Margaret Thatcher's Last Election

In her time Margaret Thatcher won three elections. The first, the election that saw a woman returned as Prime Minister for the first time in history. The second, that crushed the most left-wing manifesto the country had ever seen, and the third, that consolidated the course of the nation until today. Mrs Thatcher gave the role of running that campaign to David Young, then Secretary of State for Employment, a man for whom it held the most significance of all three. In lucid, powerful prose, Young's diary of that pivotal campaign puts us in the room with the key players, brilliantly recreates the gut-wrenching tension, claustrophobia and sometimes paranoia, observes how personality clashes threatened to derail it from within, and reveals a very different Margaret Thatcher to the one we think we know from print and film. Crucially, it reminds us what was at stake.