The popular mantra is that Scargill was an idiot, picked the wrong battle and Thatcher did good in seeing off the nasty Yorkshireman - but history is starting to tell a different story.
With careful investigation and checking of facts - two things that didn't happen when the press were used against the miner's leader back in 1990 - Seumus Milne shows us how the establishment took action against the one man trying to stand up against it.
With well-written prose that is never dull but also never over-blown, Milne takes us patiently through every stage of the strike of 84-85 and the press smear campaign five years later, piecing together the evidence that shows not only were the massive press stories in The Mirror utter bunkum, but that the security services almost certainly had several hands in the whole debacle.
Reading this in an era of phone hacking makes some of the revelations slightly less shocking than they may have been when The Enemy Within was first published, but Milne still makes enough points and raises enough questions about why the security services were used to try and bring down an elected leader of a legally-structured representative body to make sure you ask more questions in the future.