Inside Thatcher's Last Election: Diaries of the Campaign That Saved Enterprise: 2021

Description

'They say that distance lends enchantment, yet after many decades I can still feel the sheer horror of those last weeks of that election and what would have happened to all we had done over the previous eight years if we had lost.' In ten years, Margaret Thatcher won three elections. The first saw a woman returned as Prime Minister for the first time in history; the second crushed the most left-wing manifesto the country had ever seen; and the third consolidated the course of the nation until today. Mrs Thatcher gave the role of running that last campaign to David Young, then Secretary of State for Employment, a man for whom it held the most significance of all three. Young came into government determined to reverse the worst of the 1970s - oil price rises, union militancy, the three-day week and the Winter of Discontent, when for six full weeks everything closed and even the bodies lay unburied. As he surveyed the scene at the beginning of 1987, he could see the seeds that had been sown over the previous eight years beginning to grow, but they were still very fragile. In lucid, powerful prose, Young's remarkable 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: not just the election but the future of the British enterprise society.

LORD YOUNG OF GRAFFHAM, one-time solicitor, left the law to become a serial entrepreneur. In 1979, he gave up his business interests to become full-time special adviser to Keith Joseph, and he entered the Cabinet in 1984, becoming Employment then Trade and Industry Secretary. After his time in government, he became executive chairman of Cable & Wireless until 1995, and on retirement he founded Young Associates. Twenty-one years after he left government, he returned as a full-time enterprise adviser to the Prime Minister and served for the whole coalition parliament in No. 10, publishing reviews on small firms and enterprise. In 2015, he was made a Companion of Honour.

'The exciting tale told in this book takes the reader into the eye of the storm.' - Charles Moore "I greatly enjoyed these diaries. It's not just a depiction of an important moment in political history; it's a brilliant description of what it is like working at the centre of a national election campaign. It brought it all back for me. If you haven't been there, this is the next best thing." - Daniel Finkelstein "A gripping fly-on-the-wall account of the Downing Street characters who drove enterprise to the centre of political thinking in Britain." - Sara Murray, founder of confused.com "Never before will you have read such an extraordinary, in-depth, unique insight into the intricate workings of Margaret Thatcher and her government. This day-by-day, moment-to-moment account of her third election victory comes not from a politician but from a leading entrepreneur and businessman who was instrumental in enabling Thatcher to transform Britain, the sick man of Europe, into one of the most pre-eminent enterprise nations in the world. British business owes a huge amount to David Young, and this book clearly demonstrates why. This is not a ringside view; this is being in the ring experiencing it blow by blow!" - Karan Bilimoria, president of the CBI