Charles Moore’s biography of Margaret Thatcher: Review by Anne Applebaum - Telegraph Books Charles Moore’s biography of Margaret Thatcher: Review by Anne Applebaum The first volume of Charles Moore’s authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher will become the definitive account of her life and ideas, says Anne Applebaum. 5 Baroness Thatcher with her biographer, Charles Moore. Photo: Caroline Moore By Anne Applebaum 4:48PM BST 27 Apr 2013 In her first meeting with the press after defeating Edward Heath in February 1975, the new leader of the opposition modestly paid homage to her predecessors: “To me it is like a dream that the next in line after Harold Macmillan, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, Edward Heath is … Margaret Thatcher .” Accidentally, she had voiced what many other people in the room also felt.

As Charles Moore explains, “The fact that her election did indeed seem like a dream was a large part of her problem.” In and out of her party and across the country, many people found the ascent of Thatcher outlandish, even bizarre: “The oldest, grandest, in many people’s eyes the stuffiest political party in the world had chosen a leader whose combination of class, inexperience and sex would previously have ruled her out. And it was not obvious that it had really meant to do so, or that it was confident of its choice,” writes Moore. From the beginning, she sounded different. When a BBC interviewer asked how she felt on winning the leadership election she replied, in a manner very unlike Macmillan, Douglas-Home or Heath, “I almost wept when they told me. I did weep.” She looked different too, particularly back when she still had frizzy hair and wore too much jewellery. When she appeared for the first time at a meeting of Tory backbenchers, Geoffrey Howe was unexpectedly overcome. “She was flanked only by the all-male officers of the committee. Suddenly she looked very beautiful and very frail as the half-dozen knights of the shires towered over her.

It was a moving, almost feudal, occasion. Tears came to my eyes.” Much has happened since then. She became prime minister, she became a symbol to love or hate, she became the Iron Lady, she became an “ism”, so much so that many of the events in this book will be very familiar to those who lived through them: the 1979 election, the Irish hunger strikes, the Falklands War. Yet the arguing, posturing and eulogising that followed her death made it clear that the strangeness and the improbability of her life story have been forgotten. We all think we know what happened to her and why – but do we really? Moore’s great gift is his ability to make Thatcher’s story fresh again, and above all to remind us of how odd she was.

By beginning at the beginning, by showing us the reality of the childhood we only know through clichés – “grocer’s daughter”, “scholarship girl” – by introducing us to the boyfriends we’ve never met and by quoting from her chatty, breathless letters to her sister (“I decided to buy a really nice undie-set to go under my turquoise chiffon blouse”), Moore shows us how impossible it would have been for anyone who knew her as a young woman to imagine what she would become. Related Articles Harry Mount's best political books 22 Jun 2013 He also captures her unsettling personality, her “actressy” manner, her stiffness in public, her private warmth, her inept outbursts and faux pas, almost always using the language of people who were there at the time. During the decade and a half he worked on this authorised biography – of which this is only the first volume – Moore had unprecedented access to her private papers, on condition that nothing be published until after her death. He interviewed just about everyone who knew Thatcher, from her private secretaries to her political enemies, and he did so meticulously, in reverse order of age.

(This meant, according to an acquaintance, that “a call from Charles was like a call from the Grim Reaper. When you got it you knew you were now the oldest on the list.”) The thoroughness of the research, the hundreds of interviews, and above all the access to her family and friends, enabled Moore to produce a multifaceted picture of a compelling life. Moore is at his best, in fact, when presenting different views of the same situation: of the 1981 budget, he notes that its “paternity, or indeed maternity” is still hotly disputed, and then goes on to give several versions of its origins – or when illustrating the very different impressions Thatcher could make, even on ideological allies. John Hoskyns, who later became one of her advisers, was repulsed after his first meeting, writing in his diary that, “She is a limited, pedantic bore, with no lateral grasp, very little humour… God help the Tories.” Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, was captivated when he met her in 1975, when neither was yet in power: “That evening Ronnie was still going on and on about this wonderful woman he’d met,” remembered one of his aides.

To those around her, she was, as Moore explains, “inspiring, admirable, brave and, to many, surprisingly lovable” but also “intensely annoying”. Some of these contradictory impressions are explained by the fact that she was female in an almost entirely male world. In later years, many assumed she had no interest in other women or awareness of herself as a role model, but Moore shows over and over again that this was not the case. Throughout her career she was asked constantly to speak about “the role of women” and she consciously resisted, though not because she hadn’t thought about it or didn’t care. On the contrary, she understood that the topic could be used to sideline her. When Heath asked her to make a speech on the subject at the Tory Party conference of 1968, she was very clear: “Ted said would I do ‘women in politics’,” she remembered. “I thought that was much too dull.” Asked by the Daily Mirror to discuss the same subject, she replied, somewhat tartly, “They’ve been around since Eve, you know.” By speaking as a politician, and not just as a female politician, she hoped to set a new standard for others.

At the same time, she was a controlling, “type A” female long before anyone knew that such a thing existed; a woman who constantly “juggled” her children, husband and job. She had full-time nannies, put hairdressers’ appointments in her official diary under code names, kept catalogues of her dresses, maintained a bank account separate from her husband’s. In 1964 the strain became too much for Denis, who departed for two months, by himself, to South Africa. Moore thinks he was contemplating divorce, which would have ended her political career. “I am very glad to have come through it,” she said years later – implying that she might not have done. Her oddity was also connected to her brilliance, another one of her qualities now lost beneath layers of history and controversy. Thatcher got to Oxford from Grantham not because she had connections but because she worked incredibly hard, even overcoming objections from a teacher who told her to forget Oxford because “you haven’t got Latin”. She said, “I’ll get Latin” and went to take lessons from a Latin teacher at a local boys’ school. Later, she passed the Bar exam after studying tax law on her own.

The same autodidactic instinct impelled her to study economic and political theory. Although this is very much a narrative biography, it is also a book about ideas: where they come from, how they affect people and how they get shaped into policies. And Thatcher proved unusually receptive to what were then very unfashionable ideas. In the summer of 1968, when the rest of the world was turning on and dropping out, she was reading library books on Conservative political philosophy. In the Seventies, under the tutelage of Keith Joseph, Ralph Harris and others, she ignored the received wisdom and plunged into Keynes, Friedman, Hayek and a lot of very dry economic textbooks.

