Edinburgh Internartional Book Festival: Charles Moore

Magnus Linklater opens the discussion by marvelling at Margaret Thatcher’s power to provoke long after her premiership had ended. Despite having completed her term as Prime Minister twenty years ago, when Baroness Thatcher died on 8 April this year opinions on the Iron Lady proved as passionate as ever. She was simultaneously celebrated as the best thing to ever happen to British politics and slated as the worst. Countless articles and documentaries were devoted to her life and legacy in the weeks that followed but only now has the official biography, Not For Turning: Volume One, been published.

It is written by Charles Moore, former editor of The Daily Telegraph, who was chosen by Thatcher herself as the author. She stipulated that it must only be published after her death, making it an authorised but not approved biography.

A Scottish audience might seem a hostile atmosphere for an event on Thatcher – early on there were mutinous rumblings through the auditorium when Linklater mentioned the Scottish issue but oddly it was the pithy anecdotes of her early years that kept the audience laughing. Moore has access to all of Thatcher’s private papers including never-before-seen government documents, but chose instead to discuss the contents of her private letters to her sister. He describes the 150 letters written by Margaret to her sister Muriel between the ages of thirteen and forty as concerning exams, boyfriends, clothes and very little politics. Adding that, like her or not, it is these letters that humanise the Conservative leader as a sister, woman and human being.

Much discussion is given over, as it always is, to Thatcher’s unusual status as a female leader. Moore makes the excellent observation that people always ask about Thatcher as a mother, when no one is concerned with Churchill’s abilities as a father.  He describes the obstacles she overcame as a female in 80s politics when the Tory party was like a club, with club rules and certain ways of doing business. Unable to enter the smoking room at the House of Commons, Thatcher couldn’t use casual acquaintance with others in the party to forward her career in the way her male counterparts could.

The Scotland issue is only briefly mentioned when Moore states that Thatcher felt devolution should be Labour's problem and highlights her early popularity in the country when Tory seats increased by a third in the 1979 election.

Linklater's last question asks how Charles Moore, having now spent fifteen years “living with Thatcher,” feels about her. He acknowledges that he definitely admires her, describing her staggering devotion to a difficult job but isn’t sure if he likes her, as she did have many unlikeable qualities – egotistic, vengeful, rude. However, he does think the most inaccurate thing said about Thatcher is that she was inhuman, or not a real woman, and it is this biography that attests these human qualities of the Iron Lady.