Maggie: Her Fatal Legacy. John Sergeant

By John Sergeant

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0330411853
• ISBN13: 9780330411851
• Release Date: January 2005
• Publisher: Pan Publishing
• Length: 389 Pages
• Weight: 0.71 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.8" x 1.0" x 5.1"

Customer Reviews

A Tragic End Analyised with Civic Seriousness and Comic Charm

It seems very fitting that John Sergeant, a journalist who owes his success largely to the imposing presence of Mrs. Thatcher, should be the one to chronicle the legacy left by the iron woman on British politics, and the Conservative Party in particular. Putting to use his wit, political knowledge and abundance of amusing yet informative anecdotes, Mr. Sergeant cautiously describes a person of obsessive determination, and eventually isolation, which enabled her to exercise power from Number 10 for eleven years, but directly contributed to her rapid collapse, and the rendering of the Conservative Party as incapable of governing the United Kingdom for (as of writing) eleven years. `Maggie' is an entertaining read and will be enjoyed by all who merely wish to read a light-hearted summary of Mrs. Thatcher's Premiership, but it also presents a serious analysis on her lasting impact on Parliamentary democracy, and the affects of Thatcherism on contemporary Party Politics.

THE HAUNTING

The old English kings in 1066 And All That were forever dying of surfeits of something. I myself suspect that interest in British politics, in this age of saturation coverage, is in danger of dying of a surfeit of commentators. John Sergeant, while he still functioned as a TV and radio reporter and analyst of political events, was probably a little above the average, which in its way is quite a respectable average. More or less without exception they are professional, they are articulate, they can recover from minor mishaps without being flustered and they are fairly intelligent in what they say. Sergeant could be engagingly witty as well, but of course he had his 15 minutes of fame for being the man on the spot when Margaret Thatcher, the ostensible theme of his book, first got the message that her time as prime minister of the United Kingdom was up. Sergeant himself says that he struggled to find a consistent theme for his book, finally settling on the allegedly `fatal legacy' that Thatcher left the Conservative party. I must say it shows. The book is genuinely interesting, it is often perceptive and illuminating, but it is only partly about Margaret Thatcher. That in its turn only partly matters - if the rest of it is coherent and valuable that's fine by me, whatever title he chooses. My own feeling by the end was that the last couple of chapters, which do focus on Thatcher's behaviour after she left office and how this affected her party, are the best and most original. The rest is good reporting and interesting up to a point in its own right but we've been there `And oh, my lad, the news is news that men have heard before' (to misquote Housman slightly). The opening chapters are probably the weakest. Sergeant has his notes of various good stories he managed to get, he wants to see them in a book, so out comes a rather disjointed set of little vignettes. The bulk of the book after that is mainly narrative. Sergeant is a good reporter and this is quite good narrative, but I wonder which future historians in search of a Thucydides of these tumultuous times will turn to this book to find him. Instant commentary on television suffers from the inherent problem that the analysis is usually trite and banal - predictions of what is likely to happen are made as if no new circumstances will affect the matter, which they usually do, thus invalidating the predictions, at which point the tedious process starts afresh as if yesterday's predictions had never been made. Sergeant is far too canny a professional to get caught out contradicting himself, but what remains throughout the narrative section of the book is the sense of superficiality that is the consequence of its origins. The last part of the book is distinctly the best, whether or not the author had to put his brain into gear just to justify the book's title. His argument is this - Thatcher was wounded deeply by the brutality of the way she was ejected from office, and much of her resentment fo

Fast and Fun

If you happened to see John Sergeant on Parkinson plugging his book, you would assume it is anti Thatcher...but it is quite balanced. It is not your usual heavy reading political biography, but rather a crititque on how the Tory party have been affected since MT's fateful resignation and her promise to be a very "good back seat driver". Fun, for both non conservatives and ardent Thatcherites.