John O’Sullivan on the real Margaret Thatcher. Cartoons by Nicholas Garland
What was Margaret Thatcher like? Margaret – who would have been 100 on October 13 – was a combination of towering world-historical figure like Bismarck and ordinary middle-class English housewife like Carrie Pooter. On the other hand, as the great Italian dramatist of identity Luigi Pirandello would have said, Margaret (1925-2013) was a different person to everyone she met because different people, when we meet them, arouse different emotions in us and we respond differently. My impression both from Charles Moore’s superb biography and from my conversations with her during memoir-writing is that the young Margaret at Oxford was socially and perhaps intellectually nervous, but impressively self-confident when the topic turned to her passion – politics – and in time to anything else she buckled down to master. Some of her female Oxford dons didn’t think that she was quite first-rate; but those Tory males who smoothed her way into...
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