Margaret Thatcher was the towering figure of late-twentieth-century British politics. This is the story of her remarkable life in her own words. On the afternoon of 25 May 2023 the gates were damaged when a car crashed into them. The Prime Minister was inside at the time. A man was arrested by police and the incident was not terrorism related. [21] [22] Public right of way [ edit ] Downing Street in the late 1980s, before the gates were installed What a self-righteous old bag.... please don't state that she did a lot of good for the country as she, and her cronies, have been responsible for the majority of avarice and greed that exists in our country today. Ocr tesseract 4.1.1 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9837 Ocr_module_version 0.0.7 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA19882 Openlibrary_edition

The Guardian The lady sings a swan, or goose, song | | The Guardian

The appearance of Margaret Thatcher's memoirs has been one of the most eagerly awaited publishing events in many years. As this book now shows, rarely has such a sense of anticipation been so amply justified." "The Downing Street Years is, first and foremost, a brilliant first-hand portrayal of the events and personalities of her years in power. She gives riveting accounts of the great and critical moments of her premiership - the three election victories, the Falklands War, the Miners' Strike, the Brighton Bomb, the Westland Affair, her battles abroad with foreign federalists and at home with faint-hearted or misguided ministers. Her judgements of the men and women she has encountered, whether world statesmen or Cabinet colleagues, are completely, sometimes brutally, frank. She is lavish with praise where it is due; devastating in her criticism when it is not. The book ends with an account of her last days which is as gripping as anything in thriller fiction." "But The Downing Street Years is as much an argument as it is a record or a series of character portraits. No prime minister of modern times has sought to change Britain and its place in the world as radically as she did. Her government, she says, was about the application of a philosophy, not the implementation of an administrative programme. She sets out here with forcefulness and conviction the reasons for her beliefs and how she sought to turn them into action."

In her book All Must Have Prizes, the journalist Melanie Phillips made what I once considered a very strange assertion for a right-winger: that is, essentially, that Margaret Thatcher was not really a conservative. Here it is important to note the lower case -c, as opposed to the proper noun Conservative Party. Indeed, there are plenty (perhaps even a majority) of Conservatives in the British Parliamentary Party who are not conservatives. But how could any astute political observer reach the conclusion that Mrs. Thatcher was anything but the archest of conservatives, if not the mother of the movement? In fact, after reading The Downing Street Years, I see that Ms. Phillips got it quite right—a point I’ll return to in the conclusion of this (far too lengthy) review. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2020-12-10 02:49:22 Boxid IA40001320 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier

The Downing Neville Chamberlain Diary Letters. Volume IV: The Downing

Downing Street, long since demolished, were at one time houses leading up to Horse Guards Road. 15-16 formerly housed the Foreign Office, which also occupied two houses on the south side of the street. 18 was occupied by the West India Department of the Colonial Office and 20 was occupied by the Tithe Commission. I was fascinated with her chapters on improving Britain's economy, dealings with the European Council and the way she took on the trade unions. The Falkland War chapters were also enlightening. I have studied much about the collapse of the Soviet Union and it's relations with the United States, so Thatcher's discussion of these events and the repercussions to Europe were particularly interesting. I had thought I might find 'The Downing Street Years' unwatchable: four hours of self-justification by Brtian's controversial (and recently deceased) former Prime Minister. In fact, the programme is studiously neutral in its political conclusions, but ruthlessly incisive in its personal ones; and the person who wields the knife is in fact Thatcher herself, though she is its main victim. For most of the other interviewees, like most former politicians in such documentaries, come across as rueful, thoughtful, reflective. Maybe this cuddliness is just an act; but it does make you wonder what the political process does to have made them seem quite so inhuman when in the heat of government. But Thatcher is the exception, and when asked to comment on the events of the recent past (the programme was made in 1993), she does so without showing the slightest hint of humanity. It's not just her regal tone; but the fact that her opponents are so uniformly condemned as wrong, deceitful, cowardly and (in most cases) actively trying to make Britain a worse place. There's not a hint of nuance in her world-view; no willingness to concede that she might not have always been right, or even that others might have been wrong but nonetheless acting in good faith. It's almost like watching old film of Adolf Hitler: it makes you wonder, how did this person ever get to become leader of a country? What did people see in her? Perhaps people really did think that the problems of her time required an unusual personality to deal with them. Because, while the programme can not and does not offer a definitive answer, say, on the correctness of her monetary policy or her actions in the Falklands conflict, it fairly unambiguously paints the great leader as someone with a sense of self-righteousness verging on the lunatic. Vehicle access was curtailed in 1973 when metal barriers were placed across the entrance to the street. [18] In 1974, the Metropolitan Police proposed erecting a semi-permanent barrier between the pavement and carriageway on the Foreign Office side to keep pedestrians off the main part of the street. The proposal came with assurances that tourists would still be permitted to take photographs at the door of Number 10. The Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, rejected the proposal, feeling that it would appear to be an unacceptable restriction of the freedom of the public. Wilson's private secretary wrote "I much regret this further erosion of the Englishman's right to wander at will in Downing Street." [19] Walpole took up residence on 22nd September 1735. The Walpoles used their new residence as a place to entertain important guests, including royalty, politicians, writers and soldiers.

My Book Notes

This book looks at the decade plus that she was in power. It's an interesting book, because she talks about the things that drew me to student politics in the late 1980s. But anyone who reads it now will find it reads more like a historical treaties than it does anything else. I say this because much of what she writes about have become settled facts that everyone agrees on. Some sources believe that Thatcher wrote at least part of the book at the Manor House Hotel, in Castle Combe, in the Full Glass bar. [12] [13] Reception [ edit ] Thatcher's close friend Woodrow Wyatt recounted in his diary on 3 February 1989 a conversation he had with Rupert Murdoch who wanted Thatcher to write her equivalent of Mikhail Gorbachev's Perestroika, explaining her philosophy and that John O'Sullivan could do all the "donkey work" for her. Wyatt countered this by stating that the chairman of the publishing house Collins had tried to get him to persuade Thatcher to publish her memoirs with Collins and Thatcher herself seemed favourable to this option. [1] The next day Wyatt put Murdoch's idea to Thatcher but she claimed she did not have the time. [2] Today's Best Nonfiction. Mind Over Matter, The Downing Street Years, Natasha's Story, Highgrove: Portrait of an Estate, D-Day 1944