Book review: Thatcher’s Britain

Thirty years after she became Britain's first female prime minister, Margaret Thatcher remains a political figure of almost mythical proportions," said Andrew Anthony in the Observer.

She towers like a "bouffanted symbol of polarising change" over a tumultuous period that saw urban riots, the Falklands war, the miners' strike and the taming of the unions, the sale of council houses, privatisation and financial deregulation.

In Thatcher's Britain, the historian Richard Vinen has written a "tight, sensible" re-asssessment of her government - which reminds us that, far from arriving in Downing Street with "a bold vision", she had "little but a hectoring manner and an ill-defined belief in monetarism"; and that in her first term she looked set to disappear amid high unemployment and low poll ratings.

"The really refreshing thing about Vinen's elegant and zippy book is that it eschews the narrow partisanship that has always disfigured so much writing about the Iron Lady," said Dominic Sandbrook in the Sunday Times.

Thatcher emerges as "a much less strident, radical figure" than either "the Boudica of her admirers' fevered imaginings" or the "neo-liberal lunatic" remembered by the Left.

Instead she was a cautious, pragmatic politician, and a "brilliant opportunist who made the most of the chances that Ted Heath, General Galtieri and Arthur Scargill laid like tributes at her feet".

However, the title is "highly misleading. This is not a history of Thatcher's Britain." It is the story of her government, and it rarely strays out of Westminster. Vinen has, however, dug up many revealing "nuggets", such as her economic adviser Sir Alan Walters' "mad suggestion that Britain and Argentina settle the Falklands war by offering competing bribes, starting at £50,000 a head, for the islanders' support".
Thatcher's Britain by Richard Vinen, 416pp (Simon & Schuster, £20). The Week Bookshop £18 (inc p&p) ·