Archive
margaretthatcher.org is publishing online MT's files as PM, in full, working with the British National Archives (TNA)
We work also with the Margaret Thatcher Archive Trust to publish the most significant documents from MT's own papers in Cambridge as they are released to the public, as well as material from other key collections, including many overseas such as the US Presidential Libraries
Overview
The Archive section of this site contains thousands of documents–most of them declassified or previously unpublished–relating to Margaret Thatcher's personal and political life, from childhood onwards. They derive from dozens of archives around the world.
You can read:
- Whole files from MT's official papers as PM are being made available online as they are released. Every page will be published. You can download these files from hyperlinks and see them exactly as they are in the TNA reading rooms at Kew. When all the 1979-90 files have been released they will amount to more than half a million pages.
- Selected documents from these official files, and many other sources, are being uploaded into the powerful site database, allowing you to create your own collection of documents sorted by date or period, source, subject, name or keyword. Reconstruct the flow of paper across MT's desk at any one time - the perspective she got every day when she read the contents of the PM's famous "Red Boxes" - or focus on a particular topic, like Europe or economic policy. The database is growing all the time and will reach around 50,000 documents.
For a chronological way into the site, you can read MT's engagement diaries, jumping from day to day and linking to relevant documents.
The scope of the site archive is not simply personal: we aim also to provide material on the issues that concerned MT. For example, there are key documents from the Cold War like the texts of the Reagan-Gorbachev summits in which MT played no direct part, but which mattered greatly to her.
Most of the documents are images of the originals, in PDF format. All texts have been machine indexed, even PDFs, so keyword searches should find any document containing the word. That said, the indexes are not 100 per cent accurate for PDFs, depending on the quality of the original text. Name indexes have been compiled by hand for greater accuracy.
Visit our Multimedia section for photos, film and audio material. Public statements like speeches and press conferences can be found in the Speeches section. There are chronology and commentary sections too.
And you can search the whole site at once from the main search page to interleave what was public at the time and what was private, the unclassified and the secret. The relationship between these two realms is endlessly surprising, though rarely in the way conspiracy theorists imagine. The most important things were often on the surface, loudly proclaimed to a sceptical press, the secret aspects incidental or secondary.
guides to the documents
There are a lot of documents on this site. Guides to some of the most important can be found on featured pages.