Volume 37, Number 6 · April 12, 1990
Mrs. Thatcher's Last Stand?
By Peter Jenkins
The Iron Lady: A Biography of Margaret Thatcher
by Hugo Young
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 570 pp., $25.00
The Thatcher Decade
by Peter Riddell
Basil Blackwell, 236 pp., $29.95
Since the celebration, on May 4, 1989, of the tenth anniversary of her becoming prime minister, not much has gone, right for Margaret Thatcher. By the end of last year the euphoric talk of an 'economic miracle' that had followed Nigel Lawson's tax-slashing budget of 1988 had given way to gloomy forebodings about the return of the 'British disease'—inflation and chronic uncompetitiveness. By last October, on the eve of the annual Conservative party conference at which Thatcher would celebrate her sixty-fourth birthday, the base interest rate had been raised to a penal 15 percent as a means of squeezing out inflation but also of supporting the exchange value of the pound. Not long after that Nigel Lawson, the chancellor of the Exchequer, resigned from the cabinet in spectacular fashion, saying he had basic disagreements with the prime minister and her private advisers over monetary policy and the European Community.
Review, 4076 words
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