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Antony Mullen, Margaret Thatcher: A Life and Legacy. By David Cannadine, Twentieth Century British History, Volume 29, Issue 2, June 2018, Pages 324–326, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwx035
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David Cannadine’s Margaret Thatcher: A Life and Legacy was initially (and solely) intended as an entry to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. It was upon realizing the relatively vast length of the completed item—shorter only than the entries for William Shakespeare and Elizabeth I—that Oxford University Press published it as a stand-alone text.1 At 33,648 words, Cannadine offers a concise account of Margaret Thatcher’s life, understood in four broad stages: her early life, her political career pre-1979, her premiership, and the period after she left Downing Street. The perspective it offers will not be new to scholars of Thatcherism nor will it challenge their thinking; indeed, the approach taken and the ground covered make it more appropriate for a general readership. It offers breadth, not depth. Despite this, Cannadine’s biography is to be welcomed (and, considering the multiple positive reviews already published in the broadsheets, it has been).
When Cannadine began writing about Thatcher’s legacy, he could not have known the extent to which his subject would have returned to the forefront of political discussions by the time of its publication. Over the past year and more, we have seen Thatcher’s influence discussed in relation to the UK’s decision to exit the European Union and the subsequent rise of its second female Prime Minister, Theresa May. Although Cannadine does not discuss these two debates (not least because they are ongoing) his biography is—by coincidence—more timely because of them. Nonetheless, sustained discussion of Thatcher’s influence on the development of Euroscepticism is noticeably absent, despite it being of clear significance even before the 2016 European Union referendum. Although Cannadine does refer to Thatcher’s criticism of ever closer union among European Economic Community (EEC) members—and her related regret over previously supporting Jacques Delores’ presidency of the European Commission (p. 89)—this does not do justice to the extent to which she shaped the development of Euroscepticism in the Conservative Party and the UK more widely.
