The concluding volume of Charles Moore’s life of Margaret Thatcher is – as its predecessors are – a triumph

This outstanding biography comes to an end, not in an atmosphere of triumph and achievement, but in a welter of frustration, division, anger and conspiracy. There is a widespread view that Margaret Thatcher’s first two administrations, from 1979 and 1983, were huge personal successes; the third, from 1987, was her mad period. That is unfair, and avoids the truth that she was partnered in this last phase with figures who conspired to frustrate policies arising from some accurate and perceptive insights.

The end result is that where the first two volumes contained one episode after another of rare, unalloyed triumph, this final one inevitably tells the story of resentments building up, cabals of the misguided doing their best to put an end to the phenomenon, complaint and gleeful plotting. Enoch Powell’s maxim, talking about Joseph Chamberlain, that ‘all political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure’, was much quoted at the time and since. She felt that failure very painfully; whether she had reached the end, or whether this was, in fact, a point from which she could have recovered, will go on being much debated.

The truth was that, as time went on, Mrs Thatcher’s partners around the table were much less congenial to her than before, and much less willing to join in a shared endeavour. Sometimes this was indeed her own fault. The German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, had never been to her taste, though it is true that, like some English people of her generation, she found it impossible to get on with Germans. Kohl’s pride and aspirations for his country she lazily found indistinguishable from German politicians of earlier generations. When Nicholas Ridley gave an interview to this magazine in July 1990, calling the European Monetary Union ‘a German racket’ and saying that ‘you might as well give [our sovereignty] to Adolf Hitler’, there is no doubt that she regretted having to sack him, and the views were quite similar to her own.