A confused but at the same time unformative book. Jenkins remains something of a Thatcherite. He paints the standard paranoid picture of the 1970's as the years of the locust - at one point, within a few paragraphs, comparing Britain both to a third world contry and two Weimar Germany. He even propogates the myth that Thatcher transformed British industry - giving us a reputation as a low-cost trouble-free labour force. In fact British industry was getting on well enough in the sevnties and has since been virtually destroyed leaving us dependant on the fairy gold of international finance.
He is good, though, on the workings of government. He shows that behind Thatcher's rhetoric about "freedom" there lurked a centraliser concentrating power in Whitehall and ultimately in Downing Street - or at least at the Treasury. This process was continued and exacerbated by her Labour successors, and has given us a top heavy and inneficient administration prone to wasteful reorganisations and "initiatives" that simply complicate the lives of the PBI who are actually trying to manage things.
He ends by calling for a slashing of layers of government returning power to local authorities. That some of these authorities will do badly, and others better, is a problem that can be sorted at the ballot box.