Book description
When Margaret Thatcher unexpectedly emerged to challenge Edward Heath
for the Conservative Party leadership in 1975, the public knew her
only as the archetypal Home Counties Tory Lady, more famous for her
hats than for any outstanding talent: she had a rich businessman
husband, sent her children to the most expensive private schools and
sat in Parliament for Finchley.
Yet almost overnight she reinvented herself. Journalists who set out
to discover where she came from were amazed to find that she had grown
up above a grocer's shop in Grantham. Within weeks of her becoming
Tory leader an entirely new image was in place, based around the now
famous corner shop beside the Great North Road; the strict Methodist
upbringing; and her father, who taught her the 'Victorian values'
which were the foundations of her subsequent career.
In the first volume of the first full-scale biography of Margaret
Thatcher since her fall from power - and the first thoroughly to
explore her early life - John Campbell re-examines the mythology and
suggests a more complex reality behind the idealised picture accepted
by Lady Thatcher's early biographers. He portrays an ambitious and
determined woman ruthlessly distancing herself from her roots, until
the moment in 1975 when they suddenly became a political asset.
John Campbell is recognised as one of Britain's leading political
biographers. In addition to
Edward Heath
, which won the NCR Award in 1994, his subjects have included Lloyd
George (1977), F. E. Smith, Lord Birkenhead (1983), Roy Jenkins (1983)
and Aneurin Bevan (1986). His most recent books are
If Love Were All:
The Story of Frances
Stevenson and David Lloyd George,
and
Pistols at Dawn,
published by Jonathan Cape in June 2009. He is currently writing the
authorised biography of Roy Jenkins.
