Maggie: Her Fatal Legacy [Paperback]

John Sergeant was Chief Political Correspondant for the BBC throughout most of Margaret Thatcher's term of office and in his second book, he adeptly tackles the subject that made him a star.
The book takes us through Thatcher's career in a relatively quick and summarative way in order to fill out the background details required to understand his main argument about Mrs Thatcher's legacy and its effect on the Conservative Party during John Major's premiership and the 2001 election campaign.
John Sergeant has clearly done his homework and in addition to his own recollections of the events, he has interviewed almost all of the major characters involved such as Michael Heseltine, John Major, William Hague, Norman Lamont and Tony Blair. Everyone in fact, except Mrs Thatcher although by the end of the book, we have a fair idea of what she would say.
Sergeant also manages to throw in some interesting anecdotes and personal comments and a possibly unintentional touch was his referal to all persons involved by formal titles such as Mrs Thatcher or Mr Major etc. While this may just be how Sergeant speaks after years as a newscaster, for me it added to the feeling that I was actually watching a documentary (no bad thing) along the lines of "in search of Tony Blair".

This book is well worth a read for anyone interested in Margaret Thatcher or politics in general for both its pleasant style and its clear knowledge and depth of expertise. I look foreward to John Sergeant's next book with anticipation.

The old English kings in 1066 And All That were forever dying of surfeits of something. I myself suspect that interest in British politics, in this age of saturation coverage, is in danger of dying of a surfeit of commentators.

John Sergeant, while he still functioned as a TV and radio reporter and analyst of political events, was probably a little above the average, which in its way is quite a respectable average. More or less without exception they are professional, they are articulate, they can recover from minor mishaps without being flustered and they are fairly intelligent in what they say. Sergeant could be engagingly witty as well, but of course he had his 15 minutes of fame for being the man on the spot when Margaret Thatcher, the ostensible theme of his book, first got the message that her time as prime minister of the United Kingdom was up. Sergeant himself says that he struggled to find a consistent theme for his book, finally settling on the allegedly 'fatal legacy' that Thatcher left the Conservative party. I must say it shows. The book is genuinely interesting, it is often perceptive and illuminating, but it is only partly about Margaret Thatcher. That in its turn only partly matters - if the rest of it is coherent and valuable that's fine by me, whatever title he chooses. My own feeling by the end was that the last couple of chapters, which do focus on Thatcher's behaviour after she left office and how this affected her party, are the best and most original. The rest is good reporting and interesting up to a point in its own right but we've been there 'And oh, my lad, the news is news that men have heard before' (to misquote Housman slightly).

The opening chapters are probably the weakest. Sergeant has his notes of various good stories he managed to get, he wants to see them in a book, so out comes a rather disjointed set of little vignettes. The bulk of the book after that is mainly narrative. Sergeant is a good reporter and this is quite good narrative, but I wonder which future historians in search of a Thucydides of these tumultuous times will turn to this book to find him. Instant commentary on television suffers from the inherent problem that the analysis is usually trite and banal - predictions of what is likely to happen are made as if no new circumstances will affect the matter, which they usually do, thus invalidating the predictions, at which point the tedious process starts afresh as if yesterday's predictions had never been made. Sergeant is far too canny a professional to get caught out contradicting himself, but what remains throughout the narrative section of the book is the sense of superficiality that is the consequence of its origins.

The last part of the book is distinctly the best, whether or not the author had to put his brain into gear just to justify the book's title. His argument is this - Thatcher was wounded deeply by the brutality of the way she was ejected from office, and much of her resentment focused on Kenneth Clarke who had told her without mincing his phraseology that she ought to go. Furthermore she had no real interests outside of politics, but retained her messianic drive to save her beloved Britain from whatever it needed to be saved from - there had to be something, surely - so she was a loose cannon now without the restraining effects of her Downing Street apparatchiks, and wide open to being influenced by parties who knew how to exploit her prejudices and her star status for their own purposes. Even while still in office she was becoming at times intemperate in her expression in her later years, and she came to see the threat she needed to find and fight as consisting of the EU. In office she was actually a lot more pliable than she liked to let on, but her public image was of Britannia on the back of the old coins with shield and trident, and this struck a chord with both the entrenched right-wing and, for a while, with the disillusioned general electorate who saw her as being committed to halting Britain's decline. She made life hell for her successor John Major, but I'm inclined to go along with Sergeant's view that this was less a strategy than a matter of devil-take-the-consequences. Loyalty had been a traditional characteristic of the Conservative party, but she felt that her own overthrow had been treachery, and this made a volatile chemistry when combined with her growing contempt for Major and her suspicions of Europe, the last eagerly fomented by a minority in her own party who had developed an obsession with the same supposed issue.

