Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography by Charles Moore Page B

the tiny details of their past achievements, was that she never once urged me to take a particular line, or even inquiredwhat I intended to say about anything. Like all remarkable leaders, she had a great egotism. She always believed that she, and she alone, had rescued Britain from its post-1945 years of semi-socialist decline. She believed that the ‘-ism’ which derived from her married name would make a permanent difference to the story of human freedom. But she was not at all touchy, or even anxious, about what history might say about her.
    This put her biographer in an unusual position. Most biographers working on a living subject have to deal with his or her intrusion, over-enthusiasm or hostility. It is difficult for them not to write in their subject’s shadow. I kept expecting to come under hers, but I never did. This gave me enormous freedom. On the other hand, Lady Thatcher’s lack of aptitude for this sort of work could make her a frustrating source. She could rarely advise me on whom I should talk to about X or where I might find Y. (Luckily, many of those close to her could.) She had turned the key in the lock for me, but seldom seemed to know what was in the room beyond. And when I interviewed her, she found it hard to understand that historical inquiry is not the same as political combat. Her tendency, when asked a question about her past – what her father’s political views had been, say, or whom she had known best at Oxford – was to rush from the particular to the general. On one occasion, I asked her a question about her mother’s occupations. She replied that her mother had been a good seamstress and ‘she did wonderful voluntary work. And that’s the thing about the women of Britain – they do wonderful voluntary work – not like French women,’ and before I could stop her, she had made her escape from an uncongenial private subject to the area of political generalization which she preferred. Often, when all I wanted was a simple piece of information, I would find myself treated to a disquisition on some great matter like the rule of law, unintentionally provoked by a chance word. Sometimes, when her blood was up, Lady Thatcher would decide to ignore altogether the fact that I was her biographer and would treat me as if I were one of those television interviewers, such as Robin Day, with whom she had jousted over the years. ‘You only say that because you’re a socialist!’ she might shout when she felt in a tight corner, though (as she well knew) I was never a socialist in my life. She had a way, as Alan Clark once noted, of ‘jumping the rails’ in conversation. This was fascinating to experience, but not easy for the historian.
    For most of her career, Margaret Thatcher showed the same lack of interest in her own papers as in her life story. She was one of those tidy people who get a positive pleasure from throwing things away. She saw it as one of the housewifely virtues of which she was proud. Before anygeneral election, she made a point of clearing her desk in case she did not return to it. Whenever she moved house or office, which was fairly often, she threw away great piles of documents. She kept almost nothing from her childhood, and allowed a large number of family papers to be destroyed after her father died in 1970. Very little was retained from Oxford, or from early married life. As well as being uninterested in her own records, Mrs Thatcher was naturally secretive and guarded. She did not believe that others had a right to know about her life outside the public sphere. When, in the course of this work, I discovered more than 150 letters that Margaret had written to her sister Muriel between the end of the 1930s and the beginning of the 1960s, I learnt much more about her private life than had previously been revealed by all the other sources put together. She did keep some press cuttings of her early speeches, but tended to throw away things which she considered more