmer as its leader. In 1986 Margaret Thatcher arrived at her party’s annual conference in Bournemouth with a spring in her step, despite having endured months of bruising political infighting in the aftermath of the Westland affair. She promptly fell over a manhole cover and sprained ...

The Lady Vanishes

Zoë Heller, 20 July 1995

The Last of the Duchess 
by Caroline Blackwood.
Macmillan, 236 pp., £16.99, April 1995, 0 333 63062 9
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... had changed historical events more drastically than Mary Queen of Scots, or Joan of Arc, or even Margaret Thatcher, then perhaps Caroline Blackwood’s recycled revelations about the Duchess – her expertise at fellatio, her 22 carat gold bath-tub at Cap d’Antibes, the amusing tricks that her homosexual lover, the Woolworth heir Jimmy Donahue, liked ...

Short Cuts

Jenny Diski: The Falklands, 8 March 2012

... Who went to war to keep the Falklands British? Our one and only woman PM, the future Baroness Thatcher of the concrete hairdo, armoured handbag and pussy-bow. Our very own Britannia’s victory (‘Rejoice, rejoice’) is being challenged by an upstart Latin perra with loose hair and a fluid dress, a woman who dares to bring the matter up again, when it ...

At Inverleith House

Hal Foster: Richard Hamilton, 14 August 2008

... and deadening. At this point Hamilton was already feeling his Pop enthusiasms fade; by the time Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979 they seemed frivolous. Treatment Room (1983-84) is an installation that evokes a bare clinic: a partition with a window, a white trolley partially covered by a standard blanket, and an intrusive monitor showing a ...

The Darth Vader Option

Colin Kidd: The Tories, 24 January 2013

The Conservatives since 1945: The Drivers of Party Change 
by Tim Bale.
Oxford, 372 pp., £55, September 2012, 978 0 19 923437 0
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The Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron 
by Tim Bale.
Polity, 471 pp., £14.99, January 2011, 978 0 7456 4858 3
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Reconstructing Conservatism? The Conservative Party in Opposition, 1997-2010 
by Richard Hayton.
Manchester, 166 pp., £60, September 2012, 978 0 7190 8316 7
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... able to count on the loyalty of his most likely successor, Willie Whitelaw. While Whitelaw waited, Margaret Thatcher struck, and had built up considerable momentum by the time Whitelaw could bring himself to act. However, the successful assassin was herself to be toppled in the autumn of 1990 in a moment of group frenzy so bizarre that even Tory ...

The Irresistible Itch

Colin Kidd: Vandals in Bow Ties, 3 December 2009

Personal Responsibility: Why It Matters 
by Alexander Brown.
Continuum, 214 pp., £12.99, September 2009, 978 1 84706 399 1
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... Ever since the rise of Margaret Thatcher, personal responsibility has been the irresistible itch that the Conservative Party dare not scratch – at least not in public. Notwithstanding the party’s boosterish slogans of enterprise, freedom and low taxation, many of its elderly members – and some of its politicians – have long held to a more cautious ethos of middle-class respectability, restraint and downright frugality ...

Taking the blame

Paul Foot, 6 January 1994

Trail of the Octopus: From Beirut to Lockerbie – Inside the DIA 
by Donald Goddard and Lester Coleman.
Bloomsbury, 325 pp., £16.99, September 1993, 9780747515623
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The Media and Disasters: Pan-Am 103 
by Joan Deppa, Maria Russell, Dona Hayes and Elizabeth Lynne Flocke.
Fulton, 346 pp., £14.99, October 1993, 9781853462252
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... in January 1990 – that in mid-March 1989, three months after Lockerbie, George Bush rang Margaret Thatcher to warn her to ‘cool it’ on the subject. On what seems to have been the very same day, perhaps a few hours earlier, Thatcher’s Secretary of State for Transport, Paul Channon, was the guest of five ...

On Spanking

Christopher Hitchens, 20 October 1994

AGuide to the Correction of Young Gentlemen or, The Successful Administration of Physical Discipline to Males, by Females 
by a Lady, with illustrations by a Former Pupil.
Delectus, 140 pp., £19.95, August 1994, 1 897767 05 6
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... in point of its grand setting. And then there was a sort of sensation at the door and in came Margaret Thatcher. Rab’s shell crackled and contracted a little, as he tried to look flattered by the attention of his new leader: she whose whole purpose it was to cram Butskellism as harshly as possible into the WPB of history.And I? Reader, I was ...

