'That stubborn Salome'

MARGARET THATCHER
Power and Personality
Jonathan Aitken
Bloomsbury
784 pages; Rs 799

It's not generally known that Margaret Thatcher had two near-brushes with India early in life. Jonathan Aitken, author of this chatty biography, mentions one in passing but probably doesn't realise that if, as a science undergraduate at Oxford, she had married her fellow-student, Lord Craigmyle, she might have been a very burra memsahib indeed. Craigmyle was one of the heirs to Lord Inchcape's commercial empire, but according to the young peer's cousin Lord Tanlaw, better remembered in India as Simon Mackay, guardian of the Inchcape interests, Lady Craigmyle dismissed her son's girlfriend with, "In trade and in science! We know nobody who is in either!"

Thatcher's father killed the other prospect by warning that the Indian Civil Service wouldn't take her far since the British were already marking time in India. One suspects she wanted to take the exam not so much for "the glittering prizes of the Raj" as to be the first female to storm a male bastion. Ultimately, of course, she shattered an even more formidable gender barrier.

Such nuggets remind us this is a personal rather than a political memoir. Mr Aitken had the entree to the Thatcher household. He was "going out" (as the old saying went even if a couple stayed in all the time) with the prime minister's daughter for three years. But he didn't endear himself to her mother by breaking with Carol; she must have been even more incensed when he told an Egyptian newspaper that Thatcher "probably thinks Sinai is the plural of sinus". That could partly explain why he did not achieve Cabinet office until the woman who might have been his mother-in-law was ousted. Perhaps her instinct also warned her something wasn't quite right with her daughter's boyfriend who vowed to "cut out the cancer of bent and twisted journalism" but was sentenced to 18 months in prison for perjury and perverting the course of justice. Mr Aitken was also proved to have fathered a child by the wife of the international arms dealer, Adnan Khashoggi. In and after jail, he travelled by way of God to the populist United Kingdom Independence Party.

But no feeling of animosity seeps into these pages, not even when Mr Aitken tells stories to Thatcher's discredit - as he does often. On the contrary, as a Tory MP for 24 years, he fails to recognise her political failings. Thatcher almost destroyed the Commonwealth. She exalted what Tory prime ministers like Harold Macmillan and Edward Heath condemned as "the unacceptable face of capitalism", added to social discontent by creating an army of unemployed and divided the country financially and geographically. The North of England was reduced to almost a poverty-stricken wasteland.

Does anyone remember her fondly? Jim Prior, leader of the "wets" in her Cabinet, thought she was "vindictive and nasty". Tim Bell, her favourite advertising man, called her "the old bat". Even Bernard Ingham, her loyal press secretary, found her "the most tactless woman" he had ever met. Some spoke of "her tendency to fly off the handle too early, her capacity to get the wrong end of the stick and her reluctance to apologise". Others accused her of "governessy hatred", of being a "stubborn Salome" who "liked to hog the limelight". Even Mr Aitken says her triumphs in the South Atlantic and at the 1983 election "brought hubris to her style of leadership"; she had "a cruel and capricious way of running a government"; and that her abrasive man-management was "her long-term Achilles' heel".

That was especially evident when her longest-serving Cabinet minister, Geoffrey Howe, plunged in the dagger in his famous resignation speech. Another result of ham-handed man-management: Mr Howe was heard in pindrop silence by a packed chamber giving the speech maximum effect because the Speaker, Bernard Weatherill, had arranged things so. Mr Aitken suspects Weatherill had neither forgotten nor forgiven her arrogant attempt to prevent him becoming Speaker - something she had no right to do.

Mr Aitken is dazzled by Thatcher's absorption with power and the joy she took - true sign of the arriviste - in hobnobbing with stellar world figures like Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan and François Mitterrand. If "the corpulent Kohl" and "the reptilian Giscard" were not her favourites, that was, Mr Aitken explains, because "she could not forget the shadows of Nazi Germany and Vichy France". Serve her snobbish little soul right for being brought down by something as trivial as the poll tax and someone as pedestrian as John Major, whose lower middle-class origins she sneered at.

Although nothing came of Thatcher's potential India links, Mr Aitken's daughter Alexandra married a full-bearded Nihang Sikh, Inderjot Singh, changed her name to Harvinder Kaur Khalsa and began wearing a white turban. But that's no part of the Thatcher story.