This book has all the awful fascination of a gargoyle peering over the parapet of Notre Dame: the artistry is undeniable, but the effect is chilling - and, no matter how long it is until your next visit, the damn thing is still there, leering down at you.
At one level, it is easy to deconstruct the threadbare themes behind almost three decades of Mrs Thatcher's political barnstorming. Her vibrantly confident assertion that bribery and corruption "have now gone" from British political life (1968) sits oddly behind the squalor and sleaze that attended the Tories' exit from office. Her 1975 nostrum that politicians "must be wary of political ideologies" is rich indeed, coming from the most practised ideologue of them all.
She trumpets the values of less government, but presided over the creation of dozens of quangos and widespread privatisations which made accountability a sick joke, as well as adding notoriously to the hordes of place-seekers and profiteers. The decline of British industry under her stewardship is studiously ignored and when, translated to the House of Lords, she comes to speak finally of the failures of her later administrations, it is as if she is referring to a faraway country of which she knows little.
She is a mistress of the arts of elision, of fabricating guilt by association, of creating straw men to be demolished with the famous handbag. She can equate class politics with racial hatred, and dismiss a complex argument with the lofty assertion that "there's a breed of left-wing politicians who excuse violence on the grounds that it's not the criminal who is guilty, but the rest of us" (1988). No wonder she reduced so many of her political opponents to helpless frothing at the mouth.
She provides us with a compendium of cliche (the phrases "carrying a torch for freedom" and "burying our heads in the sand" appear not just in the same speech, but in the same paragraph); appropriates the word "freedom" almost to the point where no other self-respecting politician would dare use it again, and quotes Kipling so frequently that his heirs must be rolling in the royalties.
And yet, for all their tawdriness, some of these speeches are superb examples of the art form. Her party conference speeches, in particular, are scripted in lapidary paragraphs, each of them ending with an unspoken but irresistible demand for applause. She (or her scriptwriter - Robin Harris's introduction has a valuable amount of detail on how her speeches were actually constructed) has a genius for the brilliant over-simplification. "We now," she announced grandly, and irrelevantly, in 1978, "have only 74 fighter planes to defend our country. We lost twice as many as that during the battle of Britain."
I had to laugh out loud at the footnote demolition of Karl Marx ("1818-83, German philosopher and economist, lived in London from 1849 and worked regularly in the British Museum library") and at her 1975 jibe at the (then) hapless Labour Party: "I sometimes think the Labour Party is like a pub where the mild is running out. If someone does not do something soon, all that is left will be bitter, and all that is bitter will be Left."
She is able, without turning a coiffed hair, to castigate Labour both when it dares to enunciate policies of its own, and when it has the temerity to adopt some of hers. And I marvelled at the sheer effrontery which led her to quote Garret FitzGerald in her no doubt successful attempt to woo the American Congress.
This is Conservative politics red in tooth and claw. It hasn't got much to do with truth, or freedom, or any of the other absolutes scattered throughout these pages. It is about appealing to raw emotions with half-truths, pandering to the fearful and negative side of a nation which has produced many great and generous men and women. To know that she has lost power is like waking up from a nightmare.
John Horgan's latest book is Sean Lemass: The Enigmatic Patriot