At a 1975 dinner party thrown by Katharine Graham, the powerful hostess and publisher of The Washington Post, she turned to the future chairman of the US Federal Reserve and asked him about different kinds of monetary measurements: “So, Dr Greenspan, why is it that we in Britain don’t have an M3?” Alan Greenspan found the subsequent conversation startling: “She had a level of understanding of the way the world worked that most people in the political realm are unable to acquire.” Graham, on the other hand, thought she was “a vulgar fishwife”. But then Graham, in 1975, was a far more fashionable person, intellectually and socially, than Greenspan, and far less likely to admire a woman who wanted to discuss monetarism at the dinner table. In retrospect, it’s clear that Thatcher’s instinct for political controversy in her later career was, in part, a reaction to the snobbery and sexism she encountered on her way up. Personally and politically she was outside the mainstream, and so she sought out people and ideas which could help her defeat those who then occupied the centre. In the end, this combination of biography and intellectual history works perfectly.

After all, Thatcher’s ideas were shaped by the place where she was born, by the people she met, by Oxford in the Forties and Finchley in the Fifties, by her quirkiness, by her provinciality and her romantic choices. To understand what happened to Britain during her prime ministership and afterwards, it really is important to understand who she was: Moore’s Thatcher will now become the definitive account. Anne Applebaum is the author, most recently, of Iron Curtain: the Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-56 (Allen Lane) Margaret Thatcher and Charles Moore: Maggie and me | Politics | The Guardian The Observer Margaret Thatcher and Charles Moore: Maggie and me It's difficult to imagine anyone more Tory than Charles Moore. He edited the Telegraph, opposes gay marriage and for the past 17 years has been writing Margaret Thatcher's official biography. Nigel Farndale meets the man who's been rifling through Maggie's wardrobe 'She was temperamentally incapable of not having the argument': Charles Moore at 'her table' in the Goring Hotel, Belgravia.

Photograph: Alex Lake for the Observer Nigel Farndale Saturday 5 April 2014 14.30 EDT First published on Saturday 5 April 2014 14.30 EDT Share on Messenger Close What can it be like being Charles Moore? Since 1997 he has been trying to get inside the head of Margaret Thatcher , understand her personality, fathom why she was so loved, so hated. That was the year she appointed him as her authorised biographer, and gave him unlimited access to everyone and everything in her life, on condition that he wouldn't publish until after her death. So that's a good 17 years of Thinking About Thatcher. Thatcher for breakfast. Thatcher for lunch. Thatcher over port in the evening. And what can it be like for him being interviewed for the Observer? I had suggested doing an "at home" in Sussex, but he was chary about me describing the "soft furnishings, stuffed lions illegally shot, etc". And this is understandable, given that many readers will already, no doubt, see him as the devil's Boswell. To add big-game hunter to his litany of sins would be plain masochism.

So we have opted instead to meet somewhere Thatchery: "her table" at the Goring Hotel in London, around the corner from her house in Chester Square. As we puff our napkins I ask him what effect she had on other diners when she ate here. "On one occasion she got up to leave at the end and they all started clapping," he says. She told him she found it "kind but embarrassing", but he could tell she was secretly pleased. When researching his book, Moore could see from Margaret Roberts's student days onwards that she was conscious of the attention being paid to her. "When she was talking about her first boyfriend taking her to an Oxford ball she said something like 'everyone fell silent and looked at me when I walked into the room.'" That would be the "pink uplift bra", I say (she refers to one in a letter Moore quotes in the book). A clipped laugh at this. Then: "Favourable attention from men was always noticed. There was an almost actressy side to her." We discuss how some men, such as Alan Clark, went weak at the knees. "Not all of course, because a significant minority of her colleagues were irritated and even bored by her style.

Too in-your-face for a certain type of Tory. But the majority found her attractive, some sexually. There was also a sub-set who saw her as a gay icon." Did Moore find her attractive? "Only in the sense of enjoying her presence – she was, after all, older than my mother." Part of the attraction seems to have been to do with her reputation as a political dominatrix. He recalls the first proper conversation he had with her. "It was in 1985 and I attacked her about the new Irish agreement and got the terrifying stare. I liked her readiness to engage and whack you." She whacked him on many occasions after that, during his formal and informal interviews with her. "It would have been unfair to sit her down for a formal interview in the later years," he says. "It would have bewildered her." Instead they would come to lunch here and chat. "She got terribly bad around the time Denis died in 2003, no doubt because he died." He witnessed moments when she thought Denis was still alive? "Yes, I did see that, yup." Yes, ex prime minister: Moore with Margaret Thatcher in 1995.

Photograph: Nick Rogers/REX I ask if sleep offers an escape from this business of thinking about her constantly, or whether the Iron Lady intrudes even upon his dreams. "I have, um, met her in dreams, but I can't, er, remember specific ones," he says. "They are more anxiety dreams about being late to meet her or, um, not getting the tape working." For an articulate man, Moore ums and ers a lot. He is also prone to use Latin phrases without warning, or translation. And every so often he deploys a white smile, one as engaging as it is unexpected, given the solemnity of his long, undertaker's face. (He was obliged to have his "English teeth" whitened for the TV cameras before a book tour to America last year, and it seems to have given him a Colgate ring of confidence.) There is, nevertheless, something unworldly about him. He's a very English combination of self-effacement, drollery and dogmatism – a listed rectory in a suit and blue tie (unlike his more artistic brother, this paper's architecture critic, Rowan Moore).

The drink he orders with his kedgeree, a spicy virgin mary, seems appropriate and reminds me of the criticism that his friend Auberon Waugh made of him, that he doesn't drink enough. Moore met his wife Caroline at Cambridge. She later became an English don, but gave it up to look after their two children, now grown up. When I ask if she gets jealous about there being three people in their marriage, he gives that Colgate smile. "Well, luckily, they have very different personalities." Present tense, note. "And I can't imagine ever being married to someone like Margaret Thatcher , so in that sense they are not in competition." A few years back I bumped into Moore at a book launch and he told me he had just come from visiting Mrs T's dresses, which were in storage in Finchley. At the time I teased him that he was like Jimmy Savile, who used to keep his mother's clothes wrapped in cellophane in a wardrobe. (This was before comparing someone to Savile became actionable.) But I can see now that it is important for a biographer to make that tactile connection with his subject – to handle the things she handled. Did the dresses help him channel her?