Claiming victory

John Lloyd, 21 November 1985

The Miners’ Strike 
by Geoffrey Goodman.
Pluto, 213 pp., £4.50, September 1985, 0 7453 0073 1
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Strike: Thatcher, Scargill and the Miners 
by Peter Wilsher, Donald Macintyre and Michael Jones.
Deutsch, 284 pp., £9.95, September 1985, 0 233 97825 9
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... no choice but to fight an opponent who had declared war. Geoffrey Goodman makes the first case: Margaret Thatcher saw the NUM – Arthur Scargill in particular – as the embodiment of all that she held to be endemic in Britain’s economic decline: monopoly trade-unionism in a state industry subsidised well beyond the point of efficient market forces ...

An Enemy Within

Paul Foot, 23 April 1987

Molehunt: The Full Story of the Soviet Mole in MI5 
by Nigel West.
Weidenfeld, 208 pp., £10.95, March 1987, 0 297 79150 8
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... the service was matched only by a devotion to hounding the Left in society at large. He shared Mrs Thatcher’s view that socialists because they are socialists are traitors. In the early and middle Seventies, when the Left took vast strides forward in the industrial and political field, Wright and his supporters in the security services threw their ...

The View from Moscow

Boris Kagarlitsky, 20 April 1989

... Surprising though it may be to the British public, Mrs Thatcher is one of the most popular Western politicians in the Soviet Union, especially among the apparatchiki. It follows that the British Prime Minister is often a central figure in discussions among people on the left of Soviet public opinion. The experience of ten years of Conservative radicalism in Britain is too important historically to be ignored ...

Fear and Loathing in Limehouse

Richard Holme, 3 September 1987

Campaign! The Selling of the Prime Minister 
by Rodney Tyler.
Grafton, 251 pp., £6.95, July 1987, 0 246 13277 9
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Battle for Power 
by Des Wilson.
Sphere, 326 pp., £4.99, July 1987, 0 7221 9074 3
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David Owen: Personally Speaking 
by Kenneth Harris.
Weidenfeld, 248 pp., £12.95, September 1987, 0 297 79206 7
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... the key decision in the Conservative camp, on which all their three great warlords agreed – Margaret Thatcher, Norman Tebbit and Lord Young – as did their retinues of ad-men and advisers, was to run a campaign fuelled by fear, a re-run of ‘Don’t let Labour ruin it.’ Fear was a tune which the Prime Minister had practised assiduously over the ...

Hauteur

Ian Gilmour: Britain and Europe, 10 December 1998

This Blessed Plot: Britain and Europe from Churchill to Blair 
by Hugo Young.
Macmillan, 558 pp., £20, November 1998, 0 333 57992 5
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... Wilson became a potato controller at the Ministry of Food.’ In this, though in nothing else, Margaret Thatcher may have been rather similar to Wilson. During the war, the Roberts household naturally talked a great deal about Germany. The young Margaret, she wrote in her memoirs, ‘knew just what I thought of ...

On the Coalition

LRB Contributors, 10 June 2010

... were a couple of weeks in the summer of 2007 when Gordon Brown posed as a modern Leveller. Even Margaret Thatcher had her Norman St John-Stevas, with his ideas about select committees and revitalising Parliament. The Tory-Lib Dem partnership has been noisy enough about civil liberties, constitutional reform and the restoration of freedom but talk in ...

Keep Calm

Rosemary Hill: Desperate Housewives, 24 May 2007

Can Any Mother Help Me? Fifty Years of Friendship through a Secret Magazine 
by Jenna Bailey.
Faber, 330 pp., £16.99, March 2007, 978 0 571 23313 7
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... the vote, many of them lived through two world wars to see The Female Eunuch published and watch Margaret Thatcher arrive in Downing Street. Contraception, education, economic independence all became widely available to women in their lifetimes, while the institutions that had seemed to frame their destiny at birth, the empire, the class system and ...

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