Margaret thatcher

Thursday

Conrad Black

Conrad Black’s farewell to the British press

From our UK edition

The astonishing level of enthusiasm over the birth of the new prince goes far beyond the pleasure that people naturally feel for an attractive young couple who have had a healthy child. If there is any truth at all to these estimates in the North American media that trinkets and other bric-a-brac, and even increased numbers of tourists, will produce hundreds of millions of pounds for the British economy, the answer lies not just in normal goodwill and the effusions of the most strenuous monarchists. If my memory is accurate,  the last time there was so much public interest in a royal event, albeit of the exactly opposite nature, was at the death of the newborn prince’s paternal grandmother, Diana.

Saturday

James Forsyth

Justin Welby, a very political Archbishop

From our UK edition

In this increasingly secular age, you would expect the Archbishop of Canterbury to be a figure of diminishing importance. But Justin Welby is fast becoming the most politically influential Archbishop since the war. Part of Welby’s influence stems from the fact that both the Conservatives and Labour think that he is, secretly, one of them. I remember within days of his appointment being approacedh by a Tory minister and then by one of those closest to Ed Miliband. They both wanted to explain how Welby was going to help move public debate in their direction. One never had this kind of conversation about Rowan Williams whose views were thought not to be of this world.

Wednesday

Steerpike

Lord Bell savages ‘pygmy’ Cameron

From our UK edition

Lord Bell, AKA the King of Spin, made some noise at the annual Freedom Dinner (established by libertarians to mark the anniversary of the smoking ban) last night at Canary Wharf’s cavernous Boisdale. He had stern words for the anti-tobacco lobby: ‘There is not one shred of scientific evidence of the existence of passive smoking and it’s one of the more terrible lies told by a democratically elected government in the world.' Bell, though, was only getting going. He aimed his real fire at some recent prime ministers, saying: ‘We could do that Blair devil eyes campaign, because he is actually the devil.

Friday

Steerpike

The ‘conservative wing of the coalition’ toast Maggie and roast Dave

From our UK edition

Margaret Thatcher’s death has reinvigorated her devout following in the Conservative Party. The current Prime Minister was wise to give the House of Lord’s terrace a wide berth last night. It was packed out for the summer party of Conservative Way Forward. This is the pressure group that was established to preserve ‘the lady’s legacy’. Young Dave was not the most popular person in the room. This became clear after the minute’s silence for the group’s deceased honorary president, when former defence minister Gerald Howarth took to the podium to greet ‘the conservative wing of the coalition’. He went on to slam the PM for ‘slashing defence spending while protecting international aid’.

Thursday

Charles Moore

If they want another woman to depict on bank notes, how about Margaret Thatcher?

From our UK edition

Jane Austen is a ‘contingency character’, we have just learnt. In his last appearance as Governor of the Bank of England before the Treasury Select Committee of the House of Commons, Sir Mervyn King explained that the great novelist rather slightingly so described stands in reserve to feature on any of our bank notes if too many people succeed in counterfeiting the current occupants. She is also in the running for the ten-pound note when Charles Darwin relinquishes it. This is a hot issue, because the notes do not feature enough women, we are told — despite the fact that since 1952, 100 per cent of them have featured a woman (the Queen).

Monday

Rod Liddle

Prepare to be bored

From our UK edition

Something very odd is going to happen in your newspapers and on your television screens, perhaps this week, perhaps not. Soon, anyway. It looks likely that poor old Nelson Mandela is on his last legs and will very soon expire. As soon as he does, just you watch. You will hear of nothing else for days. Your morning newspaper, if you still get one, will have a vast pull-out commemorating the man’s life and achievements (all of which you know about). There will be think pieces, stuff by his friends, stuff by his enemies, stuff by people he patted on the head while visiting Brixton.

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Ken Clarke the pragmatist suspends his pugilism over EU

From our UK edition

It’s said that Ken Clarke would cross a motorway to pick a fight with a political opponent. His aggression is one reason why he thrived (eventually) under Mrs Thatcher: ambulance drivers, teaching unions and local government were all given a bunch of fives when Clarke reached Cabinet in the late ‘80s. Chris Patten (in the course of saying that he would go into the jungle with Clarke) told the late Hugo Young that ‘the key to Clarke is that he is anti-establishment – any establishment’. Yet pugilism is but one side of Clarke. He is not, by temperament or conviction, an ideologue. What matters is what works. And it worked for him.

