Maggie: Her Fatal Legacy (John Sergeant, 2005)

Being born in 1984 I spent my youngest years growing up in Margaret Thatcher's Britain, but being so young I knew little of this. As I've grown older most of the stuff I hear about Thatcher is overwhelmingly negative - particularly in Gay Times and Attitude which hold her to account for Section 28. Outside of the gay sphere, the Falklands, miners and the poll tax are some of Thatcher's less well remembered legacies. I've been intrigued about what kept her in power from 1979 to 1990 if she was so terrible, and so when browsing in a bookshop one day I came across John Sergeant's book, Maggie. A fan of Sergeant's wit from his stints on Have I Got News For You, I decided to give the book a go, and having just whizzed through it on a week off work full of cold, I've come out quite a bit wiser about Thatcher's fall from grace and her political legacy, if not much more the wiser about her decade long appeal to voters. 

Sergeant writes with the same gentle humour and intelligence as he demonstrates on TV (Strictly Come Dancing notwithstanding), and he conveys some very dry and boring seeming political concepts in an understandable and interesting manner - his descriptions of the Exchange Rate Mechanism and the internal workings of Conservative party leadership elections could have been snore-fests in lesser hands, but his experience of broadcast news journalism and ability to explain political processes in 30 second sound bites comes in hand. His access to members of then current and previous government ministers, including John Major and Tony Blair, and his presence at many of the events he discusses means that he speaks with authority. 

The book discusses the last few years of Thatcher's 'reign' and how she was ousted by her own party, and then how she managed to play a part, however unwittingly, in the downfall of the Conservative party and Major's subsequent government, leading to an appalling result for them at the 1997 election. This 'fatal legecy' Sergeant argues continued within the party in opposition as pro-European and Euro-sceptic factions fell out, causing disunity and distrust by the British public. It is clear that Sergeant holds Thatcher in high regard in terms of the impact and power she held and the influence she continued to have on politics long after she ceased to be PM, but this is no sycophantic treatise, rather it's a skillful, balanced look at how Thatcher and the myth of Maggie came to influence the political landscape of the 1990's and 2000's. A fascinating read that has helped with my political understanding immeasurably.