"Yes I think so, and it's another reason why she is more interesting than a male politician. I didn't want to see Tony Blair's suits, as it were. Each of her garments mattered more, required more decision-making." Moore was the original young fogey, having become a writer on the Daily Telegraph straight from university, and then editor of the Spectator at 27. Now, at 57, he seems almost old fogeyish, endearingly so. When I ask how his interview with FW de Klerk went, the one he had told me he would be conducting before our lunch, he looks a little sheepish and says he got his dates muddled up. To be fair, he doesn't have a PA, and he does have a lot of commitments, such as his constant round of speaking engagements (more than 100 in the past year), his appearances as the token Rightie on Question Time, and his bold and elegantly written columns for the Spectator and Daily Telegraph (which he also used to edit, before Maggie took over his life). The research he has undertaken for his epic biography has been nothing short of Stakhanovite. And it isn't over yet.

The 800-page first volume is out in paperback this week, having become, when published in hardback after her funeral last April, a number-one bestseller (a prize-winning, critically acclaimed one, no less). Moore is now working on volume two, due out next year. Making history: Thatcher’s coffin at St Paul’s Cathedral last April. Photograph: Gareth Fuller/Getty I guess he has his ending for it now: that poignant funeral. Did he think there would be more protests than there were? "My biggest fear was that the BBC's focus on the nasty people would keep the nice people away. If you thought there was going to be violent protest, you wouldn't bring your granny and your children. The streets were full, but they would have been fuller." The service brought tears to his eyes. "What I found moving was a sense of how far she had come, the grocer's daughter who ended up with the Queen standing beside her coffin." I ask if he was taken aback by the animosity elsewhere, the "Ding-dong! The witch is dead" side of things. "No, I wasn't surprised, actually." Not even when Bob Crow said he hoped she would rot in hell? "That I did find outrageous.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum [don't speak ill of the dead]. The BBC only wanted to hear from the minority who hated her, from the Galloways and the Crows, or the half-witted students in Brixton, or the miners from Yorkshire – not the miners from Derbyshire or Nottinghamshire, because they weren't Scargillites." But wearing his journalist's hat, I say, he must admit that the depth of the hatred from those quarters is fascinating. "Yes, I think in one respect she courted the hatred because when a trade unionist started foaming at the mouth she wanted to have the argument. She was temperamentally incapable of not having the argument. The other reason she inspired hatred was that she won, and kept winning, on an explicitly Conservative ideology. The Left could never forgive her for that." He also puts the hatred down to misogyny. "A lot of people, both women and men, really didn't want to be ruled by a bossy woman. There was a sort of shudder about it." Cartoonists always portrayed her as looking either slightly mad or angry, I note, and Spitting Image depicted her as man. Did that help or hinder her?

"Help, but it was quite wrong to depict her as a pseudo man in trousers and tie." I know what he means, but it nevertheless makes him sound like he has missed the joke, as she always did. He claims it's not true that she didn't have a sense of humour, by the way. "She was quite witty and observant, but what she didn't understand were jokes with a set up and punchline." When I suggest that she might have been a bit Aspergerish, he is careful in his response. "She was a naturally serious person from a serious background. She was not a relaxed person. She liked humour in others, though, and considered it an attractive quality in Denis and Alistair McAlpine . She was terrifying but not pompous, and she could be quite playful, quite cosy in a strange way." We talk about how, if she were here with us now, there would be two police protection officers in the restaurant, because the IRA never withdrew its threat to kill her. The Brighton bomb will feature heavily in the next volume. I put it to him that the speech she made the morning after the bombing might have been her finest hour.

She must have been traumatised, yet seemed calm and steely. "She was good at carrying on in situations of high tension," Moore says, "but she would crack later, as she did in church that Sunday." When I read his book I was surprised by his descriptions of her weeping during the Falklands War. Contrary to stereotype, he thinks she had a strong gift of empathy, "but only if she thought the cause was just, as with soldiers and sailors. Obviously there was much less empathy if the person came from the enemy." When I try to draw him out on the subject of Charles Moore he folds his arms and starts almost hugging himself like someone in a padded cell. Terrible body language, I say. "Yes well, I don't like talking about myself. I'd prefer to talk about her." Presumably, being an Old Etonian is a big part of his identity, I suggest. "I certainly think being well educated is a great advantage in life. It annoys me when people won't admit that they were well educated.

The tragedy of English life is that there is a constant attack on the good institutions rather than attempts to improve the bad ones." He's doing what he accuses Mrs T of always doing: deflecting personal questions by turning them into political ones. "That's true," he says with a grin. "I am doing that, yes." Another of his friends, the satirist Craig Brown , once described him as moving in a world without friction, as if never having known heartbreak. Fair? "You couldn't edit newspapers for 20 years and live in a frictionless world." And heartbreak? Was Caroline his first love? "Effectively yes, not my first girlfriend but first serious girlfriend." He has never carved a roast, sewn a button or changed a tyre – sounds like he's a difficult man to live with. "True, but we have slightly reversed the sex roles in that I write the thank you letters and remember what people's children are called, and who we had to dinner last time. Poor Caroline, she does all the DIY and the changing of the light bulbs." "A lot of people – both men and women – really didn’t want to be ruled by a bossy woman": Margaret Thatcher's Spitting Image puppet.

Photograph: ITV/Rex I ask if he was joking about the stuffed lion. He was. But he does have a stuffed fox. "It was road kill. Elegant. Not one of those angry, snarling ones." Controversialist – and masochist? – that he is, Moore revels in defending foxhunting. He has also been a vocal opponent of gay marriage, appearing on the Today programme in the run-up to the same-sex marriage bill to warn that it would "cause confusion" – and asking in a Spectator column, after it was passed, "if the law will eventually be changed to allow one to marry one's dog". But in terms of which side he will come down on in an argument, he is not easy to second guess. So what can it be like being Charles Moore? As we order coffees at "her table" and ask for the bill, he tells me he has no idea why he was chosen as biographer over other right-wing thinkers and writers. But it is tempting to imagine that Maggie might have seen in him a kindred spirit, an iconoclast and mischief maker who enjoys playing up to a parodic version of himself.