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Grocery

From our UK edition

Was Margaret Thatcher brought up in a grocery? I wouldn’t say so. The Americans would. I’d call her father’s shop in Grantham a grocer’s. He sold grocery. Yet I saw the Times refer to ‘her father’s grocery store’, which sounds doubly American. It’s not just Margaret Thatcher. The Daily Mail referred to Prince Harry befriending a woman ‘who worked in a grocery store near Eton’. The Americans have been calling a grocer’s a grocery for some time, and a baker’s a bakery. Frances Trollope, the novelist’s mother, noticed it in her Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), and a decade later Dickens wrote of the Americans’ ‘Bakery’, ‘Grocery’, and ‘Bookbindery’.

Steerpike

Blue Label for the blue lady

From our UK edition

Sir David Tang and friends packed out the Dorchester Hotel last night to taste Johnnie Walker Blue Label. I last tasted Blue Label in an airport departure lounge, where the expensive tipple is ubiquitous. Old Mr Steerpike has a bottle on the go, which he uses from time-to-time to top-up his favourite 50-year-old malt. The sight of a near-full bottle of that particular treat on the sideboard warms the heart on a cold night. Still, the evening was not without incident. Ben Elliot, co-founder of Quintessentially, revealed that he has been taken on to fundraise for the Thatcher legacy project. They want to build a permanent museum in her honour.

Wednesday

Charles Moore

After leaving office, Margaret Thatcher believed Britain should leave the EU

From our UK edition

On Tuesday night, at a Spectator readers’ evening, Andrew Neil interviewed me about my biography of Margaret Thatcher. He asked me if, after leaving office, Lady Thatcher had come to the view that Britain should leave the European Union. I said yes (I think it happened after the Maastricht Treaty in 1992), although advisers had persuaded her that she should not say this in public since it would have allowed her opponents to drive her to the fringes of public life. I had believed this was widely known, but according to Andrew, it is a story. My revelation, if such it was, came on the same day as Nigel Lawson’s piece in the Times (£) saying that he would now vote for Britain to leave the EU. How things have changed. Even the BBC treats Lawson’s view as respectable.

Steerpike

Maggie Maggie Maggie, wanted out out out

From our UK edition

To Chelsea to hear Charles Moore lift the lid on his Thatcher biography. While the crowd at the Cadogan Hall loved the anecdotes and insight, it was Moore’s revelation that, in later life, it ‘became her view’ that Britain should leave the EU that pricked Steerpike’s ears. Moore has expanded on this for tomorrow’s magazine: ‘I think it happened after the Maastricht Treaty in 1992’. So why did we not know this before she died? He claims that ‘advisers had persuaded her that she should not say this in public since it would have allowed her opponents to drive her to the fringes of public life.’ Not these days, though. So what are EU haters in the Tory party to do?

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 2 May 2013

From our UK edition

It is fascinating watching the great welfare debate as the universal credit starts its life. The ruling elites have very, very slowly caught up with public understanding. The simplest way to think about the question is this. At every level of society people tend to be acutely aware of what their approximate equals are paid, and usually unaware of what those richer or poorer receive. Therefore the people who best understand how welfare works are either its recipients or those who work on low wages and are scarcely better off for doing so. These people recognise that being on welfare is — in effect, though not morally — like having a job. There is a wage for it, plus various equivalents of overtime and fringe benefits, and the task is to get as much of these as you can.

Charles Moore

When Michael Heseltine turned up at a Thatcher book signing

From our UK edition

At the launch of my biography of Margaret Thatcher, I was flattered to see Michael and Anne Heseltine joining the signing queue. It was very sporting of him. When they reached me, Anne asked for my inscription, but Michael said he wished his copy to be blank so that he could quickly sell it. I think — unusually for him — that he misunderstands the way this strange market works. The most common question I am asked by audiences about Mrs Thatcher is something to do with Carol and Mark. Did she bring them up successfully? Was she a good mother? etc. The fact that this comes up so often is testimony to the point I make again and again: it was completely different — and very difficult — being the first woman prime minister.

Philip Ziegler

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, by Charles Moore, and Not for Turning, by Robin Harris – review

From our UK edition

It is a measure of Lady Thatcher’s standing that her death has been followed not only by the mealy-mouthed compliments from political opponents which are normally forthcoming on such occasions but also by robust denunciations. Nobody would have sung ‘Ding, dong, the Wizard is dead!’ after the deaths of Jim Callaghan, John Major or Alec Douglas-Home. Even the more controversial Harold Wilson got a bland send-off in his obituaries. Ted Heath was asked by a journalist whether it was true that, when he heard of Margaret Thatcher’s eviction from the party leadership, he had exclaimed ‘Rejoice! Rejoice!’. No, he replied, after some deliberation. ‘What I said was “Rejoice! Rejoice! Rejoice!

