Maggie & Me

Jon Snow provides a personal recollection of Baroness Thatcher: the woman, the leader, the icon, the hate figure; the biggest British political figure of Jon's lifetime. Mrs Thatcher's rise to leader of the Conservative Party and then the country as Britain's first female Prime Minister spans the same period as Jon's own early career as a successful young television reporter and then newsreader. In 1979 Jon was a young reporter working for ITN. And amazingly on 4 May he was actually given the job of reporting Mrs Thatcher's arrival in Downing Street for the first time - live. What he didn't know at the time was that he would be following Mrs Thatcher around the world on and off for the next eleven and a half years. From the election trail to Europe, from Washington to Casablanca, she dominated his reporting life, and the lives of everyone who lived through her reign. This is not an obituary and it is certainly not a review of Mrs Thatcher's legacy. It's more personal than that. It is Jon's own recollection of intersecting with the most powerful woman most of us had ever known.