The concluding volume of Charles Moore’s life of Margaret Thatcher is – as its predecessors are – a triumph

This outstanding biography comes to an end, not in an atmosphere of triumph and achievement, but in a welter of frustration, division, anger and conspiracy. There is a widespread view that Margaret Thatcher’s first two administrations, from 1979 and 1983, were huge personal successes; the third, from 1987, was her mad period. That is unfair, and avoids the truth that she was partnered in this last phase with figures who conspired to frustrate policies arising from some accurate and perceptive insights.

The end result is that where the first two volumes contained one episode after another of rare, unalloyed triumph, this final one inevitably tells the story of resentments building up, cabals of the misguided doing their best to put an end to the phenomenon, complaint and gleeful plotting. Enoch Powell’s maxim, talking about Joseph Chamberlain, that ‘all political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure’, was much quoted at the time and since.