Archive

Ways in

Read whole declassified files from MT core archive as PM at the UK National Archives in Kew, every single one. You can study them from your desk, abolishing distance.

Search the whole site - not just declassified archive documents, but speeches, film, photos, etc. That way you can 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.

Browse by looking at her engagement diaries as PM, which link to documents covering the day.

Scope of the site

The scope of this site is not simply biographical, despite the name. We provide material on the issues that concerned MT as well as the woman herself.

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. A minority are transcripts.

Texts have been machine indexed, including most of the PDFs, so keyword searches should find most documents containing the word. That said, the indexes are not 100 per cent accurate for PDFs. Name and subject indexes have been compiled by hand for greater accuracy.

There is a 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.