More than iron in the soul

Charles Moore's multidimensional biography of Britain's first woman prime minister reveals many enigmas to the "Iron Lady"

Some readers may lap up a footnote in Charles Moore's biography where Margaret Thatcher comments after visiting China "that (the absence of) 'the spark of human spirit' would be the undoing of China and would eventually make India a more successful country". It's an unexpected claim by a woman who is remembered for her hard-headedness, but then, Mr Moore's multidimensional portrait reveals other enigmas.

What one would like to know is how she really viewed Afro-Asians. Did that explain her reported indifference to the Commonwealth? And what of her apparently warm response to Indira Gandhi? More later of the stories surrounding both topics that Mr Moore might explore in the concluding volume of a work that enriches public life with personal insights and brings the subject to animated life.

Like Clement Attlee, Lady Thatcher changed the face of Britain. The comparison would undoubtedly cause the lady who is not for turning to turn in her grave. Whereas the first post-War Labour government created a kinder and more caring Britain, the first woman prime minister seemed to blame poverty on the laziness of the poor and social problems on inadequate personal initiative, effort and will. Yet, there may have been chinks in the Iron Lady's armour, belying her impatience with "wets", devotion to Milton Friedman's economics and role in sinking the Argentine cruiser, the Belgrano, killing 321 men.

Mr Moore shows that though she threw Irish Republican Army (IRA) prisoners into the notorious Maze prison, she privately admired their courage for going on hunger strike. "You have to hand it to some of these IRA boys," she observed. While publicly refusing to negotiate with terrorists, she secretly did just that. As a patrician Old Etonian High Tory (despite the American "authorized" for the English "authorised"), he may, like Lord Carrington, have regarded her as a "f***ing stupid, petit bourgeois woman". But he respected and supported her politics without being blinded by loyalty. He recognised "her lack of emotional intelligence" as a major flaw that led to political catastrophe, and blames her dismantling of an important part of Attlee's legacy by selling council houses to sitting tenants - which many hailed as a brilliant move - for "the gradual build-up of a housing shortage which, in 1979, had not existed".

Abroad, she sought, like the ill-fated Anthony Eden, to put "Great" back into Great Britain. Believing herself to be draped in the mantle of Disraeli and Churchill, she sought to lay the ghost of "Dean Acheson's endlessly repeated quotation that Britain had lost an empire and not found a role". Her Britain would blaze a new trail "in upholding international law and teaching the nations of the world how to live". Even a sympathetic chronicler like Mr Moore shudders at the hubristic boast.

Her relations with Indira Gandhi ("a delightful person") might reward examination. The two women shared some common characteristics without the "who's the star" complication of her relations with Queen Elizabeth. Lady Thatcher spoke feelingly at Gandhi's funeral of women politicians who are also mothers. Lee Kuan Yew thought India's leader the "more determined and ruthless" of the two, but his comment about her "smiling coquettishly at men" reflects Lady Thatcher's skittish "we girls". Drawing on more than 150 letters to her older sister, Mr Moore reveals his heroine's active love life before marrying Denis. Once married, she seemed to have settled down more easily, though Mr Moore does reveal tempestuous spells and says "quite large numbers of men" continued to fall for her even after she became prime minister. She was just as secretive as Gandhi about the romantic aspect of her life.

Critics may have invented or exaggerated Lady Thatcher's supposed racism. A bitter joke credited her with saying when Malcolm Fraser and Emeka Anyaoku were both contesting the Commonwealth secretary-generalship that of the two blacks, she preferred the real one. Nigeria's Anyaoku won. She respected Sikhs for having fought for Britain. But Commonwealth secretariat officials felt that, but for the Queen's unflinching stand, she would have evicted them from Marlborough House. It's no secret she hobnobbed with Enoch Powell after Edward Heath, the prime minister, banished him from the party for his "rivers of blood" speech on Afro-Asian immigration. Mr Moore notes she also warned Heath of the ground support Powell enjoyed among the Tory rank and file.

She was on the white side in Rhodesia too, having "no use at all for blacks". This may have been Denis' influence. With relatives in South Africa, he "had an unreconstructed belief in the political and economic incompetence of black regimes". But she regarded Robert Mugabe as a terrorist, and was greatly impressed by white-run Rhodesia's "one-person, one vote for four different parties" system. "Where else would you get that in Africa?" she demanded.

In the end, however, she went along with the rest of the Commonwealth and the US and supported black majority rule in Rhodesia. She didn't try to bring back Powell either. Was she playing to the Tory gallery in the first instance or did political pragmatism (expediency?) ultimately triumph over personal instinct? We don't know. Some secrets elude even the best of biographers.

MARGARET THATCHER: The Authorized Biography
Volume One: Not For Turning
Charles Moore
Allen Lane; Rs 899