What Maggie did next

But John Sergeant wasn't picked to star on Have I Got News for You for nothing. There were several points in this book where I laughed aloud, and there are some good new anecdotes, as well as some carefully polished old ones.

It is hard to get excited about another book on Margaret Thatcher without some new twist. Sergeant tries to solve this dilemma by writing not about the glory days but the years after her departure from Downing Street and about her influence on the Conservative Party, which Sergeant sees as nothing short of disastrous, and a "fatal legacy".

Sergeant reveals himself as a strong pro-European who was "angry" at Britain's exit from the ERM, which he felt could bring financial discipline to Britain. I hadn't realised that behind his raffish exterior there lurked such financial orthodoxy. He feels Mrs Thatcher encouraged splits in the Conservative Party over Europe and made it difficult for her successor, John Major, to be "at the heart of Europe".

Sergeant tries hard to be fair and quotes politicians from both sides of the European argument, but his own sympathies are clear.

We are told by Chris Patten that Mrs Thatcher "destroyed the Conservative Party for 10, 15 years, whatever", and John Major gives considerable vent to his frustrations.

Interestingly, the one person who expresses strong admiration for Mrs Thatcher is Tony Blair, who praises "her uncluttered mind". Blair even says she could have won the 1992 election. Sergeant says it is seen as treachery among Thatcherites to say she might have lost that election. But I have heard the lady herself speculate that she might have lost, so it can't be such great treachery.

Sergeant lists a catalogue of occasions when Mrs Thatcher went far beyond the conventions for ex-Prime Ministers. But what do you expect? Mrs Thatcher would not have been Mrs Thatcher if she had done otherwise. She would not vote for Maastricht in the Lords, and she encouraged backbench rebels in the Commons.

But Sergeant, whether out of malice or lack of imagination, is completely wide of the mark in his central charge against Mrs Thatcher, that she "used the Europe issue", "to get her own back" on those who forced her out of office. Sergeant simply does not recognise how deeply she felt about these issues over a long time. More importantly, he fails to see she has turned out to be right. Few people today would swap the pound for the euro after the experience of the Eurozone.

When pro-Europeans like Ted Heath argue that Europe is above party politics, europhiles like Sergeant agree, but not when it is Mrs Thatcher.

Sergeant rehearses the old argument that Mrs Thatcher has been inconsistent because she signed the Single Europe Act. She may have made a mistake, but in Mrs Thatcher's mind the Act no more implied acceptance of a Federal Europe than joining the World Trade Organisation implies World Government.

Sergeant argues Mrs Thatcher's Bruges speech created the Conservative Party's divisions on Europe. But she was still PM then and presumably had a duty to warn of the dangers she foresaw. In any case the Conservative Party was
already changing.

When Mrs Thatcher lost the leadership, some Tory MPs, largely from the Heath era, thought she was too abrasive in her eurosceptism. But as Sergeant rightly points out, a new breed of Thatcher's children entered the Commons in 1992, and they were the ones who made life difficult for her successor.

Sergeant spends some time denying the existence of Thatcherism. It is true that it is not a coherent intellectual philosophy like Marxism, nor would she make such a claim. But, like Gaullism, the word describes an era and a set of political values.

This book is in no sense an analysis of Thatcher's legacy. That will require another author at a later date. This is just a highly readable, slightly biased account of the recent past - as one would expect from someone with a classic BBC background.