The Iron Lady.

• Author: Kinsley, Michael

For all her faults., Maggie Thatcher has done some

good and revolutionary things for England.

The Washington Monthly has long championed the cause of honest book reviewing. In particular it has mocked the practice of friends reviewing books by friends without revealing the connection. But reviewing by enemies, especially ideological enemies, can be just as corrupt. Paul Johnson, who writes the press column in the British Spectator, made this point in a recent article. Yet the most fantastically dishonest book review I have ever read, I think, appeared recently under this same man's byline in The Wall Street Journal. The victim was The Iron Lady,* a biography of Margaret Thatcher by Hugo Young, the political correspondent of The Guardian, Britain's leading liberal newspaper.

Johnson, a prominent British writer, is an extreme version of an American neoconservative. Extreme in the speed of his political conversion (he dashed the same distance across the political spectrum during a couple of years in the mid-1970s that the leading American neocons traversed in a couple of leisurely decades). Extreme also in his fanatical insistence that no decent person could hold views he himself held for most of his life. Johnson's review of The Iron Lady argued that the book is a typical example of left-wing snobbery toward Mrs. Thatcher by "those who consider themselves her social and intellectual equals." The danger of cultural snobbery among liberals is another favorite theme of The Washington Monthly. But Young's book is a poor illustration of the thesis since-as every other review has pointed out-the book (unlike the review) is scrupulously fair and, on balance, even reluctantly admiring.

Even in describing the Falklands adventure of which he is generally critical, Young writes, "Through the weeks of turbulence and political fear, Mrs. Thatcher behaved like the best kind of soldier. She was calm and ... clear-sighted." Young's most vicious thrust is reserved not for Thatcher but for her worst political enemy-who is not Labour leader Neil Kinnock but her Tory predecessor Edward Heath. |N~obody any longer cared what Heath had to say," Young writes about one of Heath's petulant speeches. "The fate he brought on himself was to be patronised and insulted from his own backbenches, by |real~ estate agents and car salesmen who were still at school when he was prime minister." You could read that line about "estate agents and car salesmen" as snobbish if you...