With obvious delight, for example, he says that he hasn't listened to a pop record since 1974 "unless inadvertently, in a taxi". People in morning coats and feathery hats arrive for a late lunch, no doubt straight from an investiture at nearby Buckingham Palace. He must have been offered a knighthood by now I'm guessing, like those other Telegraph editors, Sir Max Hastings and Sir Peregrine Worsthorne. Has he done a Jon Snow and turned it down? "I wouldn't say, I wouldn't, um, be pushed to say anything on that, er." Besides, he already has a title bestowed by Private Eye: Lord Snooty. "Lord Snooty is a very decent figure," he says with a flash of white teeth. "In the early Beanos the ditty went 'Son of a duke but always pally/with his chums in Tin Pan Alley,' something like that. He was an early apostle of diversity." I'll buy that line about Charles Moore/Lord Snooty being decent, and though I'm not sure he has many friends on the Left, for a foxhunting Old Etonian he doesn't seem to care much about class.

It's another unexpected thing about him. The person with whom he had the most laughs in his life, he tells me, was the late Frank Johnson, a journalist who used to pride himself on being a working-class Tory. And let us not forget that his heroine came from Tin Pan Alley, or at least Grantham's equivalent, the grocer's shop. Charles Moore's Margaret Thatcher The Authorised Biography , Volume One is out now, £12.99.

To order a copy for £10.39, with free UK p&p, click on the link or call 0330 333 6846 Former PM sent personal note to Indira Gandhi saying Britain supported India's unity in face of demands for Sikh homeland Published: 15 Jan 2014 The ceremony that hushed central London was a farewell to Margaret Thatcher – and also to the conflicted 1980s Published: 17 Apr 2013 From handbags to Westminster: Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography: Volume I, by Charles Moore - Review | The Independent From handbags to Westminster: Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography: Volume I, by Charles Moore - Review This long-awaited biography, with previously unpublished correspondence and unprecedented access, presents a fresh - even vulnerable - Iron Lady Sunday 28 April 2013 07:44 BST Click to follow From handbags to Westminster: Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography: Volume I, by Charles Moore - Review 1/29 Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street in 1984 Getty Images 2/29 A clean sweep: English Conservative politician and future Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, holding up

 a brush which a member of her audience at the Conservative Women's Conference had presented to her in 1975 Getty Images Cover image of Charles Moore's authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher, Not For Turning 4/29 1 August 1980 Margaret Thatcher as prime minister, 1 August 1980 Getty Images 5/29 Future British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher with her parents and sister, Muriel in 1954.

Her father Alfred Roberts was an Alderman and served as the Mayor of Grantham from November 1945 to 1946 (Getty Images) 6/29 1976.

Party leader Margaret Thatcher presents the Tory policy leaflet 'The Right Approach' at the Conservative Central Office (Getty Images) 7/29 4 May 1979 4 May 1979: Margaret Thatcher next to a campaign poster on becoming the first woman to hold the office of Prime Minister (Getty Images) 8/29 Getty Images 10/29 14th March 1980: March 1980: Fleet Street printers on a protest march against the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher (Keystone/Getty Images) 11/29 1980 Emlyn Hughes and Kevin Keegan Getty Images 12/29 1980 Brighton party conference Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images 20/29 1985 Tory Party Conference Getty Images 21/29 1986 fixed channel 1986: From left to right, French president Francois Mitterrand (1916 - 1996), British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and foreign secretary Geoffrey Howe at the signing of the 'Fixed Channel Link' treaty (Hulton Archive/Getty Images) 22/29 PA 24

/29 1 April 1990: On the afternoon of Saturday 31 March, a peaceful protest against Margaret Thatcher's unpopular poll tax turned to violence in the centre of London Jon Jones Baroness Margaret Thatcher in 2006 Chris Jackson/Getty Baroness Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron photographed together in 2007 (AFP/Getty Images) 27/29 28/29 2008, Thatcher, Blair and Brown AP 29/29 Prime Minister Baroness Margaret Thatcher meets with current British Prime Minister David Cameron, inside 10 Downing Street in London June 8, 2010 Getty Images Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street in 1984 The phrase “long-awaited” is over-used in politics, but the official, authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher, 16 years in the writing, commissioned on the condition that it would only be published after her death, is just that: Charles Moore, whose first book this is at the age of 56, must have felt a heavy burden of duty to get it right – even though Lady Thatcher agreed that she would never read his manuscript, and while it is merely Volume I, it feels like a life’s work of

 research and interviewing.

Less than a month after her death, followed by days of retelling of the story of the former Prime Minister, Moore presents us with enough new material (including previously unpublished correspondence with her sister, Muriel) to offer a fresh, even vulnerable person behind the mythology. The details – her girlish obsession with clothes and appearance, well into her thirties; her fickle affections for men before she settles down with Denis; her naivety, on becoming Prime Minister, of how Whitehall works – do not undermine her Iron Lady image but, at a moment when her grand Establishment funeral appeared to afford her immortality, they make her mortal. As the Bishop of London declared in his St Paul’s sermon that “lying here, she is one of us”, so Moore fleshes out the ordinariness of the suburban, lower middle-class scholarship girl. Click here or on "View Images" for Margaret Thatcher's life in pictures Her literary tastes are traditional and unadventurous: Shakespeare and Kipling.

In the summer of 1944, as the Second World War reaches a turning point, an 18-year-old Margaret writes to Muriel: “Do you think the person who makes the handbags could make me one in maroon leather like your blue one? I have decided that maroon would be the best colour for my wardrobe ….” Yet, here is a clue to what made Thatcher not so ordinary after all: at moments of external crisis, such as war raging in Europe or, in 1960, the illness and death of her mother, Beatrice, Margaret refers to neither in her vast amounts of contemporaneous correspondence with family and friends. This volume covers the period from her birth to the Falklands conflict in 1982, and although other dangerous moments, such as the miners’ strike and the poll tax, will come in Volume II, the book shows how she tried to protect herself from serious issues by apparently ignoring them. The day before her mother died in December 1960, a comment piece by Thatcher about being a woman in politics, written when her mother must have been gravely ill, ran in the Liverpool Daily Post.

