Lord Powell of Bayswater

I have never met Margaret Thatcher. By the time I wrote my book about her, There is No Alternative, she was already too ill to grant interviews. But I spent countless hours interviewing her colleagues, her friends, her enemies, and ordinary Britons who lived through her time in power. I recorded all of these interviews.

In the end, I had to choose which comments were worthy of inclusion in my book about her. It was a difficult decision: So many people had said so many things that seemed to me worthy of note. Much of great interest wound up on the cutting room floor, but only because something had to go.

For those interested in Margaret Thatcher - or indeed, in the way biographers work - the transcripts of these interviews, unedited, may prove illuminating. Other historians may one day find them useful: Perhaps they will notice points that I failed to grasp.

I thus reproduce the interviews in this series, every word of them, from the moment I switched the recorder on to the moment I switched it off.

Charles Powell, Baron Powell of Bayswater, was Margaret Thatcher's key foreign advisor.