An authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher which promises to make the late prime minister into a “three-dimensional [figure] for the first time”, and a tribute to the Iron Lady from her speechwriter Robin Harris, will both be released later this month, their publishers announced yesterday, as sales of Thatcher’s own memoirs soared in the hours following her death.
The death of Britain’s first female prime minister from a stroke on Monday morning was greeted with tributes from around the world – and with street parties in Brixton and Glasgow. The news also sent readers rushing to get their hands on copies of Thatcher’s two volumes of autobiography, with sales of The Downing Street Years – in which she “recalls the triumphs and the critical moments of her premiership” – rising by over 100,000% on Amazon, and The Path to Power up by almost 25,000%. Books by or about Thatcher took up five of the top 10 slots on Amazon.co.uk’s movers and shakers chart – which measures the titles to have undergone the most significant sales rises in the last 24 hours – this morning.
The first volume of the authorised biography of Thatcher – to be titled Not for Turning – was also announced yesterday. Commissioned in 1997 on the understanding that it would not be published during Thatcher’s lifetime, Penguin will release Charles Moore’s biography immediately after her funeral. Moore, said the publisher, “was given full access to Lady Thatcher’s private papers and interviewed her extensively; she supported all his requests for interviews with others, including those who worked most closely with her and her own family”. Thatcher herself did not read the manuscript – which ends in the wake of the Falklands war – before she died, and Moore is now writing the concluding volume of the biography, Herself Alone.
“Charles Moore’s biography of Margaret Thatcher immediately supersedes all earlier books written about her. Having worked closely with Lady Thatcher on both volumes of her autobiography, and read all the other main books about her, I was astonished at how much Moore says which has never been public before. At the moment when she becomes a historical figure, this book also makes her into a three-dimensional one for the first time,” said Stuart Proffitt at Penguin imprint Allen Lane. “Moore is clearly an admirer of his subject, but he does not shy away from criticising her or identifying weaknesses and mistakes where he feels it is justified.”
Thatcher’s famous speech at the Conservative party conference in 1980 – “To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase, the U-turn, I have only one thing to say: You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning” – also gives the title to Harris’s new biography of Thatcher, announced yesterday by Transworld and due out on 25 April. His Not for Turning will tell Thatcher’s “extraordinary life story”, and is a “fitting tribute to a woman who made history”, said Transworld.
Harris was Thatcher’s speechwriter and adviser, draftsman of her own memoirs, and a friend until her death. When he decided to write his own version of her life story, she wrote to him to say: “I can think of no one better placed than you to tackle the subject… You also know, better than anyone else, what I wanted our reforms to achieve for the people of Britain.”
Transworld promised “a stunning account of her exit from power”, and a “deep, personal insight” into Thatcher’s character.
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