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Short Cuts

Jenny Diski: Mary Whitehouse’s Letters, 20 December 2012

... there’s no chance it’s going to get better. I won’t have a warm retrospective feeling about Margaret Thatcher. I don’t see Reagan or Nixon in a new perspective with the passage of time. And I still loathe my wicked stepmother. This last is what needs acknowledging, because as I read Mary Whitehouse’s letters, everything about her, except the ...

Deservingness

Jeremy Waldron: Equality of Opportunity, 19 September 2002

Against Equality of Opportunity 
by Matt Cavanagh.
Oxford, 223 pp., £25, February 2002, 0 19 924343 3
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... others choose for their own good reasons to give you or leave you in their wills. Years before Margaret Thatcher made it a political mantra, Nozick taught his followers to say ‘there is no such thing as society,’ and no social obligation to see that needs are taken care of or that inequality does not get out of hand. These points had been made ...

It’s a shitshow

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite: Thatcher’s Failed Experiment, 8 May 2025

Inside Thatcher’s Monetarism Experiment: The Promise, the Failure, the Legacy 
by Tim Lankester.
Policy, 227 pp., £19.99, May 2024, 978 1 4473 7135 9
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... would merely ‘deepen the depression’ and ‘erode the industrial base of our economy’. Margaret Thatcher had come to power in 1979 pledging to cut inflation, then at 10 per cent. In 1980 it rose to 18 per cent, with unemployment at 6.8 per cent and manufacturing output contracting by 8.6 per cent. Following the budget announced by the ...

After the Battle

Matthew Coady, 26 November 1987

Misrule 
by Tam Dalyell.
Hamish Hamilton, 152 pp., £10.95, May 1987, 0 241 12170 1
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One Man’s Judgement: An Autobiography 
by Lord Wheatley.
Butterworth, 230 pp., £15.95, July 1987, 0 406 10019 5
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Changing Battlefields: The Challenge to the Labour Party 
by John Silkin.
Hamish Hamilton, 226 pp., £13.95, September 1987, 9780241121719
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Heseltine: The Unauthorised Biography 
by Julian Critchley.
Deutsch, 198 pp., £9.95, September 1987, 0 233 98001 6
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... of 10 Downing Street has been the target of so relentless an onslaught at his hands as Mrs Margaret Thatcher. Now, with all the zeal of a Dickensian prosecuting attorney, he summarises the case he has deployed for so long, and sadly to so little effect. It is his contention that she has misled the House of Commons on a string of issues, most ...

Demob

Robert Morley, 7 July 1983

Downing Street in Perspective 
by Marcia Falkender.
Weidenfeld, 280 pp., £10.95, May 1983, 0 297 78107 3
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... that his height, slimness and pallor make him look less solid than other public figures. When Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservatives, most of Mr Shore’s colleagues believed Labour would be home and dry at the next election: he was the only one to foresee the trouble ahead. He recognises that the women’s vote is of supreme ...

Diary

Tam Dalyell: Argentina in 1984, 6 September 1984

... north-west of Argentina. A conventional warhead could for crucial days render inoperable the ‘Margaret Thatcher International Airport’ at Mount Pleasant, and the effect of a nuclear warhead does not bear thinking about. Since Alfonsin came to power, there has been no hiccup in the Argentine nuclear weapons programme, for which the Junta bought 143 ...

They don’t even need ideas

William Davies: Take Nigel Farage ..., 20 June 2019

... is liable to be dispelled. But when the stage is set correctly, the illusion can be very powerful. Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair oversaw devastating electoral machines, which delivered four huge parliamentary majorities in the space of twenty years. Both appeared to establish a new consensus as to what constituted good leadership and policy. The fact ...

Diary

W.G. Runciman: Dining Out, 4 June 1998

... sleaze. When first disenfranchised, I was rather glad not to have a vote, since although wanting Thatcher out I didn’t at all want Kinnock in. But this time I am sorry not to have a vote to cast for Blair, however little he turns out to need it5 May 1997. Frank Field describes being rung up from Downing Street in the aftermath of the election to be asked ...

Short Cuts

Peter Geoghegan: BP in Azerbaijan, 7 November 2024

... region.This wasn’t the first time BP had come to Baku’s aid at a difficult moment. In 1992, Margaret Thatcher became the first Western leader to visit the newly independent Azerbaijan when she was flown in at BP’s behest to secure a lucrative oil deal. Browne recalled in his autobiography that Thatcher ‘was ...

Conspire Slowly, Act Quickly

David Runciman: Thatcher Undone, 2 January 2020

Margaret ThatcherThe Authorised Biography Vol. III: Herself Alone 
by Charles Moore.
Allen Lane, 1072 pp., £35, October 2019, 978 0 241 32474 5
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... When​ King Fahd of Saudi Arabia discovered in late November 1990 that his friend Margaret Thatcher had been turfed out of Downing Street after 11 years he thought she must have been the victim of a coup d’état. How else to explain it? She was undefeated in general elections and, more puzzling still, she was about to send her armed forces into battle ...

Our Fault

Frank Kermode, 11 October 1990

Our Age: Portrait of a Generation 
by Noël Annan.
Weidenfeld, 479 pp., £20, October 1990, 0 297 81129 0
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... and vices of that condition; if there was Schlegel in him there was also Wilcox. One thinks of Margaret Schlegel’s naive resolve, under Wilcoxian influence, to be less polite to the servants: but although Annan reports many gentlemanly activities with an air of detachment or even disapproval, he does not find it necessary to use the word ...

Palmerstonian

Bernard Porter: The Falklands War, 20 October 2005

The Official History of the Falklands Campaign. Vol. I: The Origins of the Falklands War 
by Lawrence Freedman.
Routledge, 253 pp., £35, June 2005, 0 7146 5206 7
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The Official History of the Falklands Campaign. Vol. II: War and Diplomacy 
by Lawrence Freedman.
Routledge, 849 pp., £49.95, June 2005, 0 7146 5207 5
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... assessment of the difficulty of defending the islands; taking the wrong signals from the Thatcher government’s defence cuts, and from decolonisation elsewhere (Zimbabwe); convinced of their own case for sovereignty (although, in truth, it was not much better than Britain’s); and fired by local nationalism – or maybe exploiting it to divert ...

Swedish Practices

Gunnar Pettersson, 26 October 1989

Under Fire: My Own Story 
by Simon Hayward.
W.H. Allen, 473 pp., £6.99, September 1989, 0 352 32588 7
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... cannot let England down. If he was to confess he would be failing his family, the British Queen, Margaret Thatcher, the Queen’s Guards, the majors, the brigadiers – yes, the whole British Empire.’ For a manipulative police inspector, a public prosecutor on the make, and a national press eager for evidence of British – if not downright ...

Maastricht and All That

Wynne Godley, 8 October 1992

... as the only alternative to poverty or starvation. I sympathise with the position of those (like Margaret Thatcher) who, faced with the loss of sovereignty, wish to get off the EMU train altogether. I also sympathise with those who seek integration under the jurisdiction of some kind of federal constitution with a federal budget very much larger than ...

Diary

Nicholas Spice: Karl Miller is leaving, 5 November 1992

... and passionate. Fiercely opposed to the Falklands and Gulf Wars, unceasing in its criticism of Margaret Thatcher and all her ways, uncompromising in its refusal to accede one jot to the culture of slick presentation and the sound bite, the London Review of Books has contrived to sit squarely across and against the grain of the decade through which ...

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