Iron Lady, the Rust is Showing

DON8217;T bother with this book unless you8217;re an absolute, true-blue politics buff. This is not history from some lofty, detached pers...

DON8217;T bother with this book unless you8217;re an absolute, true-blue politics buff. This is not history from some lofty, detached perspective; it8217;s not even a biography of Britain8217;s only woman prime minister and last empress. Rather Maggie: Her Fatal Legacy is an account of Margaret Thatcher8217;s final years, the debilitating battles over Europe, ones she fought inch by inch, delayed when she couldn8217;t win, but which eventually claimed her.

This is about her testy relationship with senior cabinet colleagues such as Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson, respectively foreign secretary and chancellor of the exchequer, and somewhat more realistic and less emotional on Europe than she was. Above all, it is about that final pulsating battle with the flamboyant Michael Heseltine, Tory dissident, rebel without a pause, a man who quit Thatcher8217;s government because, as the author says, he was, paradoxically, so much like her.

Eventually Heseltine was to challenge Thatcher for the leadership of the Conservative Party. The only effective way of preventing him becoming prime minister was for Thatcher to step down, and make a conclusive ballot meaningless.

This is precisely what happened. Heseltine won a pyrrhic victory 8212; or perhaps Thatcher did. Whatever the outcome, the Conservatives, writes John Sergeant, are still paying for it. Thatcher8217;s influence on a succession of Conservative leaders meant not one could be his own man. Attila the Hen henpecked two generations of Tories. No wonder, Sergeant says, the party hasn8217;t been in power in over a decade.

It is a piquant argument and a rivetting story. Sergeant is not the world8217;s most elegant writer; even so, this BBC veteran 8212; Thatcher was his beat, as it were, from the 1979 election till the day, 11 years later, she resigned 8212; remembers enough to tell a good tale.

In so many ways, politics is an epic saga, an Illiad or a Mahabharata. The same set of characters can appeal to or repulse one observer or the other differently. To Thatcherites, Heseltine was 8216;8216;the Assassin8217;8217;: 8216;8216;When he toppled their queen in 1990, they called it regicide.8217;8217; Page 40.

Yet Heseltine is the anti-hero of Sergeant8217;s book. Perhaps, just perhaps, he was a trifle too brash for 1980s British politics, still at the cusp of a stodgy, grey-haired establishment, and the energies of a young Britain that New Labour adroitly tapped into a few years later.

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As Sergeant puts it, Heseltine himself was a complex mix of American-style politics, all telegenic and clever, and an almost Curzonian sense of destiny. To use the author8217;s words: 8216;8216;It8217;s usually assumed that someone like Mr Heseltine is up to something; he must have a clever plan, a personal agenda, and his actions were invariably judged in that light. As a student at Oxford he was said to have sketched out on a piece of paper his future career in the most confident terms: 8216;1950s, millionaire; 1960s, MP; 1970s, minister; 1980s,cabinet; 1990s, Downing Street.

8216;8216;As he progressed inexorably along that path 8230; his denials that he had ever written such a note were easily dismissed. From early on Mrs Thatcher was in no doubt that Michael Heseltine was someone to watch, and she did not look upon his progress kindly.8217;8217;

What followed was a first-class political battle. if you relish such stuff, read this book. It8217;ll leave you enlightened about Thatcher8217;s insecurities, about Heseltine8217;s shooting star of a career. It may even have you wondering, as it did this reviewer, about the parallels with a Govindacharya or, to a degree, a Pramod Mahajan 8212; clever politicians both, and perhaps, like Heseltine, doomed to be deemed clever even when they8217;re not trying to be.