Meetings with Mrs Thatcher are not for the faint-hearted or ill-briefed. She has normally read all the papers on the subjects under discussion, probably in the middle of the night when her ministers and advisers sleep. She will frequently launch a ferocious attack on a possible weak point in the arguments she is advised to accept. She expects her ministers and officials to defend them with with equal vigour if they believe they are right. She will interrupt them if they say something she disagrees with – and yet listen intently if they insist and prove to have an important point to make which she needs to consider. It sometimes seemed to me that she would on occasion tease her advisers by advancing some outrageous proposition in which she did not believe, just to see how they responded to it. Contrary to what is generally written in the newspapers and believed by her critics, she seemed to me positively to welcome serious argument and to have a high regard for those who argued with her most effectively.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Meetings with Mrs Thatcher are not for the faint-hearted or ill-briefed. She has normally read all the papers on the subjects under discussion, probably in the middle of the night when her ministers and advisers sleep. She will frequently launch a ferocious attack on a possible weak point in the arguments she is advised to accept. She expects her ministers and officials to defend them with with equal vigour if they believe they are right. She will interrupt them if they say something she disagrees with – and yet listen intently if they insist and prove to have an important point to make which she needs to consider. It sometimes seemed to me that she would on occasion tease her advisers by advancing some outrageous proposition in which she did not believe, just to see how they responded to it. Contrary to what is generally written in the newspapers and believed by her critics, she seemed to me positively to welcome serious argument and to have a high regard for those who argued with her most effectively." in the context of "Michael Butler, Europe: More Than a Continent (1986), p. 116" to mean that wisdom is timeless.