The last time I met her was after all this was over. We had had a strange relationship. She continued for some reason to consider me worth talking to. Yet I wrote columns of pretty unremitting hostility to most of what she did. It became obvious that, while granting that I had “convictions”, she never read a word of my stuff.
For years, in fact, she despised writers, except those who did her speeches. Why don’t you get a proper job, she once sneered at me. Yet, at that last encounter, her tone was different. She had just finished the first volume of her memoirs, which she insisted was all her own work. This has been a terrible labour, she said. It was all very well for me to write books. I was a professional writer. She was not a writer. It came very hard, getting the words and paragraphs in the right order, a task for which, she eventually admitted, she had hired some help.
But now the history was what mattered. Getting the record straight.
Making sure the verdict wasn’t purloined by others. Everything has its season. Promises. Action. Words. Hats. Gloves. Handbag. Now it was the turn of the words, and no one, of course, would, against all the odds, do them better than the lady who, 25 years before, once thought the sky was beyond her limit.
- Margaret Thatcher left a dark legacy that has still not disappeared, by Hugo Young, Guardian.co.uk, April 8, 2013.
Hugo Young was a political columnist for the Guardian from 1984 until 2003 and biographer of Margaret Thatcher. He wrote this piece in 2003, two weeks before he died.
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