These put-downs are not, of course, all Aitken's own opinion. He is quoting enemies among others. But there are enough to make this charge a serious one — especially since it is echoed at points in the other two biographies. And the truth is that Mrs Thatcher could sometimes be a very difficult woman — "bullying, obnoxious, hypocritical, etc, etc, etc". But she could also be kind, understanding, thoughtful, curious, analytical, perceptive, forgiving, etc, etc, etc. We are all, as Pirandello noted, different people to the different people we meet. Each person brings out a different side in us. That is most true when we are least sure of ourselves and veer between timidity and assertiveness, as in adolescence, or in Mrs Thatcher's difficult years at Oxford, or in the first few years of her Tory leadership, or in her final years of memory loss and advancing senility. This general tendency is an especially acute problem for a political leader since he is surrounded by people many of whom wish him ill. He is therefore likely to be "difficult" in his relations with colleagues and subordinates. As all three biographers attest, that was truer for Mrs Thatcher in and out of power than for most other prime ministers.

Most of the bile that came from her was directed at ministers and civil servants whose loyalty to her was dubious or shifting at best. Her advisers in Downing Street universally praise her kindness and consideration — the lower their rank, the greater their praise. Ferdinand Mount points out that those senior civil servants who were working loyally with her towards the same objectives — Robin Renwick on South Africa, Anthony Parsons at the UN during the Falklands crisis — all found her a rational, intelligent, co-operative, and grateful boss. That was also my own experience. But Prior, Heseltine, Gilmour, Carrington, Howe, Lawson, Pym and Uncle Tom Cobleigh were not all working loyally with her towards the same objectives-at least not on every occasion. They had the theoretical authority, and for most of her time in government the numbers in Cabinet, to block her programmes.  

As a result she lost her temper, scolded colleagues in front of their subordinates, ranted angrily over decisions forced on her, encouraged backbenchers to support the positions she had been unable to sustain in the Cabinet, moved decisions from there to more malleable committees, summed up discussions misleadingly, and in general behaved badly. Some of that was an expression of distrust towards slippery colleagues; some was simple frustration at the malevolence of events; some was a shrewd appreciation that she could only get her way from a frequent position of weakness by such tactics. If she had not used them, she would not have achieved a great deal, let alone carried through the massive programme of reforms that now carry her personal "brand".

Aitken appreciates this, of course. But how anyone interprets her behaviour will rest on the degree to which they sympathise with her or with her internal opponents. Harris sympathises almost wholly with her; Moore to a lesser and cooler extent. Aitken starts out as still more ambivalent — and for a reason most readers will not suspect. Because he is flamboyantly a risk-taker and adventurer — who broke the Official Secrets Act, was an early experimenter in LA's hippy drug scene, identified himself with the rebellious young of the 1960s in his first book The Young Meteors (aka The Young Thrusters in Private Eye), befriended a discredited Richard Nixon after the fall, took the extraordinarily high risk of suing the Guardian for an alleged libel that was in fact true, and when that failed, went to prison-Aitken is not always seen as the establishment figure that he was and is. Aitken is the son of a Tory MP and the grandson of Britain's first representative to an independent Ireland, whose baptism in Dublin's Anglican Cathedral was attended by both President de Valera and the future Queen Juliana of the Netherlands. He rose in politics as a fully paid-up member of the Tory tribe. His establishment status was never seriously put at risk by any of his risk-taking, even by prison, until perhaps recently when he became a devout and active Christian. He starts out therefore, both in life and in writing, as someone who is instinctively quite sympathetic to the Tory grandees who were such a nuisance to Margaret Thatcher.

He likes the style of, for instance, Lord Carrington — witty, cynical, self-consciously realistic — and he is inclined to feel that the Foreign Secretary's prudent advice was not always taken into sufficient account by his boss. She was too willing to override the Foreign Office experts, he thinks. She had to be saved from herself and from her kitchen cabinet of right-wing experts. That was doubtless true at times; but this instinctive bias leads Aitken into questionable judgments on other occasions. He believes that Thatcher scuttled Carrington's sensible initiative for lease-back of the Falklands and so bears some responsibility for the Argentine invasion. But she judged it would never survive the Commons; and in the light of later events her judgment is hard to gainsay. Aitken praises Carrington for bringing her round to a realistic policy on Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, pointing out in justification that the Lancaster House settlement had 20 good years (an eternity in international politics) before Mugabe began murdering white farmers. Well, up to a point Lord Carrington.  Mugabe's North-Korean-trained special division murdered 20,000 of the rival Matabele tribe between 1982 and 1985. Mrs Thatcher deceived herself far less than others about Mugabe or the settlement; she was persuaded by Carrington merely that it was the only available deal to end the war. And though the two Foreign Office's Soviet experts named by Aitken were indeed impressive and realistic, I doubt that either would claim superiority to her own private Sovietologist Robert Conquest.