John Campbell on Margaret Thatcher

“[I]t was Alfred who instilled in her the habit of hard work, as something both virtuous in itself and the route to self-advancement. Throughout her life, it was her inexhaustible willingness to work longer hours than anyone else, her refusal to go to bed before she had read every last paper, which enabled her repeatedly to beat down colleagues and opponents by sheer mastery of detail. She once confessed to a recurring nightmare that "I'm going to take my final degree exam tomorrow and I haven't done a stroke of revision and I'm always terribly glad to wake up." As Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher still prepared for parliamentary questions or international summits like a schoolgirl swotting for an exam. She was contemptuous of opponents, colleagues or fellow heads of government who had stinted their homework. But however much they had done, she always expected to have done more.”

“It would be hard to overestimate the effect of this sort of snobbish condescension on the formation of Margaret Thatcher's character. The discovery that all the trendy people were against her only confirmed her certainty that they were all wrong and reinforced her righteous sense of persecution. She encountered the same patronising attitude when she first became Leader of the Opposition in 1975. She had probably met it already at school, where she was used to being a loner who was not allowed to go to dances: it was precisely the attitude Alfred had tried to arm her against by urging her to follow her own – or his – convictions and ignore the crowd. But nowhere can it have been more brutal than at Oxford, where she went up naively expecting to find rational inquiry but met only with arrogant superiority. This was her first encounter with the liberal establishment and she did not like it. It hardened her heart: one day she would get even. Janet Vaughan...gets no warm words in her memoirs. The experience forged her lifelong view of herself as an outsider, part of a persecuted minority, which never left her.”