BooksReviewA study of Thatcher's era that leaves vital questions unanswered

Britain changed more in the 1980s than in almost any recent decade. The rise of the City and the fall of the unions, the wider retreat of the left and the return of military confidence, the energy of a renewed entrepreneurialism and the entropy of a new, entrenched unemployment – more than twice as high even in the mid-80s boom as when Margaret Thatcher took office in 1979 – all make the decade feel like the hinge of our modern history. Graham Stewart argues this emphatically in his conclusion. He compares his chosen period with that traditional whipping boy of 80s chroniclers, the 1970s, "a decade of strife", which "unfolded without actually settling any of [Britain's] persistent problems". "By contrast," he continues, "a Briton gifted with the ability to switch seamlessly from the news of 1979 to that of 1990 would have been astonished to find that … many of the daily staples of the 70s were either no longer major concerns by 1990 or … were analysed and debated through the prism of almost completely different assumptions."

But just because an era is important doesn't mean it is easy to bring to life. The 80s, especially the glossier, more expansive middle and later years, are both relatively recent and pretty familiar to anyone who knows a bit of history: the property bubbles, the beleaguered 1984-5 miners' strike, the 1986 deregulatory Big Bang in the City, the ecstatic 1988 birth of modern British dance and drug culture. And then there is Thatcher herself: so myth-encrusted, so stylised and armoured in her personal presentation from the mid-80s onwards, so much written about, that the historian's gaze often just bounces straight off.

Stewart, who has written previous books about Winston Churchill and has Tory sympathies, makes Thatcher the absolutely central figure of this volume. "No decade had seen Britain served continuously by the same prime minister since William Pitt the Younger in the 1790s," he points out, a little tweedily but tellingly. By the time her crucial ally-turned-enemy Geoffrey Howe resigned from her cabinet in 1990, she was its only surviving original member, "the prime minister who had sacked more ministers than any other in British history". Stewart authoritatively describes the workings of Westminster and how she subverted them, for example in cabinet where her "schoolgirl-swot approach to argument, trumping [ministers'] generalities with a seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of highly technical details … [meant] she was able to imply that she was more on top of their departments than they were".

The first half of the book is dominated by high politics and chewy as a result. Successive sections on "The Joy of Monetarism" and "The Pain of Monetarism" explain with rare clarity the Thatcher government's highly experimental early-80s economic policy, with its ever-shifting blueprint and frequent lab explosions, but non‑specialist readers may find themselves having to concentrate very hard. Whether writing about politics or pop music, Stewart builds up thick, thematic chapters using long, sometimes almost page-long paragraphs, perpetually explaining, summing-up and stitching together anecdotes from the life stories and memoirs of key 80s players. He knows how to usefully fillet a biography: to reveal, for example, that Sir Anthony Meyer, who helped precipitate Thatcher's downfall by standing against her as a "stalking horse" party leadership candidate in 1989, had been "one of only two Tory MPs actively to oppose the Falklands War" seven years before.

Yet the thematic structure of the book means that some of the drama of Thatcher's 80s arc is lost. After efficiently but a little routinely tracing her government's early struggles, and its rescue by a combination of the Falklands, a belatedly recovering economy and the errors of the opposition parties, there is a 100‑page detour into 80s culture. At‑times, it feels slightly dutiful, a frequent drawback of would-be encyclopedic decade histories such as this, with a few hundred pithy but unrevelatory words per subject, and boisterous movements such as alternative comedy stiffly referred to in quotation marks.

Stewart has more fun with the anti‑Thatcher tantrums of the arts establishment, like many grandees full of disbelief and fury at her success deep into the decade. In 1986 Harold Pinter co-founded a group for dissident leftish writers, announcing to the press: "We're going to meet again and again until they break all the windows and drag us out." In 1987 voters gave her a third term with a massive Commons majority.

"This book," writes Stewart, "has a unifying theme: the [feelings of] attraction or repulsion … [generated by] Thatcher." That many people – perhaps most people – might have been both attracted and repelled by her and the changes she led goes almost unexplored. Is Martin Amis's gaudy 1984 novel Money, as Stewart interprets it, simply about "the corrupting influence of … the world the Tories were supposedly encouraging" – or are its brash sentences also suggesting that Thatcher's Britain was rather more exciting than what had gone before?

An ambivalence does freshen some of Stewart's judgments towards the end of the book. The Tory "right to buy" policy for council tenants, lauded since by right and left alike as empowering and politically shrewd, also had a "byproduct … to reduce the available housing stock for those on low pay". The malign consequences of this, such as the current financial and social dilemmas around housing benefit, are only beginning to be felt. Stewart also correctly emphasises the slowness of Britain's 1980s economic "miracle": consistently strong growth only arrived six years into the Thatcher government.

Yet he is not prepared to make the bolder reassessment of her revolution that the financial crisis, the bank bail‑outs, and all the other recent blows to 80s certainties seem to call for. Much of this book reads like it could have been written in 2007. The secondary sources on which it relies are often from the 80s and the years immediately afterwards, when the effectiveness of the Thatcherite national rescue act went largely unquestioned. Stewart suggests that his lack of interviews with 80s protagonists is because of "the possibly unreliable memories of those who shaped the period". Yes, old warriors often spin and forget; but they can also interestingly reflect and think afresh.

He also makes little use of official documents. To his credit, his account seems reasonably consistent with what they are beginning to reveal, for example that Thatcher may have been more prepared to negotiate with Argentina during the Falklands War than was publicly thought at the time. "Her outward display of Churchillian resolve was not the whole story," Stewart writes shrewdly.

In the end, his book feels like a long, well-informed briefing about the 80s – he calls it a "tour d'horizon", a revealingly boardroom term – rather than a vivid evocation of a world. The British 80s were so eventful and important that Stewart's readers will rarely be bored. But they will finish this volume with much the same decade in their heads as they had when they started. The best history books do more than that.

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