The indispensable election-winner distrusted by a large part of her own party. When she told him she was going for the leadership, he asked her “Leadership of what?” It is hard to imagine Betsy Duncan-Smith asking that question.As you read this detailed account of Mrs Thatcher’s record as Prime Minister, the analogies with that of Tony Blair are unavoidable. She wrote to every spouse or parent who had lost a son or husband in the Falklands war. She remembered humble men and women who had helped her on her way. In her first term, she simply ignored her Employment minister, Jim Prior, announcing publicly further constraints on the unions she knew he opposed. She did not disagree with her opponents in the cabinet; she scorned them, and said so openly. In particular, she both privately and publicly expressed her contempt for the loyal and patient Geoffrey Howe, architect as Chancellor of the Exchequer of her radical economic policies.

But she learnt from the setback, and steadily built up coal stocks in the following years, to the point where she could be certain that Scargill was outgunned. She manoeuvred Leon Brittan into becoming the fall-guy for the Westland mess, cheerfully losing Michael Heseltine as well, and she manoeuvred Nigel Lawson into responsibility for the untimely entry into the ERM.Caution, however, left her in her vendetta against certain colleagues. Campbell recounts her thoughtfulness towards those who served her. After her dramatic fall from office, she still remembered to thank the telephone operators and secretaries at Downing Street before leaving for the last time. There was a certain divine justice in his quiet delivery of the lethal speech that ended her long reign.There was another side to her.

Most of them were casualties of the post-1983 election cabinet reshuffle.As Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher was more cautious than her rhetoric implied. She backed away from the miners’ strike in 1981, for the good reason that there were insufficient stocks of coal to enable her to starve them out. To do so, she employed a civil servant, Bernard Ingham, who became the most aggressive and devoted of her personal watchdogs. She hollowed out democratic government, bypassing the cabinet and stacking cabinet committees to get her own way. According to John Campbell, the cabinet in her first term never discussed economic policy at all. That was discussed either in a series of breakfast meetings to which only Thatcher loyalists were invited, or occasionally in the Cabinet’s E committee, where only Jim Prior was present to speak for the wets.

She had little patience with the neutrality of the Civil Service, promoting those she thought to be “one of us” over more senior officials. She made it clear that the Civil Service would henceforth implement government policy decisions, not advise on them. She saw the media as an important instrument in promoting her positions, using them to undermine her political rivals including her most formidable cabinet colleagues. It was the price of enfeebling the unions.More subtle was the damage to the delicate structure of the country’s unwritten constitution.