If you are expecting to read a high-powered analysis of Mrs Thatcher’s policies, then you are going to be disappointed. This book, written by the former Conservative cabinet minister, Gillian Shephard, is, however, valuable in its own right because it paints an authentic portrait of Britain’s first woman prime minister. Shephard has cleverly persuaded 36 former colleagues, friends and observers to provide their recollections of what it was like to work with Mrs Thatcher, and then linked together their accounts with a sympathetic yet candid running commentary.

An underlying theme of the book is the scale of Mrs Thatcher’s achievement in becoming prime minister and winning three successive elections in the male-dominated world of the 1970s and 1980s. As Shephard points out, the odds against her – or indeed any other women – becoming and remaining prime minister were overwhelming. Astonishingly the principal of her Oxford College wrote off the undergraduate Margaret Roberts as uninteresting, while her Oxford contemporaries found her unmemorable. It seems that it was her obsession with Conservative politics that brought out her qualities and drove her to overcome the prejudices of mostly male selection conferences and of her almost entirely male colleagues in parliament.

In analysing the factors that led to Mrs Thatcher’s success, Shephard’s witnesses cite her devotion to work and attention to detail, her drive and energy, and above all her conviction and courage. All agree on her courage; the courage that it took to stand for the Tory leadership; to appear at the scheduled 9.30am starting time for her party conference at Brighton after the shocking IRA bombing of the Grand Hotel the night before; and ,more controversially in showing her powers of leadership during the Falklands conflict. Even her political opponents admit that she was formidable. The former general secretary of the TUC, John Monks, acknowledged ‘her clear leadership, tactical skill, and her powerful executive ability to get things done her way … qualities which mark her out as an exceptional prime minister.’

There was, however, a darker side to Mrs Thatcher which is also revealed in this work. John Major says that she was ‘a women of contrasts who could behave with great kindness yet who was equally capable of great intimidation’. As Shephard remarks, there was ‘too much evidence to ignore that Mrs Thatcher did become increasingly overbearing in her approach, particularly in the second half of her Premiership’.

She increasingly tended to reduce her cabinet to subservience and to be openly rude to her colleagues. For example, Nigel Lawson wrote in his autobiography that she treated Geoffrey Howe ‘as a cross between a doormat and a punch bag’. In the end the worms turned, and, following the resignation of Howe and the challenge of Michael Heseltine, her much-despised cabinet forced her to resign. Douglas Hurd commented: ‘the main reason for Margaret Thatcher’s loss of the leadership was … her failure over the years to make the best of the cabinet system’.

A full assessment of Mrs Thatcher as prime minister requires an examination of the impact of her policies. But, as Gillian Shepherds’ book shows, despite her weaknesses and limitations my generation recognised that she was an outstanding political personality.

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Giles Radice is a peer and a former Labour MP