Margaret Thatcher (Vol II): Everything She Wants, by Charles Moore - book review: When big beasts ruled the Earth

Allen Lane - £30

Howe with Margaret Thatcher, during his time as Foreign Secretary (PA)

It’s 1983 and Cecil Parkinson – Margaret Thatcher’s “most loyal and dashing knight” – is poised to resign from the Cabinet because his former secretary, Sarah Keays, is carrying a child fathered by the married father of three.

Norman Tebbit, who was to be Parkinson’s successor as Trade and Industry Secretary, reacts: “There were three of us. Now there are only two.” It was Tebbit’s calculation that only he or Michael Heseltine could now succeed Thatcher after Parkinson’s downfall.

Extraordinary. Thatcher is obviously the star of Volume II of her own authorised biography and Charles Moore covers the height of her powers, from shortly after victory in the Falklands conflict of 1982 to her final general-election triumph of 1987.

But the book is stuffed full of Tory titans such as Peter Walker, Sir Keith Joseph and Nigel Lawson, and somehow only Tebbit and Heseltine were considered leadership material. Compare that to today, when, at latest count, 18 Conservatives are jockeying to succeed David Cameron as party leader, also only months into a second term.

Outside the obvious – George Osborne, Boris Johnson, and Theresa May – there is a lot of talent among those would-be leaders. But the employment minister Priti Patel, the House of Commons leader Chris Grayling, and even the Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt are more obscure, lesser characters than their 1980s forebears.

Two-and-a-half years later and the late Geoffrey Howe, then Foreign Secretary, emerges as a credible leader-in-waiting. “He’d got all his ducks in a row,” says Richard Ryder, Howe’s then parliamentary private secretary – though Volume III will show how he slayed Thatcher but didn’t take her crown.

Howe died this month and his is one of many ghosts of big beasts past who haunt this book. Denis Healey, Howe’s great Labour rival – “the greatest prime minister we never had” – died only a week earlier.

Moore reminds us that imaginary PMs cannot live up to the real thing. Fearing heavy electoral defeat for Labour in 1983, Healey heckled Thatcher for wanting to “cut and run” to the ballot box. Thatcher replied: “The right honourable gentleman is afraid of an election, is he? Afraid? Frightened? Frit? Could not take it? Cannot stand it?”

Despite that drubbing, Healey’s presence reminds us that this was also a golden age of fiercely ambitious, super-brained Labour politicians who never led their party. By contrast, Jeremy Corbyn didn’t even want the job.

Moore makes some questionable assertions: Thatcher shares credit with Heseltine for the creation of the London Docklands Development Corporation but this pioneering urban regeneration was, in reality, Heseltine’s alone. Thatcher finished off dying industries, but she was a slave to the academic perfection of the free market and didn’t understand that devastated communities could not simply bounce back as the text books told her they must.

Ultimately, Moore’s book is a rollicking read and Thatcher a remarkable lead – but the supporting cast was pretty special too.