Thatcher wrote that “charm is not enough” but must be accompanied by “courage and conviction, for without these qualities the others are hollow and useless”. Thatcher’s coldness towards her mother and, in turn, to her daughter, Carol, is poignant, but it is frustratingly under-explored. About her mother, Thatcher told Moore in an interview: “After I was 15 we had nothing more to say to each other.” But she also hinted at regret, telling the author: “I don’t think I thanked my mother enough, because you don’t realise ….” If she was so cold to both her daughter and her mother – although perhaps warmer to her sister – is it any wonder that she failed to lift other women into positions of power around the Cabinet table? It is disappointing if Moore failed to push her on this subject, but if he did, perhaps she refused to elaborate. Moore observes that Thatcher was “happier when the focus of attention was her views rather than her sex”, but there is plenty of evidence in the book that she loved being a lone woman admired by equally intelligent, powerful men.

While she all but grew out of her obsession with appearance and clothes, she used her gender to her own ends – rather than to benefit womankind. Like his journalism in the Daily Telegraph and Spectator, Moore’s writing is often elegant and vivid, particularly when he escapes the burden of authorised biographer by turning to commentary on Thatcher’s behaviour and decisions. There are surprising moments of demythology: when she arrives in Downing Street in 1979 she asks a senior civil servant: “What do I do now?” to be told: “You’ve got to form an administration.” But at other times the book is almost too detailed, too exhaustive an account, particularly of her career as a junior minister, and it is difficult for the subject to come to life underneath the weight of information. The richness and depth of primary-source material on her earlier personal life, however, make this forgivable. Moore says Thatcher can serve as a “cautionary tale” to some and a lodestar to others, but – unsurprisingly, given his politics are sympathetic – there is very little criticism of her policies.

His 11 pages of acknowledgements read like a guide to the British Establishment and the Washington elite, and the book ultimately echoes what Thatcher’s funeral achieved for her record: creating an official, Establishment-backed, and largely uncritical version of a very controversial figure. Jane Merrick is the political editor of 'The Independent on Sunday’ Charles Moore - Biography - IMDb Charles Moore Jump to: Overview (2) | Mini Bio (1) | Spouse (1) Overview (2) Charles Hilary Moore Mini Bio (1) Charles Moore was born on October 31, 1956 in Hastings, East Sussex, England as Charles Hilary Moore. He is known for his work on Question Time (1979), Election 2010 (2010) and Margaret Thatcher: Prime Minister (2013). He has been married to Caroline M. Baxter since 1981. They have two children. Spouse (1) Charles Moore at the Cheltenham Literature Festival 2013 - YouTube Charles Moore at the Cheltenham Literature Festival 2013 Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Need to report the video?

Sign in to report inappropriate content. The interactive transcript could not be loaded. Loading... Rating is available when the video has been rented. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later. Published on Oct 5, 2013 We spoke to Charles Moore - Lady Thatcher's official biographer about his Samuel Johnson shortlisted book of her life. As Moore himself says, one cannot be neutral about Margaret Thatcher. In our conversation before he went on stage today at the Cheltenham Literature Festival he told us how he came to be "hand-picked" for the job, the revelations in the Thatcher archives, and what volume two will bring...

You can Reserve & Collect Margaret Thatcher - The Authorized Biography: Volume One: Not for Turning from your local Waterstones bookshop ( ), buy it online at Waterstones.com ( ) or download it in ePub format ( ) For more information about the Cheltenham Literature Festival, and to buy tickets, click here ( ) Category Margaret Thatcher biography Charles Moore review John Keane reddit More The most telling tale in Charles Moore's winsome biography of Margaret Thatcher spotlights the moment of her greatest political triumph: the military defeat of Argentina in June 1982, after a 74-day war that cost nearly a thousand lives on windswept islands in the south Atlantic. Prime Minister Thatcher flung herself into the detailed planning of the glorious victory celebrations. When the dean of St Paul's wanted a Spanish version of the Lord's Prayer in the thanksgiving service, Thatcher's eyes reportedly ''widened in absolute horror''. At the clergy's suggestion that the service be one of ''reconciliation'', Thatcher ''struck the table a tremendous blow'', snarled, ''A service of reconciliation!'' and threatened to denounce the wishy-washy lassitude of the clergy.

SHARE Link Domestic row: Margaret Thatcher, pictured at home in 1975, was irritated by questions about being a woman. Photo: AFP Some hours later she, instead of the Queen, took the salute at a victory march-past in London. At a victory dinner at No.10, she praised ''the spirit of Britain'' and quoted the Duke of Wellington: ''There is no such thing as a little war for a great nation.'' Her dinner guests were hugely impressed. ''She spoke like Queen Elizabeth I,'' senior diplomat Sir David Goodall recalled. ''She looked like Queen Elizabeth I!'' Prone to xenophobia, consistently hardline, indulgent of state power, a political fighter blinded by hubris, on occasion a table-thumper: all these qualities land a hard blow against the more tender-hearted Thatcher that Moore tries to project in the first instalment of his two-part ''authorised'' biography. He rightly observes that his subject is ''someone about whom it is almost impossible to be neutral'', but thanks to his probing of previously inaccessible letters, diaries and interviews with her colleagues, friends and family, we learn that the Iron Lady indeed had a private life - an ascetic life ''with no space for self-examination''.

SHARE Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume One - Not For Turning. by Charles Moore. Photo: Supplied When plumbing the depths of her private life, Moore reveals that quite early in her political career she developed a taste for mixing in Tory circles dominated by ''the well-off, the ex-military and the landed Etonians''. Moore is particularly attracted to her role as a woman within these circles. Instead of tackling the all-important question of how democracies can create spaces for dignified tough women who bring a different style to high politics, he wraps her in gendered imagery, domesticates her, especially in the opening sections of the biography. Advertisement ''Her handbag became the sceptre of her rule,'' he says. Every decision she takes, every move she makes comes dressed in heels, brown tops, black hats, half-yards of peach curtain material, nightdresses and perms. When Thatcher moves to No.10, she insists on paying for a new ironing board out of her own pocket. Moore also notes that a big factor in Thatcher's political success was her ''female conscientiousness''. What kind of ''female conscientiousness'' drove Margaret Thatcher?