I differ from Sergeant only to the extent of seeing Thatcher as less central to the process than he does. The Conservative hostility to Europe would have happened anyhow, and Thatcher was mainly a convenient ally, leading the process less and being manipulated more than she would have liked to think. Where her political manipulative skills were effective, I certainly agree, was in preventing Clarke from leading the party, which in my own opinion is likely to keep them in opposition for quite a long time yet. Events have now caught up with us since the book was written, Clarke has been rejected again, this time without active intervention by Thatcher, and I believe this bears out my own view. What she had was star quality, a personal magnetism and a devoted following, but restricted latterly to a self-preoccupied minority who had failed to realise that her magic had worn off in a big way as far as the rest of us were concerned. This minority would have been obsessed with themselves anyhow, with or without Thatcher, and if I'm any judge the one leader who could have pulled them out of this self-destruct mode would have been Clarke, whom they just will not accept.

I have read chronicles of this period first from John Major and now from John Sergeant. Whether there is some John Corporal or John Bombardier still waiting in the wings to tell it again his way I don't know, but I hope not. The harvest of instant commentary has been well and truly reaped, and a 10-year vow of silence from those with something to say on the matter would be more than welcome.

As someone who would only vote Tory with a gun at my head (And even then I think the shame would cause me to blow my own brains out the back of my skull in the not too distant future) I read this book as a masochistic exercise .. To try to understand what it was about Margaret Thatcher that even now renders some people to go all dewy eyed and start babbling about "Britain being great when she was in charge". Not if you were working class and lived in the North it bloody wasn't , that I can empirically testify to.

John Sergeant has written a thoughtful , though often gossipy indictment and all the better for it as far as I'm concerned, of the cult of "Thatcherism". The book is more concerned with what happened after Thatcher was ousted by her own party and the undesirable effect it had on the Conservative party and their electoral prospects. He talks to numerous protagonists( I use that word advisably) including John Mayor -still a little bitter after all these years-, Bernard Ingram , Norman Lamont , Michael Heseltine ,Ken Clarke, William Hague to produce a fascinating account of those politically turbulent times.

The book is written in a highly readable prose , unencumbered by dry dogma and excessive political ephemera ( Though some would undoubtedly prefer this in a political book , though I must confess much of the stuff on Europe I found dreadfully dull) and contains some incredible revelations .Frank Field , the Labour M.P, was one of the people Thatcher consulted when determining whether to run in the second ballet , apparently she had a lot of time for him .He told her she should go. Tony Blair is also one of the few people who believes she would have won in the 1992 election had she stayed on. He is also sickeningly gracious of her and her legacy but I will return to him later. Sergeant is superbly scathing about Ian Duncan Smith too , portraying him as a bumbling incompetent , way out his depth.

It comes as no surprise that Thatcher found it hard to let go after her overthrow and the anecdotes about her still acting as if she was at the centre of government and having no interests outside politics add credibility to the whispers that she is just a little crazy. Her harrumphing that there is no such thing as "Majorism " reveals her for the egocentric , narcissistic individual she is.

Thatcher's legacy is that the Tory party became unelectable for a very long time but worse for the country and democracy is that in order for Labour to make itself electable or so they thought( This wouldn't have happened had John Smith lived I believe), it had to shift away from it's socialist past and enter the centre ground of politics where not only has it stayed but drifted inexorably further towards the right so effectively we now have two Tory parties and now they have opportunistically painted themselves as the party of social conscience. Her mantra of individual responsibility and look after number one has had an invidious effect on British society and her record in government is littered with preposterous political errors that reverberate to this day-The poll tax, privatisation of the utilities and most ruinously the rail industry , entry into the ERM were disastrous follies and the bloody woman still won't admit any of them were a mistake.

It says it all about Tony Blair that not only does he believe that she would have won the 1992 election but that he views her as a valuable source and confidant for his own premiership which shares many distasteful parallels with her own . Thankfully we will see the back of him soon , but time will tell if his legacy for Labour will be as devastating as Margaret Thatcher's was for the Conservatives. That though is another book for John Sergeant to work on.