This is an excellent biography written by an author who has already tackled the lives of five other British politicians over the last century and who demonstrates, in this work, his remarkable insight into an extremely complex political figure.
No doubt in years to come, as the veil of the 30-year rule is gradually drawn back from the archives of the British and other governments - our own included - new material will be found to add to that available to John Campbell. But I very much doubt whether the principal lineaments of Margaret Thatcher's character, as revealed in this work, will be significantly altered.
Undoubtedly the fact that Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to become Prime Minister of Britain has been responsible for much of the fascination her career has evoked. But there is more to it than that. For, leaving aside entirely the gender question, Margaret Thatcher was by any standards quite a remarkable politician: remarkable in her ambition, in the skill with which she disguised some of her talents and many of her ideas until at last she secured the post of Prime Minister; in her strength of purpose; and in her dominance over British politics throughout the 1980s. Her own autobiography did her poor service. It has been said, although I do not know with what truth, that the only part she penned herself was the section on the Falklands War. The remainder of that book shows every sign, indeed, of having been penned by sycophantic ghosts. Whether she allowed such pens to present her in a self-serving manner, or did the job herself, either way it does her little credit, diminishing her achievements and reducing her standing. It has also left her vulnerable to future biographers who may expose the fictional elements in her own account of her life.
John Campbell has had the task of revealing much of the truth that lay behind this fictional element, and he does so with clarity and wit - not a cruel wit, but certainly ironic. It is clear from his account, for example, that her political ambition arose very early on in her life, perhaps at school but certainly at the start of her days at Oxford University, rather than towards the end of that period, as she herself has suggested. Why she should have wished to obscure this fact is unclear.
While the general thrust of her political views was evident from her speeches in Opposition - and indeed as Minister of Education in the 1970-74 Conservative Government, as well as from her votes in favour of the restoration of birching and capital punishment, she successfully hid from view both the scale of her ambition and her strong-mindedness and determination to have her own way. John Campbell remarks "She had to be careful to keep this side of her character out of sight for the next 20 years while she climbed the ladder". So far as having a coherent political philosophy was concerned, this was a very late development under the influence of Sir Keith Joseph, who, immediately after the Conservative defeat in 1974, provided the intellectual scaffolding for and gave coherence to what had hitherto been a series of prejudices rather than a coherent right-wing philosophy of government.
Her unique skill lay in her capacity to present to the public a simplified version of the right-wing political theories developed by Joseph at that period. As John Campbell points out, she was an intensely practical and ambitious politician and he adds his view that "it is not the job of politicians to have original ideas or even necessarily to understand them" - so long as they can successfully popularise them.
Her leadership campaign for the Conservative Party in 1975 was very skilfully organised by Airey Neave, who managed to persuade many Conservative MPs to vote for her as a stalking horse who had no hope of winning - so many, indeed, that she actually defeated Ted Heath on the first count, and was thus uniquely well positioned to win the second round in which only Willie Whitelaw was a serious challenger - but just not serious enough. Even in her four-year period as Leader of the Opposition she was careful not to "frighten the horses" by disclosing too much of what she intended to do when she was elected Prime Minister.
In any event, she still needed more time to sort out some of her ideas. The Thatcher who was elected Prime Minister in 1979 was significantly different from the Thatcher elected to the Tory leadership in 1975. I can testify to this myself. On the first occasion that I met her, very shortly after her election to the leadership, she presented herself as strongly pro-European, telling me that an appalling aspect of the referendum campaign on EU membership that the Labour Government had just launched, was that "Britain had lost respect and support by so blatantly dishonouring an international treaty obligation, seeking a re-negotiation of their own treaty". This was fully in line with the pro-European stance that she had taken from the very start of her political career, during which she had strongly defended the European ideal and had rejected fears of loss of sovereignty in the most explicit terms.
But by the time she became Prime Minister, her increasingly virulent anti-Europeanism was eventually to be the precipitating factor in her loss of the leadership of her party and the office of Prime Minister.
At the time of her election to the leadership she had not yet made the transition from support for incomes policy to the monetarist approach that she was to deploy in government four years later. Indeed, when we met for the second time in April 1975 at a conference in Turkey, she told me that she had learned a good deal from discussions at that meeting - for example, the inadequacy of the money supply approach, because so much had to be done by way of supportive action to make the money supply work. If inflation went very high and an incomes policy was necessary, there should be a statutory policy - but only for a very short time.
On that occasion she also told me, and an English journalist who joined us for this informal discussion, that she favoured a political consensus as long as it was amongst people who agreed on a free society and a mixed economy. Indeed it was her aim to create a centre force in British politics, attracting social democrats from Labour. That was indeed a very different Margaret Thatcher from the one who was to govern Britain for 11 years!
She was also a late convert to enthusiasm for the US, taking the view for much of her political career that Europe should form a block with as much power as the US or Russia, and that we "should take the initiative on foreign affairs and not merely follow our American friends". There may have been echoes here of the foreign policy approach of Enoch Powell - a man whom she greatly admired throughout her political career.
Even in later years she was never as pro-American in private as she appeared to be in public. She told me once that she had firmly rejected a request by Ronald Reagan to express support for the Israeli air raid on the PLO headquarters in Tunis - which she vigorously stigmatised as a serious breach of international law, her commitment to which is also noted by John Campbell in his book. She added that she had asked Reagan what he would have said to her if she had "bombed the Provos in Dundalk"! Her fury at the American invasion of Grenada was intense. "The Americans are worse than the Soviets, Garret," she told me, shortly after that event "persuading the Governor to issue a retrospective invitation to invade after they had taken him on board an American warship".
The quality of John Campbell's book ensures that there will be a warm welcome for the second volume covering Margaret Thatcher's period in Government and her final fall from power.
Dr Garret FitzGerald is a former Taoiseach, and an Irish Times columnist