Was it her definition of breakfast: black coffee and vitamin C tablets while listening to the BBC World Service and Radio 4? Or perhaps her early support for the legalisation of abortion, the decriminalisation of homosexuality, the return of birching and the withdrawal of free milk in schools? Or that the milk snatcher sometimes sent flowers, with hand-written notes offering ''the scent of flowers from an English country garden for you''. Or (to speak in her language) that she typically played the role of a man's woman, a figure of power whose perfume, bold lipstick and taste for whisky intoxicated more than a few men, including junior minister Alan Clark, who confessed to Moore he didn't want ''actual penetration - just a massive snog''. The oddly unconvincing feature of Moore's effort to rescue Thatcher from obloquy by invoking her ''femininity'' is her unequivocal personal rejection of any such talk. The mother of twins was always so profoundly irritated by questions about being a woman that her press officers had to warn foreign journalists off the subject. In word and deed, Thatcher expressed hostility towards feminism, which explains why Britain's first female head of government insisted on being known as the first British prime minister with a science degree.

She announced to Dr John Ashworth, the chief scientist, that her government had no room for a minister for science. ''I'm a scientist,'' she said. ''I shall be my own minister for science.'' The chief flaw of this biography is that in spite of many similar marvellous details, it has no articulated thesis, no parables, no memorable conclusions. Perhaps the planned second volume will offer reasons for remembering Thatcher. That is, after all, the point of biography: to lift individuals out of time and to confer upon them a form of immortality. Trapped within the biographical method of persuasion through induction - one damned ''fact'' after another - this biography instead leads readers nowhere. Part of the problem surely stems from its ''authorised'' status. Moore, editor of the conservative Daily Telegraph from 1995 to 2003, was hand-picked by Thatcher as her official biographer, on the condition the finished work be published posthumously. Thatcher's choice paid off. Moore thinks like a Tory, writes like a Tory, for an imaginary heartland Tory audience.

He supposes the remarkable ''facts'' of Thatcher's life will automatically win over his readers, that the stories he tells speak for themselves, proving even to faint hearts that she will forever remain ''a national archetype'', a figure as great as ''Henry VIII, or Elizabeth I, or Nelson, or Winston Churchill''. Is Thatcher to be remembered in this way? She certainly thought so. Immediately after her enforced resignation in 1990, she was asked what had changed during her 11-year leadership of the country. ''Everything,'' she answered. The pity of this biography is both its failure to confront the hubris of that utterance and its strange complacency about the huge political questions Thatcher bequeathed to Britain, and to the world. Are military adventures fuelled by pompous talk of ''the people'' damaging to democracies? Did Thatcher's commitment to ''sweeping Britain clean of socialism'' through deregulation, privatisation and hostility to ''Europe'' pave the way to the present banking crisis and its terrible consequences? Why did she leave a legacy of hatred in parts of Northern Ireland?

And when historians look back on her thumping flag-waving reign, will they be inclined to see that she destroyed the conditions of fair-mindedness and universal citizenship? A Britain where life for many millions of people has come to resemble Hobbes' state of nature: more solitary, poorer, nastier, brutish and short? Scribble on, Charles Moore, but don't dare dodge these tough but consequential questions. John Keane is professor of politics at the University of Sydney and author of The Life and Death of Democracy. MARGARET THATCHER: THE AUTHORISED BIOGRAPHY, VOL. ONE: NOT FOR TURNING Charles Moore Margaret Thatcher biography heralds new chapter for former editor | Politics | The Guardian Margaret Thatcher biography heralds new chapter for former editor Former Telegraph editor Charles Moore to publish authorised Thatcher biography, Not For Turning, immediately after funeral Thatcher biographer Charles Moore, ex-editor of the Sunday and Daily Telegraph, in his former office in London.

Photograph: David Sillitoe for the Guardian Tuesday 9 April 2013 11.38 EDT First published on Tuesday 9 April 2013 11.38 EDT Close This article is 3 years old Lady Thatcher's funeral next Wednesday will coincide with the publication date of a book expected to become an instant bestseller. Not For Turning, the first volume of Charles Moore's authorised biography, is likely to fly off the shelves within hours of the ceremony at St Paul's Cathedral. Moore, who told the Guardian with some embarrassment that he had been contractually forbidden to speak to newspapers, is a former editor of the Sunday and Daily Telegraph, who resigned from the latter position in 2003 to focus on the biography. The book was commissioned in 1997 and Moore had been granted unprecedented access to Thatcher's private papers, including her extensive correspondence with a shadowy figure in previous biographies, her older sister, Muriel, who died in 2004. He also conducted hours of interviews with the former premier and received her blessing for further extensive interviews with friends and colleagues, staff and her family.

Stuart Profitt, a director at the publisher Allen Lane, said the book would supersede previous efforts. He admitted he was astonished at how much information on Thatcher had not been made public before. "At the moment when she becomes a historical figure, this book also makes her into a three-dimensional one for the first time," he said. Margaret Thatcher in 1979. She faced the daunting task of reviving the UK's economy. Photograph: Chris Capstick/Rex Features "Moore is clearly an admirer of his subject, but he does not shy away from criticising her or identifying weaknesses and mistakes where he feels it is justified." The contract for the biography provided that nothing would be published until after Thatcher's death. Within hours of the official announcement from her family on Monday, Allen Lane, the imprint of Penguin Books, said the first volume, which ends with the dinner party to celebrate victory in the Falklands war, would be published immediately after the funeral. Moore is working on the second volume, Herself Alone.

In a series of interviews 18 months ago, posted on the Conservative Home website , when he still had no idea when his work would be published, Moore said he had a particularly sharp view of Thatcher's career, as her election as prime minister coincided with his arrival in Fleet Street in 1979. He said during the years he has devoted to the project, he had seen a steady rise in Thatcher's reputation. "You often get people who say – not necessarily people who agree with her – 'we need a Maggie Thatcher'," he said. Although at 56, he is too old to count as a young fogey, the Eton- and Cambridge-educated Moore has always appeared to revel in his archconservative image. His column in the Spectator magazine frequently includes vignettes from his home village of Etchingham in East Sussex (it was raining heavily there in January) and he was recently affronted by a waitress who had never encountered a cork – as opposed to a screw cap – in a wine bottle. He listed "hunting" as his only hobby in a recent Who's Who.

In 2010, Moore was convicted at Hastings magistrates court and fined £262, plus £530 costs, for an unpaid television licence. The write stuff – Thatcher books. Photograph: Amazon/Fever PR His refusal to pay the fee was a protest against the BBC's decision not to sack Jonathan Ross over the prank phonecalls the presenter and the comedian Russell Brand made to the actor Andrew Sachs. "It was against my conscience," he told the court. His book, 16 years in the making, will be beaten to the shops by the Iron Lady's own offering. HarperCollins has announced the imminent publication of the first single volume edition of Thatcher's autobiography, originally published in 1993 and 1995, which has sold more than 1m copies. Thatcher tomes There are already enough Margaret Thatcher books – biographies, hagiographies, compilations of speeches, commentaries and the Iron Lady's own two hefty volumes oftwo-volume autobiography – to fill a small library, with many more on the way, two with the same title, Not For Turning.

