Hugo Young (1938–2003)

The interest of this interim biography, written as Margaret Thatcher was half way through her third ministry but before her fall from power in 1990, lies in its contemporaneous assessment of her at the height of her powers by a fair-minded member of the centre-left establishment.

Hugo Young was the classic old-style Guardianista and was to become the Chairman of The Scott Trust which owned The Guardian and other news media. As such, he represented precisely the cultural 'noblesse oblige' of show more the British elite that Thatcher tended to sweep aside.

However, he was also a fine and honest journalist, again of the old school, so his approach to political biography remains fact-based, unemotional and fair-minded about someone who could excite visceral emotions for and against.

Although now outdated, it stands as a source if only because Young was in a position to interview actors in the drama off and on the record. Although journalists can never know the true heart of things, he was still able to get as close to the heart of British politics as any of the breed might.

As a narrative it speaks for itself. He tends to leaves his judgements to the very last chapter which is wise because then both parties - reader and author - are working from the same information and the former is then more likely to accept the conclusions of the latter.

Looked back at from over 30 years, the Thatcher phenomenon remains interesting even if its appropriation and misuse by a third rate politician in 2022 was close to bringing down the Tory Party and, economically, the nation. This cannot be laid at the door of 'Maggie'.

Young reminds us that Thatcher (like Blair later) never really had the majority of the nation behind her, merely her Party and the House of Commons and (he was not to know) not even they in 1990. Her remarkable power was down to personality but also the peculiarities of our Constitution.

Because he is of the Establishment, Young never really gets into the question of how liberal democracies end up with powerful, if temporary and disposable, leaderships who are not ever truly answerable to the people but only to relatively small numbers of allied politicians.

The question is what did she do with that power. The similarities with Blair lie not only in the nature of her power and its relationship to the Constitution but in just how much of it was 'spun' and short term. The instabilities of liberal democracy are what should strike us most.

That she was instrumental in using her power in changing Britain has to be admitted. There were significant transfers of wealth from the State to selected elements in the middle classes that have never been reversed. The welfare system was sufficiently degraded never to fully recover,

There was no doubt that 'enterprise' transformed the way that the British economy was managed, a process compounded by New Labour but only to the extent that public debt was merely to become debt for all, reliance increased shifted to 'services' and the whole underpinned by migratory labour.

Thatcher cannot be blamed for what was done with her legacy by a regime of spin doctors and intellectual lightweights but it was her legacy that they expanded upon to which was added an intensification of pseudo-nationalistic guff while effectively selling out to the US and EU.

It was probably true that Britain could not continue as a badly run corporatist mish-mash whose economic practices were still beholden to war recovery and unravelling a dodgy empire. It is certainly true that Labour and the one nation Tories had no serious alternatives that were viable.

Thatcher filled a gap in which the British public were fed up with the decline and conflict, happy to be bought off with a twentieth century version of the dissolution of the monasteries and uninterested in the abstract shibboleths of urban liberals.

And whatever she was, she was certainly dynamic in her revolutionary impulse, adopting ferocious shock tactics to drive the country from one mode of slothful corporatist governance to another of ideologically-directed energy in the interests of her class.

If only the Left had had anything like the same energy and, frankly, intellect. She may have been a colossal ego but no one can gainsay her intellectual capacity or capacity for hard work. She honestly had no peer which is why she has achieved cult status among lesser Tory males.

The unpopular comment (from someone like me, purportedly from the Left) is that she was probably necessary if only because the Left could not find someone of equal energy and intellectual capacity to drive its platform forward. The United Kingdom was troubled enough to need change.

The tragedy is not Thatcher (though it was to be a tragedy for many working class communities and proved to be a wrong turning in the long run) but that the Left still failed to produce that person of energy and intellectual capacity when she and her successor had gone and that it still cannot.

Instead, Labour simply sold the pass and put in someone for even longer in Government who merely tried to produce Thatcherism with an allegedly human face but upping the ante on illegal warfare (which Thatcher never engaged in), foreign alliances and the strengthening of the State.

All this was not something Young could have foreseen. Yet the tone of his book is one of grudging admiration from a centrist for a political force of nature, even when wrong-headed. We suspect that this elite view of Thatcher helped later to create the Blair phenomenon - a true tragedy.

Eleven years in power (of which ten are covered in this book) is not enough to transform a nation heart and soul. We suspect from reading Young's evidence that the British are much as they were in terms of core values as they were in the days of Wilson or Palmerston.

People like Thatcher and Blair can, from this perspective, be seen as irritants on the skin of the nation. Creatures thrust into power by mysterious party-driven means and then given an unwieldy, not always functional but still powerful State machine to play with.

Tiny (by national standards) numbers in the political elite become entranced by these figures who get us into wars and can screw up our household budgets or make us happy with handouts or delude us with 'targets' and 'achievements' that are never quite what they seem.

But, sourness aside, Young's interim biography remains a fairly judged and sound account of the 'reign' of one of the most divisive but also one of the most effective of these irritants who did genuinely, for good or ill, change the machinery and direction of the country. show less

"This is the story of fifty years in which Britain struggled to reconcile the past she could not forget with the future she could not avoid."

So opens Hugo Young's magisterial tour of the U.K.'s troubled relationship with Europe in general and the European Union in particular over the last half of the 20th century. Young, the doyen of liberal political columnists, has chosen to take on this subject at a time when the British Right remains in angry torment over it and the Labour Party appears show more to have at last made its peace with the Continent and all its works. The book opens with Churchill's putting on record for the first time an outline of a new united Europe, but it ends with Blair's actually "preparing to align the island with its natural hinterland beyond." In between there is a fascinating battle between wide-eyed idealism, brutal realpolitik, and treacherous conspiracy. Young has talked to everyone who matters on both sides of the Channel and elegantly produces a gripping narrative. In British terms, this is the story of half a century of wrecked political careers, ending up most recently with John Major's cataclysmic defeat in 1997. But on the wider stage, this is the story of a great question--Is Britain a European country?--and why Britain found it so difficult to answer. --Nick Wroe

With immense knowledge matched by a sure sense of narrative, Young has written the best book yet about Britain's attempt to make sense of itself after its era of empire. He takes a chronological approach, focusing on heads of state and those who carried out their policies, starting, as the subtitle indicates, with Winston Churchill and ending with Tony Blair. For 50 years, he writes, Britain has "struggled to reconcile the past she could not forget with the future she could not avoid." show less

The Iron Lady has now died, having observed her from afar I knew little about her. This is a biography of Margaret Thatcher, but does not pretend to cover all the details, but an more of an analysis of her actions and motives. Monetary policy in particular is dealt with in much detail. It has certainly given me a new perspective of her - not all positive. She had some tough issues to deal with, and addressed them very directly - no compromise (on the face, but not behind the scenes), and one show more is left feeling that a little more compassion was warranted. show less

Written to coincide with a Channel 4 series on Lady Thatcher, this biography is based on intimate conversations between the Prime Minister and the major politicians of the period and Hugo Young. It traces her life from being an apprentice under Harold Macmillan and her participation in the government of Edward Heath, to her unquestioning destruction of the Conservatism of the 1950s and 1960s and her emergence as a senior stateswoman of the western world. In 1980, 1983 and 1985, Hugo Young show more was the British Press Awards Columnist of the Year, and in 1985 he won a "What the Papers Say" Award. He has written and presented several series, including "No Minister", "But Chancellor" and "The Thatcher Phenomenon", all of which have been published as books. show less