Inside Thatcher’s Last Election

The year is 1987. Having made history by becoming the UK’s first female Prime Minister and then driving out the most left-wing manifesto the country has ever seen, Margaret Thatcher faces a climactic third election campaign.

Her eight years in power have been pivotal in guiding the UK back onto the path towards prosperity, and as he surveys the scene, David Young, Secretary of State for Employment, can see the fragile seeds of Thatcher’s government beginning to grow. But this third election threatens to destroy it all, plunging the nation back into the chaos of union militancy, the three-day week and the Winter of Discontent, when Britain ground to a halt and even the bodies lay unburied. Drafted in to run the campaign, Young knows one thing for certain: the country cannot afford to go back.

Written in lucid, powerful prose, Young’s remarkable diary of the election that set the UK on course for the next thirty years invites readers into the room with the key players, including the Prime Minister herself. Full of gut-wrenching claustrophobia, tension and paranoia, Inside Thatcher’s Last Election reveals the personality clashes that threatened to derail the campaign from the beginning and presents a very different woman from the Thatcher we think we know.

For those in the eye of the storm, there was little doubt about what was at stake: the future of Britain’s enterprise.