John Campbell: MARGARET THATCHER, Volume Two: The Iron Lady

Reviewed by JIM EAGLES

Even though it is 13 years since she last held public office Margaret Thatcher still evokes strong feelings.

"You're not going to read about her are you?" a colleague asked venomously, seeing the familiar face on the cover of the 913-page tome parked on my desk.

"Oooh, Margaret Thatcher, what's it like?" another inquired enthusiastically.

And, yes, I did read it, and found a marvellous book and well worth the effort.

Love her or hate her, Thatcher certainly made an impact, and not only in Britain.

The great strength of John Campbell's two-volume biography is that he seems able to stand above the strong feelings she evoked to offer a balanced assessment of the self-styled Iron Lady of politics.

The highly acclaimed first volume, The Grocer's Daughter, covered her childhood and early political career up to the 1979 election which brought her to power.

Now the second volume, The Iron Lady, brings us up to date with the 11 years as Prime Minister plus a final chapter, appropriately entitled "Afterlife", on the years after the ousting by her colleagues.

Together they represent a tale of the singleminded pursuit of power, its corrupting effect and the trauma of losing it.

Campbell was able to draw on a vast array of papers from Thatcher herself, her colleagues, advisers and rivals, as well as material from foreign sources such as the Ronald Reagan archives, the memoirs of Mikhail Gorbachev and the reminiscences of Helmut Kohl.

His conclusion is that Thatcher was neither as singlemindedly consistent as she would like the world to believe, nor as thoughtlessly destructive as her detractors claim.

Indeed, in her early days as Prime Minister, she was nervous of anything that might seem too extreme and was reluctant to put her policies into practice by taking unpopular steps such as tightening monetary policy, slashing public spending, chopping off state-owned lame ducks like British Leyland, abolishing exchange controls, or even taking on the union bogey of the National Union of Mineworkers.

Geoffrey Howe, her first Chancellor of the Exchequer, commented in his memoirs about "the ambivalence which Margaret often showed when the time came to move from the level of high principle and evangelism to practical politics".

Campbell concludes that the two tough decisions which set the early tone of the Thatcher Administration - the harsh first budget and the abolition of exchange controls - had to be almost forced on her. "Not," he writes, "the last time that a cautious Prime Minister had to be hauled over the hurdle by her more resolute colleagues."

On the other hand, when the crunch came, Thatcher could be counted upon to live up to her image.

She had no difficulty standing up for what she believed in the face of either enemies like the Soviet Politburo, or fellow heads of state from the European Union, or even her close friend Ronald Reagan.

Lord Carrington, her first Foreign Secretary, told of an early stopover in Moscow when Prime Minister Kosygin and half the Politburo came out to the airport for an unscheduled dinner with her.

"They were absolutely mesmerised by her," he recalled, "because ... she was very direct with them. She wasn't in the least overawed by Kosygin and all the hierarchy of the Soviet Union ... She just abruptly told them what she thought, and asked them questions, and said, 'No, I don't agree. I think that's absolutely wrong.' They were mesmerised by this."

Thatcher also held her nerve when, two years into her regime, her economic policies stubbornly refused to produce the expected revival, and her popularity plummeted to unprecedented depths. In a famous speech to the Tory Party Conference she told her critics, "You turn if want to. The lady's not for turning."

And fortune did favour the brave. The economy did start to recover, the opinion polls did begin to trend the other way ... and then she was lucky enough to to enjoy that politician's dream, a small, victorious war in the Falklands.

Thatcher was the sort of wartime leader the British have always loved - arguably a better leader than her hero, Churchill, because she did not keep interfering with the military planning - and she won not only the war but also enough political popularity to carry her through a couple of election victories.

When a suitable opportunity arose she also smashed the National Union of Mineworkers, severely weakening the wider union movement in the process, and underlined her victory with a series of reforms to industrial law.

But, as Campbell shows, the aggression and single-mindedness that was her greatest asset in winning those battles was also in the end the cause of her downfall.

The bluntness that mesmerised the Soviets antagonised the Europeans and the forcefulness that was necessary to drive her policies through the civil service and a sometimes unenthusiastic Cabinet ultimately alienated all her colleagues.

At the start of her reign Thatcher's insistence on subjecting policy proposals to a vigorous scrutiny was a strength.

Campbell quotes one senior civil servant as saying admiringly, "There was absolutely no side to this woman. She treated officials like fully fledged human beings who (at that stage of her premiership at least) were allowed their say ... As you talked, the electric blue eyes bored into you, as if probing for insincerities or fuzzy thinking.

"I liked the way she preferred plain speaking, even when she simplified things outrageously, and admired her 'can-do' style.

"If you made your point with conviction and could prove you were right, she would take the argument, while avoiding any appearance of doing so."

But over the years what started as a technique to force people to think through their ideas became little more than bullying, a reluctance to even listen to ideas other than her own, that eventually drove away her ablest supporters.

As a result, by the time Michael Heseltine launched his challenge to her leadership in 1990, she really had no one to organise her campaign and as a result it was a failure.

The issue was not the poll tax or even the approach to be taken to Europe, but that too many years in power had created too great a gap between the leader and the rank and file.

"Fundamentally," Campbell writes, "the very fact that Mrs Thatcher could not put together a decent campaign showed that she had lost the support of the central core of the parliamentary party."

Sadly, although she handled her loss of the leadership with dignity, Thatcher was unable to carry that approach through into retirement.

She continued interfering with the Tory party, in an attempt to preserve what she saw as her legacy, and as a result left it in a state of disarray from which it has still not recovered.

Probably because of that - and in spite of her rather self-serving memoirs - Thatcher's record has tended to follow the Shakespearean line on fallen leaders: "The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interred with their bones".

She is, as Campbell notes, "not merely the first woman and the longest-serving Prime Minister of modern times, but the most admired, most hated, most idolised, most vilified public figure of the second half of the 20th century.

"To some she was the saviour who 'put the Great back into Great Britain' after decades of decline ... To others she was a narrow ideologue whose hard-faced policies legitimised greed [and] deliberately increased inequality ... There is no reconciling these views: yet both are true."

That is a debate which should strike a chord in New Zealand where many of the same policy changes were implemented, often badly, but where they also successfully reversed decades of decline.

Helen Clark's Government, no less than Tony Blair's, happily reviles "the failed policies of the nineties" while equally happily leaving the main elements in place and thriving on the resulting improved economic performance.

Campbell's verdict on Thatcher is one which in many ways could also apply to our 1984 Labour Government.

"She may have achieved less than she claimed, but she still achieved much that was necessary and overdue."

Publisher: Random House

Price: $79.95