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Simon Jenkins |
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Simon Jenkins writes a twice-weekly Column for The Times and a weekly Column for the London Evening Standard. In the course of his career he has edited both the Evening Standard and The Times, and has written books on politics and on the history and architecture of London.
He was born in 1943 and educated at Mill Hill School and St John's College, Oxford. He began on Country Life magazine, worked for The Times Educational Supplement and the Evening Standard and edited the Insight page of the Sunday Times. He was political editor of the Economist from 1979 to 1986 and subsequently went on to found and edit the Sunday Times Books section, where he also wrote a weekly column. In 1988 he was voted Journalist of the Year, and in 1993 Columnist of the Year. He has won the Edgar Wallace and David Watt awards.
He has been deputy chairman of English Heritage (1985-90) and is currently a member of the Millennium Commission. He chairs the Buildings Books Trust, sponsors of the Pevsner guides.
Simon Jenkins lives in London and is married to the actress Gayle Hunnicutt.
Thatcher & Sons by Simon Jenkins
WHO COULD BE MORE THATCHERITE THAN MAGGIE?
The history of Britain in the last thirty years, under both Conservative and Labour governments, has been dominated by one figure - Margaret Thatcher. Her election marked a decisive break with the past and her premiership transformed not just her country, but the nature of democratic leadership.
When Thatcher came to power in 1979, she inherited the Britain of the three-day week, the Winter of Discontent, and the Sick Man of Europe. Twenty years on, Britain’s economy became the most dynamic in Europe and London the most cosmopolitan city in the world, as the Labour government took Thatcher’s ideas further than ever before.
But by 2006, Britain was the most heavily regulated country in the non-socialist world, with every aspect of public activity relentlessly audited, and power more rigorously centralized than in any other mature democracy. The great instrument of centralization and audit was the Treasury, whose Thatcherite policies were carried to their apogee by the most controlling Chancellor of modern times, Gordon Brown.
Pithy, passionate and polemical, Simon Jenkins’s book explains the two Thatcherite revolutions, one of good, the other of bad effect, and how we have come to be where we are - prosperous but perplexed, economically liberated and spoilt for ‘choice' but less and less equal, infantilized by targets, overwhelmed by bureaucracy and frustrated by a politics which values spin over substance. He shows how 'of Thatcherism’s three Prime Ministers, Blair was the most Thatcherite’, privatizing far more relentlessly than Thatcher herself, and how he and Brown became her most loyal sons. It is his ‘argued history’ of Britain in the last twenty-five years, to which he gives a shape and coherence no other commentator has yet matched.
