34 The New York Review
Thatcher: The Letting Go
Anne Applebaum
Margaret Thatcher:
The Authorized Biography:
Herself Alone
by Charles Moore.
Knopf, 1,006 pp., $40.00
When Sir Geoffrey Howe got up to de-
liver his resignation statement in the
House of Commons on Tuesday, No-
vember 13, 1990, the room felt expect-
ant—in the words of Charles Moore
in Margaret Thatcher: Herself Alone,
“like a theatre audience before a new
show.” Howe had been a senior mem-
ber of Prime Minister Thatcher’s cabi-
net since the beginning of her term in
office, most recently as British foreign
secretary. But he had had enough. A
few days earlier, he had told Thatcher
he would quit, news that surprised but
did not initially distress her. Howe was
considered loyal but boring by Thatch-
er’s inner circle, a safe pair of hands;
the Labour politician Denis Healey
once said an attack from Howe was
“like being savaged by a dead sheep.”
The parliamentary Conservative Party,
already heaving with rumors, knew
otherwise: Howe’s discontent mirrored
their own. After eleven and a half years
in office, she had stopped listening,
both to people on the street—she had
pushed through an extraordinarily un-
popular and regressive poll tax—and to
people in her cabinet. Her unpopular-
ity in both places was growing.
Howe’s speech captured that mood.
He spoke, writes Moore, “with great
care, and with dry wit, but also with
contained passion.” His words “drew
gasps as his point hit home.” The
speech makes fascinating reading
today, because so much of it concerned
Britain’s relationship to Europe, and
because it reflects a liberal internation-
alist worldview that has now vanished
from the Conservative Party. Though
the details of the policies he was dis-
cussing mean little now, at base Howe
was talking about attitudes. Thatcher,
he said, looked at Europe as “a conti-
nent that is positively teeming with ill-
intentioned people.” Instead of seeking
cooperation and mutual benefit, she
kept leading Britain into “isolation.”
As a result, she was “running increas-
ingly serious risks for the future of our
nation.” He ended by declaring that it
was time “for others to consider their
own response to the tragic conflict of
loyalties with which I myself wrestled
for perhaps too long.” Although this
sentence was ambiguous, his fellow
members of parliament immediately
understood it as a call to challenge her
for the leadership of the party. In retro-
spect, it also sounds like the first warn-
ing bell of the Brexit debate that was to
unfold a quarter-century later.
Even in 1990, the political impact was
enormous. This was the first important
parliamentary speech to be delivered
on television—cameras had been put
into the debating chamber only the
year before—and it was heard across
the country. Immediately afterward,
Michael Heseltine, the Tory MP and
former minister, challenged Thatcher
for the leadership of the party. Moore
gives a day-by-day, almost hour-by-
hour account of what happened next—
the intrigues and secret meetings that
led to her resignation—as remembered
by most of the major players. Some of
the details are almost too good to be
true, such as the story of Thatcher’s
hairdresser, Paul Allen, who arrived at
10 Downing Street to fix her hair before
her appearance in parliament on her last
day in office. He realized he had forgot-
ten his comb, but Thatcher was too upset
to be asked for one. He snuck upstairs
into her private apartment to get one
from her dressing table, and “knocked
softly on every door lest the Prime
Minister should be behind it. She was
not. Allen extracted the comb and fled
downstairs.” He did her hair, which of
course looked magnificent throughout
her rousing final parliamentary state-
ment. Afterward she was swept away in
a limo, tears in her eyes, and later that
day deposited abruptly in a house she
owned, but had never inhabited, in the
London suburb of Dulwich. There was
no food in the refrigerator.
Following an internal battle, John
Major defeated Heseltine for leadership
of the Tory party and became the next
prime minister. Although Major, much
like his American counterpart, George
H.W. Bush, is now remembered as a
better leader than he was given credit
for being at the time, the Tory party
soon regretted Thatcher’s downfall, and
indeed tore itself apart over it for years.
