The Downing Street Years

...In fact, both Churchill and Eden brought out their memoirs within three years of leaving office, the former while still Leader of the Opposition...

...with The Downing Street Years it has now gone nuclear...

...Whether she succeeded in doing much more than momentarily arresting the process must be left to historians...

...She allowed supporters to languish on the backbenches, while promoting ideological opponents, all of whom turned out to have 'knives concealed in their togas...

...The late Shirley Letwin's recent The Anatomy of Thatcherism goes into the driving force behind her actions: Democratic capitalism, according to Thatcher "was a moral and social, not just an economic system, it encouraged a range of virtues...

...In fact,the record for that was set by his own autobiography, in which he devoted 1,300 pages to proving that he never made a single error at the Treasury...

...I The American Spectator February 1994 93...

...American readers are nevertheless particularly well catered for...

...They will certainly not be short of research material—hers is the twelfth cabinet minister's autobiography to go over the 1979-90 period, with Geoffrey Howe's still to come...

...For a revolutionary, Lady Thatcher was not enough of a factional leader...

...It is a serious—perhaps overserious—explanation of the way Lady Thatcher hoped to regenerate her third-division, post-imperial country using only guts, luck, unremitting hard work, mastery of detail, and a messianic belief in Britain's potential...

...It was a valiant attempt to reverse a national decline which had been evident since 1918, and which has clearly set in again...

...What is over here called "The Battle of the Biographies" has thus far been fought with conventional weapons...

...It is now being reprinted and translated into fourteen languages...

...Instead she promoted John Major, who with Douglas Hurd forced her into the European Exchange Rate Mechanism at the 'wrong time and wrong level...

...One of the unfairest quips of all came from Simon Jenkins in the Sunday Times, who sneered that "when the end was nigh, she was found sitting in a box in Versailles...

...The method of her fall—viciously knifed by her colleagues after three election victories—is told superbly in the final fifty pages of the book...

...At a time when John Major has decried the eighties as "a golden age that never was," and described the only three Thatcherites left in his cabinet as "bastards," it is clear that the record needed to be set straight...

...For all their jibes, the bien pensants and liberals have been unable to stymie the book's popularity...

...It is revealed that he intended to inform the Argentine junta of the British Government's intention to recapture the South Georgia Islands during the Falklands War...

...T he lack of a concluding chapter is disappointing...

...Operation Desert Shield was in place, and the meetings she had with Bush, Gorbachev, and Mitterrand were of vital importance...

...T hatcher explains early on that all she needed in her cabinet were "six good men" to carry out her policies...

...and one finishes it relieved that the experience is over...

...Major has proved in Britain, just as Bush did in America, how easy it is for politicians to get blown off course in this post-charismatic age, especially if they have no ideological star by which to steer...

...Two of the men who brought her down, Nigel Lawson and Geoffrey Howe, predictably savaged it in the Evening Standard and Financial Times respectively...

...The row that has developed over her claim in this book that Nigel Lawson had made the pound shadow the deutsche mark at huge expense and in contravention of cabinetpolicy could have been proved with a simple graph plotting interest-rate changes against the exchange rate...

...Hers was always a radical, even revolutionary, philosophy, quite out of kilter with the rest of postwar conservative thought...

...This book will provide useful ammunition to those who remember Lady Thatcher's eleven-and-a-half years in power as an all-too-brief shining moment in British history...

...The account of George Bush's inclination to "go wobbly" during the Gulf Conflict will interest but not necessarily surprise people...

...By 1990 she had lost the instinct for self-preservation that had been her constant companion ten years earlier, and suicidally allowed the wounded elephant Geoffrey Howe to remain in government...

...and much of Britain's liberal media have not even tried...

...Howe, after some trite praise and crocodile tears, was equally dismissive...

...One of the criticisms leveled against The Downing Street Years, repeated recently by Douglas Hurd in the British Spectator, is that Lady Thatcher has shown too much haste in dashing into print...

...As a Tory icon, Lady Thatcher stands with Burke, Salisbury and Churchill, but her philosophy ought to have been spelt out once again...

...Ronald Reagan unsurprisingly emerges as one of the heroes, although Al Haig does not come out well, at least from a British perspective...

...It was only when she was diverted by outside pressures—the Foreign Office, media, Civil Service, her liberal colleagues, or the chattering classes who always loathed her—that disaster struck...

...Her struggle against Britain's debilitating postwar drift, overweening union power, and consensus politics needed to be put into the greater context of the moral philosophy of Thatcherite Conservatism...

...Margaret Thatcher sets standards of self-regard hitherto unknown," complained Lawson...

...Had she been prepared to give her own career as high a priority as she gave the British national interest she would have stayed in London, where she might have been able to bring over the two votes she needed to win the first ballot...

...When I went to get my copy signed, the line of people waiting in the cold, two hours before the author even arrived at the bookshop, stretched halfway down one of London's longer streets...

...Whenever she acted on gut instincts—which were those of Middle England—she won through...

...But this vital aspect of her philosophy is skated over in a mere three pages...

...In fact, of course, Thatcher would have far preferred to have been in London during the crucial first ballot for the leadership: the reason she was in Paris was the CSCE summit, which wound up the Cold War...

...The chattering classes have derided it, treating it with barely concealed contempt...

...The general public has gone out and bought it—over half a million copies in the English language alone, after only four weeks of publication...

...The political commentator Robert Harris—author of the best-seller Fatherland—wrote in the Independent on Sunday that "it comes as no surprise to find her autobiography is shot through with malice, contempt, rage and hatred like no political memoir since—well, Mein Kampf—to which it bears more than a passing resemblance" (ignoring the fact that Hitler's book was not a memoir...

...What emerges most clearly from the book is how Margaret Thatcher's failures were almost always born of her timidity, rather than her boldness...

...Sheer political correctness—or as she puts it "presentational difficulties"—persuaded her not to appoint her ally Nicholas Ridley as chancellor after Nigel Lawson's resignation...

...Harris continued: "It is a nasty piece of work spawned by bitterness and frustration...

...It is exactly because she is such a phenomenon that this book is so hard to review objectively...

...In fact, far from being nasty, much of the book reads too much like a successful company chairman's report and accounts...

...The community charge—the unpopular "poll tax" that helped bring her down—ought to have been brought in immediately after a general election rather than during the run-up to one...

...The sixty pages on the Falklands War and the forty on the Miners' Strike of 1984-85 are also gripping...

...The THE DOWNING STREET YEARS Margaret Thatcher HarperCollins/914 pages / $30 reviewed by ANDREW ROBERTS 92 The American Spectator February 1994 extraordinary thing about her career was not that she was brought down in 1990, but that she managed to outmaneuver the liberals, collectivists, interventionists, and pro-Europeans in her party to survive for so long...

...Non-British readers might find the accounts of public spending debates, local government finance, and housing reform hard going, but it is a well-indexed book with a chapter devoted to each subject, so they can easily be skipped through...

...m any literary editors hit on the (hardly original) idea of sending the book to her political enemies to review...

...But it was rare that she even got that number...

...The librarian of one gentlemen's club in London has cheekily classified the book under Reference rather than Autobiography...

...It is overlong, over-hyped, deluded and disloyal, Andrew Roberts is the author of The Holy Fox: A Biography of Lord Halifax, published in London by Weidenfeld and Nicolson...