As I drove in to the House of Commons on 22 November 1990, a television reporter shouted from behind her camera, "She's gone." For a moment I experienced the feeling of disbelief that made so many parish clerks refuse to nail the news of Queen Victoria's death to their noticeboards. Margaret Thatcher had seemed immortal. Superstition had been reinforced by the evidence provided by the television news just two nights before. The prime minister, in the courtyard of the British embassy in Paris, had snatched the microphone from the hand of the BBC's John Sergeant and announced that, although she had narrowly failed to gain the necessary two-thirds majority on the first ballot in the Conservative leadership election, she would fight on.
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