Even Howe came to regret it. Feeling
“battered” from a barrage of angry let-
ters—this was an era before Twitter,when ordinary mail still had the power
to wound—he wrote Thatcher an apol-
ogy a few months after the event. He
said that he was sorry their long partner-
ship had ended badly. She never replied.This dramatic description of Thatcher’s
fall is the emotional high point of the
third and final volume of Moore’s tril-
ogy.* Not merely the authorized biogra-
phy, Moore’s is the definitive biography
of Thatcher, and perhaps one of the de-
finitive books about Britain in the late
twentieth century. Eerily, the tale of her
downfall echoes one of the highlights
of the first volume, the story of how
she was selected to be party leader in
the first place. By Moore’s telling, that
choice was a kind of accident, made at a
moment when the country was gripped
by what seemed to be an unsolvable
economic crisis. At the time, many peo-
ple found Thatcher’s selection bizarre:The oldest, grandest, in many
people’s eyes the stuffiest politicalparty in the world had chosen
a leader whose combination of
class, inexperience and sex would
previously have ruled her out. And
it was not obvious that it had really
meant to do so, or that it was confi-
dent of its choice.The ambivalence persisted, from the
beginning to the end. A part of her
party would always regret choosing her,
and a part of the party would always
regret letting her go.
Moore is in the latter camp. One of
Britain’s best-known conservative col-
umnists—and a former editor of the
Spectator, the Daily Telegraph, and
the Sunday Telegraph, the three most
important British conservative publi-
cations—he does not hide his admira-
tion for Thatcher, and this may not be a
bad thing: nobody who did not admire
Thatcher would be able to do what he
has done. The research and writing of
the three volumes took him more than
two decades. He read thousands of
documents and interviewed hundreds
of people, including three hundred for
this volume alone. (He did it in reverse
order of age: “A call from Charles was
like a visit from the grim reaper,” one
interviewee told me. “When you got it,
you knew you were now the oldest on
the list.”)
Yet Moore maintains a genuine ob-
jectivity as well, always seeking to
understand and reflect the views of
people who did not admire Thatcher.
Summarizing her downfall, for exam-
ple, Moore observes that Thatcher’s
vices wereinseparable from her virtues. Her
intelligence, courage, nonconfor-
mity and commitment set her way
above the common run of politi-
cians, but these involved a pig-
headedness which was sometimes
more than frail Tory flesh and
blood could bear. So when she
slipped, too few were left to break
her fall.At the end, as at the beginning, she was
“a woman isolated in a man’s world—
herself alone.”
Moore remains focused, in this vol-
ume as well as the earlier ones, on the
qualities that made Thatcher so odd,
so unlike other people, as well as those
that made her so simultaneously loved
and hated. She was strangely formal
and refused to dress down, preferring
stiff suits and Ferragamo shoes even in
t he c ou nt r y, or even when ever yone el se
was in blue jeans at the Reagan ranch.
She had an ability to speak with fierce
clarity and absolute certainty, an attri-
bute that was both inspiring and polar-
izing. She treated her staff with great
kindness and respect, yet was rude
and ungracious to her cabinet peers
and dismissive of her critics. She never
overcame some of her prejudices, from
an inability to understand Scottish na-
tionalists or Northern Irish Catholics
to a very deep dislike of Germans, even
postwar Germans. Once, Helmut Kohl
invited her to visit him in his home-
town in the Rhineland. His intention
was to show her, as he told one of her
advisers, “that I’m not really German.*The first two volumes, Margaret
Thatcher: The Authorized Biogra-
phy: From Grantham to the Falklands
(Knopf, 2013) and Margaret Thatcher:
At Her Zenith: In London, Washing-
ton and Moscow (Knopf, 2016), were
reviewed in these pages by Jonathan
Freedland in the September 26, 2013,
and April 21, 2016, issues.