John Campbell
Jonathan Cape, London 2000, £25.00
Campbell wrote the much acclaimed biography of Edward Heath and this has had similarly good notices. It is a very good, orthodox biography. It describes her political career to 1979 in great detail and provides enough personal information to understand how she acquired that rigid, humourless, repressed, character. But where Mrs Thatcher is concerned, an orthodox biography doesn’t make it.
None of the paramilitary and psy-ops events of the 1974-79 period which led to her 1979 election victory are mentioned. Brian Crozier is referred to twice, once as a ‘disillusioned socialist intellectual’ (p. 372) – an absurd description for a man who, by his own admission, spent virtually the whole of the post-war period working for British and American intelligence. His role in educating Thatcher on security and intelligence issues with his Shield group of old spooks is omitted and his memoir is not included in the author’s bibliography.
ISC and NAFF are referred to once and there is no reference to the intelligence agencies’ role in either. G. K. Young is omitted, the Monday Club gets half a line; and so forth. Reading Campbell’s book you would never know, for example, that the The Times was seriously discussing the conditions for a military coup in the UK in 1974. In omitting all this parapolitical material Campbell is guilty either of incompetence or of falsification.