The Real Iron Lady: Working with Margaret Thatcher – review

"I voted quickly and went over to stand at the exit from the No Lobby. Mrs T as usual was the last one out. She timed her exit so that colleagues wishing to lobby her could do so. 'Shall I follow you, Prime Minister?' I asked. 'People usually do,' was the reply."

So Labour MP Frank Field describes one of his regular tete-a-tete's with Margaret Thatcher at the apogee of her pomp and prime. This is a book about those glory days of Gloriana. Crafted as a response to Meryl Streep's portrayal of the former prime minister as a dotty old pensioner in The Iron Lady, it is a set of reminiscences to remind us of Thatcher as a world-historic figure. As such, it is part of the beatification of the blessed Margaret as Britain's finest postwar premier and, when the sad hour arrives, a leader worthy of a state funeral.

Unfortunately, former Conservative education secretary Gillian Shephard does her cause few favours with this poorly constructed work. It is clumsily written, shoddily edited, and often embarrassingly reverential. Within Shephard's collection of accounts of working with Thatcher – as provided by former advisers, ministers, and journalists – there do lurk some gems. But the best way to read this book is as a marked critique of the David Cameron premiership. What Tory grandee Baroness Shephard suggests is that everything the heroic Mrs T was in office, the callow Old Etonian is not.

Beginning with hard work. "In my family we were never idle, partly because idleness was a sin, partly because there was so much work to be done, and partly no doubt we were just that sort of people." Thatcher was a roundhead (who liked to be surrounded by cavaliers). Brought up in a provincial nonconformist household by her Methodist father, life at school, Oxford University, parliament, and in government was a serious matter to be lived conscientiously.

This book is littered with accounts of her puritanical industriousness. "Is it one o'clock?" she asked policy adviser David Willetts during one speech-writing session. "I get a new lease of life at this time of the morning." Other rewrites continued until 3am. "On we went, draft following draft," recalled special adviser Elizabeth Cottrell. "We were both now in stockinged feet, with a drink to sip; whisky for her, gin for me." But however late the editing ran, the following morning Thatcher always liked to drop a passing reference to Farming Today, to show she had been up at 6am, cooking eggs and bacon for Denis.

What was equally remarkable was her prime ministerial command of evidence. In Shephard's view, "She combined a ferocious appetite for work and the all-important detail of how policies would actually work, with an iron grasp of strategy and long-term aims". Time and again, advisers had to be on top of their brief – Thatcher enjoyed little more than flaying flabby ministerial memos. Not for her the laid-back role of chairman of the board that our current PM has allocated himself. All of which, as Shephard notes, made the disaster of the poll tax more peculiar.

Much of the personal fragility behind Thatcher's rise to power has, of course, been written out of the story. "History, having concluded that Margaret Thatcher was a tremendous, convinced, directed and unstoppable force, has all but forgotten the fragile self-confidence, the hurt, the panic, the changeability and despair that, I keep having to remind myself, I saw in the early days," as Matthew Parris wisely puts it. Instead, Shephard is keener to focus on her heroine's personal mettle – during the Falklands war, the Brighton bomb, and those decades of condescension as she sought to rise up in the Tory party. "Only ample amounts of dedication, courage, intelligence, hard work, persistence, and personality broke the barriers, and Margaret Thatcher had every one of them," thought fellow female Tory MP Jill Knight.

The book's finest pages are played out through this prism of gender and power: Thatcher's battle for parliamentary selection, management of the House of Commons, ability to command a cabinet of men. As a junior minister in her government, Shephard quite rightly criticises Thatcher for not promoting enough women, but she also rewards us with intriguing accounts of the prime minister's Aquascutum wardrobes, tips for pressing dresses, and secrets behind the impregnable blond coiffure.

Another rewarding undercurrent to the book is a sense of the lost ecology of the Tory party tribe. If tedious in detail, Shephard's accounts of speeches to the North-West Conservative Women's Association, the spring conference, constituency luncheon parties, and agent's receptions highlights that vibrant Tory civil society. And Thatcher never regarded its workers or volunteers as an embarrassment. "She had a great and enduring love for the party, took a great interest in its members and staff, and seemed prepared to devote an almost infinite amount of time to it."

There are numerous faults to this book: it is too hagiographical, offers little sense of the ideology of Thatcherism, or a truthful analysis of the breakdown between prime minister and parliamentary party. It is best just to luxuriate in the anecdotage. "Do you know, Tony, I am so glad I don't belong to your class," Mrs Thatcher once informed her foreign affairs adviser Sir Anthony Parsons. To which he responded, "What class would that be, Prime Minister?" "The upper-middle class, who see everybody's point of view but have no view of their own," la Fille d'Epicier responded.

But if French President Giscard d'Estaing (who coined this insult) could not bear her, President Mitterand remained mesmerised. "How had her downfall come about? Were British politicians mad to get rid of such an outstanding prime minister? What role did the Queen play in all this – surely she could have prevented such a disaster?" were among the battery of questions fired at Shephard by Mitterand during a chance meeting in 1992. And, most revealingly of all, "What did I think of her husband, and what kind of a man could be married to such a woman?"