Maggie: The First Lady [Hardcover]

Largely based on interviews for a TV series, the book quotes a huge variety of friends, colleagues, enemies and acquaintances throughout Maggie's life and political career. It includes all the highs and lows like the election victories, the Falklands War and the collapse of communism, without dwelling long enough on some of these.

It is clear that her husband Denis Thatcher played a major role in her achievements; he was certainly the perfect partner. Both her victories and defeats and her admirable qualities and faults are described in an engaging way. Denis Thatcher's flashes of humour are delightful and must have made up for what Maggie lacked in this regard.

As an admirer I came away from this book adoring her even more but perhaps also a bit wiser to her faults. The book wets one appetite for reading a more serious biography and for investigating Thatcher's own book titled Statecraft.

The book concludes with notes to every chapter, a bibliography and a thorough index. There are plenty of black and white photographs, from when she was a little girl of four to the last poignant one when she leaves No. 10 Downing Street for the last time.

Maggie: The First Lady falls somewhere between light reading and serious biography. Although not recommended for the serious student, I think the text contains enough meat to satisfy her fans and admirers.

Maddox gets to the heart of what defined Maggie all those years ago in her younger days, from her pathological hatred of socialism (in her mind she equated it solely with the Nazi's, and saw it simply as a kick in the teeth to individuality), to her almost inhuman ability to get by on 4 hours sleep every night (a habit that became ingrained in her as a young woman, when she worked long hours on the political campaign circuit). She also pinpoints when Maggie became the Iron Lady. What was startling for me about this book was that in her early years Maggie comes across as quite likeable, albeit a bit too bossy and desperately in need of a sense of humour! For example, Maddox presents a quite charming picture of pretty young Miss Roberts, the new chemistry teacher at a boys' school in the last few months of WW2. Her marriage to Dennis is also quite heartwarming, and Maggie looks quite startlingly beautiful in her wedding photo. As the young mother fighting 1950s Tory male prejudice to get a seat in parliament you admire her courage and tenacity, let alone her immense capacity for hard work.

I think where it all changes is during her time in Ted Heath's government, when she was exposed to her first taste of media backlash in the wake of the "Thatcher the Milk Snatcher" episode. Incredibly (when you think of the scorn heaped on politicians these days) it was her first taste of media criticism, and it hardened her. The Iron Lady was born. From then on it's quite hard to like Thatcher, her ambition and her dogmatism seem to replace whatever human characteristics she had. It's as if all the hard work and gritty determination she had had to pay out in her youth had robbed her of any balance. As Maddox points out, when describing Maggie's rather serious days as a student at Oxford, a bit of fun and frivolity in her youth would have helped her enormously later on in life!