• Margaret, Daughter of Beatrice (1989) A politician's psycho-biography by Leo Abse, former Labour MP, who deduced much from Thatcher's failure to refer to her mother. • One of Us (1989) Bestselling biography by Guardian columnist Hugo Young. • Kill the Messenger (1991) Press officer Bernard Ingham's account of the Thatcher years. • The Downing Street Years (1993) and The Path to Power (1995) The two-volume autobiography. • Margaret Thatcher (2005) A tribute in words and pictures by journalist Iain Dale, also author of The Margaret Thatcher Book of Quotations. • The Real Iron Lady, Working with Margaret Thatcher (March 2013) By former cabinet member Gillian Shepherd, once tipped as a potential successor. "Are we really that desperate?" Thatcher is reported to have said about that. • Margaret Thatcher, The Autobiography (April 2013) The autobiography for the first time as a single-volume ebook, due out this week, to be followed by hardback and paperback editions and an audiobook read by Thatcher herself.

• The Grocer's Daughter (2000) and The Iron Lady (2003) Two-volume biography by John Campbell, who became a consultant on the 2011 Academy Award-winning film, The Iron Lady. It was abridged in a single volume in 2009, which is heading Amazon's Thatcher bestseller list. • Not For Turning (17 April 2013) Volume one of Charles Moore's authorised biography. • Not For Turning (25 April 2013) Biography by Robin Harris, her scriptwriter who also helped with her autobiography. • This article was amended on 11 April 2013. The original gave the title of Hugo Young's biography of Margaret Thatcher as The Iron Lady and said it was published in 1990. It was given that title in the US, but it was first published in 1989, and in Britain its title was One of Us. Charles Moore's biography to be published immediately after funeral, with Robin Harris's account following before the end of the month Published: 9 Apr 2013 Most newspapers adopted supplements with a straightforward and respectful tone, but the Sun chose a brash splash.

By Lisa O'Carroll Published: 9 Apr 2013 Robert McCrum: Aggressively philistine she may have been, but her impact on literature – and culture in general - was enormous Published: 9 Apr 2013 Guardian readers had plenty to say about Margaret Thatcher - as this sample of their letters shows Published: 9 Apr 2013 Reviewed: Margaret Thatcher the Authorised Biography by Charles Moore Reviewed: Margaret Thatcher the Authorised Biography by Charles Moore Charles Moore admires Margaret Thatcher, but he cannot fully relate to her. Sign up for our weekly email * Margaret Thatcher: the Authorised Biography – Volume One: Not for Turning Charles Moore Allen Lane, 896pp, £30 One of the fascinations of this biography is the way Charles Moore searches for the underlying personality of Margaret Thatcher, whom he admires but cannot fully relate to. Good biographies, and this is an exceptionally good one, tell us things we did not know about the life of their subject.

In the absence of any diaries, Moore draws on 150 letters that the then Margaret Roberts wrote to her sister, Muriel, from the end of the 1930s up to the beginning of the 1960s. These cover the war years, her time at school in Grantham, Somerville College, Oxford, where she went shortly before her 18th birthday in October 1943, and her attempts to become an MP. The letters reveal more about her private life, Moore claims, than all his other sources put together. Only her sister would have known as much about Margaret’s early loves, one of whom she more or less passed on directly to her sister. She writes with tenderness about another close male friend, Robert Henderson, in January 1950: “I think we are both getting very fond of one another – in fact more than that. I hope so.” At 47, he was twice her age when they met and already had a distinguished medical career.

A bachelor, he was the medical superintendent at Southern Hospital in the constituency of Dartford, where she was the adopted Conservative candidate and fought two general elections in 1950 and 1951. Eventually, however, she married Denis Thatcher, whom she was seeing at the same time, perhaps because he had asked her and Henderson had not. Her letters give the distinct impression, which their long and successful marriage bore out, that Denis was ready to accept her powerful ambition and to support her financially but also, crucially, temperamentally. Politics was a fast-developing passion. Thatcher joined the Oxford University Conservative Association as soon as she arrived and ended up as its president. In those days, a woman could only attend Oxford Union debates in the gallery and then only if she was given tickets by a member. Dorothy Hodgkin, who later won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, was her tutor. Described by one of Thatcher’s contemporaries as a “brilliant chemist but an awful tutor”, she held different political views from Margaret but liked her. She gave this careful assessment: “I came to rate her as good.

One could always rely on her producing a sensible, well-read essay and yet there was something that some people had that she hadn’t quite got.” Nevertheless, Thatcher’s scientific background as a chemist gave her political position an extra dimension, not revealed much in this first volume, which ends after the Falklands war, but that became a feature as she took a serious and informed interest in environmental issues as prime minister. What is surprising is how Thatcher was helped in pursuing her political ambitions by a number of powerful and rich Conservatives, notably Lord Bossom. His son Sir Clive was a Conservative MP between 1959 and 1974 who, like me, frequented a bohemian bistro in Chelsea. With no condescension and with no little admiration, he referred to her as the “Blessed Margaret”. Searching to find the key to Thatcher’s growing support in the party, Moore spends some time, rightly, on Enoch Powell. After Powell’s highly controversial and populist speech on immigration on 20 April 1968, in which he saw the “River Tiber foaming with much blood”, Ted Heath rang around shadow cabinet members. “Enoch must go,” he told Thatcher.

She responded by warning Heath not to “heighten what [Enoch] said too much” while also letting it be known in the party that she was quite sympathetic to Powell. She never minded being seen to be on the Tory right. Positioning like this is not uncommon in the race to the top of a party but she was unusual in remaining where she was ideologically and not moving to the centre ground. Nevertheless, she was determined not to be easily typecast: she was in favour of abortion, fairly relaxed about sexual conduct and had no hang-ups about appointing or being seen around gay men, many of whom she rather liked. Moore rightly gives a mere 36 pages to the Heath government of 1970-74, for Thatcher was not a very influential member of it. As secretary of state for education and the only woman cabinet minister, she removed free milk from all children over the age of seven. She inherited 1,137 comprehensive schools in England and Wales, approved a further 3,286 and rejected only 326 – an early example of her pragmatism. Later, she disguised this by presenting Shirley Williams as the progenitor of comprehensives.