Monday

Steerpike

Mind your language, Mr Rawnsley

From our UK edition

The weekend press offered some rave reviews of Charles Moore’s Thatcher biography. Craig Brown, who is not given to hyperbole, compared Moore’s book to a work of art, while the Observer’s Andrew Rawnsley praised Moore’s ‘multi-dimensional portrait’ of the person we know as Mrs Thatcher. There were, however, some reservations. Rawnsley, brave man that he is, criticised Moore’s usage: ‘Moore is a patrician Old Etonian and a High Tory. So another of his challenges is to make the empathetic leap necessary to get inside the head of a grammar school girl who was born over a shop in Grantham. He makes a decent stab at it, but can't always resist lapsing into pedantic snobbery.

Saturday

Charles Moore

‘Please don’t mention Margaret Thatcher when you write to me’

From our UK edition

‘Arthur Negus’ — Tony Bray — is the only one of Margaret Thatcher’s early loves still alive, though sadly he is now in poor health. Once I had tracked him down, I found him happy to speak about those distant days at the end of the war when he danced with the future prime minister. But he was extremely anxious — 60 years later — that his wife (who is now dead) should not know of my inquiries. ‘If you ring up, please say nothing of your purpose,’ he said, ‘and if you write, please don’t do so in a Daily Telegraph envelope.’ When he married his wife, a couple of years after the relationship had ended, a similar sense of honour induced him to destroy all Margaret’s letters to him.

Thursday

Peter Oborne

Will Boston still fund the Real IRA?

From our UK edition

One of the first world statesmen to send a message of sympathy to Boston after last week’s outrage was Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein. ‘Just watching news of the explosion in Boston,’ he tweeted, ‘Sympathy with people of that fine city.’ Mr Adams has every reason to think fondly of Boston. Throughout the troubles, while he sat on the IRA war council, Boston was one of the major American centres which he (through Noraid) could rely on for support and funding. Bostonian money would have been used to help pay for the IRA attack on Margaret Thatcher’s democratically elected government in Brighton, the grotesque Birmingham pub bombings that left 21 dead, and of course the Lisburn van bombing of 15 June 1988.

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 25 April 2013

From our UK edition

The first volume of my biography of Margaret Thatcher was published on Tuesday. Since Lady Thatcher had stipulated that the book could appear only after her death, we were, in principle, ready. But it is still a huge undertaking to finish correcting a 900-page book on a Tuesday (the day before the funeral), and get back the printed book the following Monday. Reviewing my endnotes, I came across an interviewee called Rosie Cruikshank. She appeared in relation to Margaret Roberts’s most serious boyfriend. Who on earth was she? Just in time, I remembered. While writing all the ‘love interest’ passages, I had worried that they might fall into the wrong hands, and so I gave the characters pseudonyms. I chose names to fit the period.

Charles Moore

Margaret Thatcher and the missing votes

From our UK edition

There was a startling late entry for the first volume of my biography of Margaret Thatcher. On the day after she died, I received an email from Haden Blatch. Mr Blatch’s father, Bertie, was the chairman of the Finchley Conservative Association when it selected her in 1958. I had asked Haden for information before, but he had not got round to it. Now he revealed that his father had come home from the Finchley selection meeting and explained that Mrs Thatcher had not really won the vote. Her rival, Thomas Langton, had just pipped her. Blatch senior, however, was very keen on Mrs Thatcher, and thought that Langton, who ‘was born with a silver spoon in his mouth’, would easily get in somewhere else, whereas she, being a woman with young children, would not.

Mark Mason

The Ize Have It

From our UK edition

She divided us in life, she’s dividing us in death. Baroness Thatcher was so controversial that a single letter in a single word in the subtitle of a book that someone else has written about her and is being published after her funeral can get people’s backs up. Charles Moore’s biography is, according to its cover, ‘authorized’. Iain Dale isn’t happy (and I’m sure he’s not alone). ‘I am appalled,’ he writes on his blog, ‘that they have used the American spelling … It’s certainly not what she would have wanted and it grates. Penguin ought to remember its British roots.’ Good news, Iain – it turns out ‘-ize’ isn’t American after all.