No sign of former girlfriend Carol Thatcher or rival biographer Charles Moore at the launch of Jonathan Aitken’s book on Margaret Thatcher at Bloomsbury in Bedford Square.
“I’d love to have seen them but I wasn’t in charge of the invitations,” said Aitken, who had known the Iron Lady since 1966. Aitken told guests including former Defence Secretary Sir John Nott and David Davis that he’s the only writer to have interviewed Mikhail Gorbachev about Thatcher.
“Their first meeting didn’t start well,” he said. “She told him, ‘I hate communism’, and Raisa Gorbachev said, ‘Come on, let’s leave.’ But later they got on well and she persuaded the Americans they could do business with him.”
“Ours is one of the happiest professional relationships of my life,” declared his publisher Robin Baird-Smith, saying that even the Guardian, the paper that brought about Aitken’s downfall, considered the book a triumph. “I’ve already published his sister Maria and there are plans for at least one of his daughters. This is going to be bigger business than publishing the Longford/Pakenham tribe.”