It was not until the early 1970s that I met Thatcher properly and we were able to talk to one another as people rather than as politicians. She had been giving dinner to a psychiatrist with whom I, as a neurologist, had worked at St Thomas’ Hospital in London. We bumped into each other during a division in the House of Commons and she asked my wife and me to join them for coffee. The discussion revealed the strengths and weaknesses of someone who was, I had already sensed, a most unusual person. She was sufficiently concerned about a constituent’s worries over her teenage son’s health to bother, when she was exceptionally busy, to arrange to meet the doctor who was treating him. Yet it soon became apparent that she neither accepted nor wanted to understand that any adolescent could be depressed. For her, it was all due to a lack of personal drive, effort and will. As she spoke, her voice hardened and she became ever more assertive about the im - possibility of the adolescent’s condition having anything to do with depression. My wife, normally an active conversationalist, clam - med up, staggered by such an uncomprehending position.

As we rose to leave, Thatcher, right in front of her, said to me: “Is your wife always so quiet?” I have never forgotten that conversation. It showed Thatcher conscientious to a fault yet insensitive to someone she perceived as a non-achiever. This became ever clearer over the years in her attitudes towards poverty, social problems and the ethos of organisations such as the NHS. On the eve of the first ballot for the leadership of the Conservative Party in 1975, in which she defeated Heath, she said on tele - vision: “All my ideas about [Britain] were formed before I was 17 or 18.” There is a good deal of truth in this comment. It explains her simplistic view of life, which was part of her appeal, as well as the source of an off-putting certainty. On the day of her election as leader, she told ITN: “You don’t exist as a party unless you have a clear philosophy and clear heritage.” The philosophy was kept in her handbag – Friedrich Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty, of which she is supposed to have said, “This is what we believe.” Nevertheless, she was pragmatic as prime minister.

Encouraged by her foreign secretary Lord Carrington, she dumped some of her previous prejudices, like her passionate support in opposition for Bishop Muzorewa and the internal settlement in Rhodesia. In February 1981, when the moderate miner’s leader Joe Gormley was close to calling a strike, without any cabinet discussion, she told her energy secretary David Howell, “Bring it to an end, David. Make the necessary concessions.” She cost the country £400-500m in the process. Also, as Moore remarks, this contributed to the myth that the miners were invincible, something that was tested to destruction during the strike of 1984-85. The economic gloom deepened throughout 1981 and the cabinet grew increasingly divided. Her home secretary and confidant Willie Whitelaw warned her: “There comes a moment in politics when you have pushed the tolerance of society too far. We aren’t there but we aren’t far off.” An opinion poll in the summer of that year showed the SDP/Liberal Alliance on 45 per cent, Labour on 29 per cent and the Conservatives on just 25 per cent.

On 28 August, John Hoskyns, the first head of her policy unit, who had built and sold a computer company and was her leading non-career civil servant, addressed to her what he called a “blockbuster” memo entitled “Your Political Survival”. It recognised that: “Your government has achieved the beginning of a nearrevolution in the private sector and especially in industry.” It even ventured, “Things in the economy are better than people realise.” But it went on: “Your own credibility and prestige are draining away very fast.” Hoskyns then listed her faults. “You lack management competence . . . Your own leadership style is wrong . . . You bully your weaker colleagues . . . You give little praise or credit, and you are too ready to blame others when things go wrong.” A few weeks later, after no discussion, she hissed at him: “I got your letter. No one has ever written like that to a prime minister before.” She was not correct. Clementine Churchill had written a more lovingly phrased but equally blunt letter to her husband in June 1940.

As if to confirm Hoskyns’s diagnosis, late one night in December 1981, Thatcher burst into a meeting at the Treasury, “quite full of whisky”. She berated Geoffrey Howe, who was preparing his Autumn Statement with officials. “If this is the best you can do, then I’d better send you to hospital and deliver the statement myself.” The fuse was being put in place for Howe to ignite publicly nearly nine years later in his now celebrated resignation statement. However, within a few months, in March 1982, there were definite signs that the economy was beginning to turn. Then, on 31 March, there followed what Thatcher described as “the worst moment of my life”. John Nott, the defence secretary, arrived bearing intelligence about an impending Argentinian invasion of the Falkland Islands. Moore offers a vivid reconstruction of a meeting that evening in the prime minister’s room in the House of Commons. Nott and his permanent undersecretary Frank Cooper told her that the recapture of the Falkland Islands was all but impossible. She knew from her Foreign Office private secretary in No 10 that this view was shared by the chief of the general staff.

The then chief of defence staff, Admiral Sir Terence Lewin, was away in New Zealand. In the middle of this discussion, Admiral Sir Henry Leach, the first sea lord, arrived from Portsmouth, in uniform. He had dropped in to his office in the Ministry of Defence to find a naval staff briefing on the Falklands that advised: “Don’t touch it.” But this was a man of resolution and intelligence, as I knew from my time as navy minister between 1968 and 1970. Leach asked the prime minister for political clearance to assemble a task force. “What does that mean?” she asked and Leach explained about ships, aircraft carriers and helicopters. “How long can it take to assemble the task force?” she enquired. “Three days,” replied Leach. “How long to get there?” “Three weeks.” “Three weeks?” Thatcher exclaimed. “Surely you mean three days?” “No, I don’t,” Leach said. “Can we do it?” she asked. “We can, Prime Minister.” “Why do you say that?” In language that echoes down the years, Leach replied: “Because if we don’t do it, if we pussyfoot . . .

we’ll be living in a different country whose word will count for little.” The rest is history. Leach’s analysis was echoed in the emergency parliamentary debate on 3 April, a rare occasion on which the Labour leader Michael Foot and I were in total agreement. The prime minister’s grave decision was supported by all parties. However, the Thatcher premiership was never the same again. She would succumb to hubris and that started with her taking the salute, instead of the Queen, at a victory march-past in the City of London, something that this book mistakenly passes off as of little consequence. David Owen was foreign secretary from 1977-79 and a co-founder of the Social Democratic Party

Question: Charles Moore is whose official 2013 biographer?
Answer: Margaret Thatcher