At a time when Tories are gripped with gloom that their party will never again win a parliamentary majority, many in their ranks look back wistfully to the woman who won them three elections in a row, two by a landslide, and changed Britain for ever. It is not terribly healthy, either for them or the country, this nostalgia for the lost leader, but it's a potent force. Here are two very different ways of remembering the Iron Lady.

Thatcher fans should avoid Chateau Despair. They will not like it. In this strange but interesting limited edition, the photographer Lisa Barnard has collected some of her prints of the interior of 32 Smith Square, the building that was Conservative central office when Maggie was in her prime, and which was left unoccupied for a long time after the Tories deserted it nearly 10 years ago. It was here that her campaigns were plotted. It was from here that she would first appear on television on election night to celebrate her victories, waving from the balcony as adoring party workers chanted "four more years!". Treating the building and its forgotten contents as a sort of political mausoleum, Barnard shows us shabby and empty blue spaces, stained carpets and crumbling plasterboard, stopped clocks, empty chairs and abandoned shoes. The detritus of old political battles is represented by images of shrivelled campaign materials, faded rosettes and unblown balloons. The effect is quite spooky. These haunted images are punctuated by portraits, retrieved from a long forgotten cupboard, of the former chatelaine. There's the face that ruled Britain for more than a decade in the pose that became so embedded in the national consciousness: the purposeful lips, the regimented hair, the signature pearls clipped to her ears and hung around her neck, and the drilling blue eyes which François Mitterrand once likened to Caligula. The photos are in a corrupted state, aged and bleached, providing a visual metaphor for the passing of glory and the fading of pomp.

Gillian Shephard takes a different approach to reanimating the ghosts of the Thatcher years in The Real Iron Lady, her miscellany of recollections of what it was like to work with her. It's published by Biteback, the prolific political publishing house which I greatly admire. Iain Dale and his team put into print many lively, engaging and often important biographies, memoirs and current affairs titles written from across the spectrum. It's the political junkies' publisher and long may it flourish. So it is as a disappointed friend that I say Biteback shouldn't have wasted paper and ink on this thin piece of work. A cover puff calls it "an enthralling and highly original book". I'm afraid the reverse is the truth.

Shephard collects plenty of tributes to the former prime minister's obvious qualities: her conviction, her determination, her courage, her energy, her appetite for work and her attention to detail. Trouble is that we knew that already and certainly didn't need reminding of it again and again at such repetitive length. There is some acknowledgement of Thatcher's weaknesses: her obstinacy, her belligerence, her divisiveness, her reckless humiliation of colleagues and the other flaws that eventually led to her downfall. "She could be impossible to work with, given to tantrums, tears and shouting matches and lightning changes of mood," writes Shephard. On the whole, though, this former Tory cabinet minister is a fan and often a gushing one. And she has mainly sought testimony from other worshippers at the shrine of Maggie, which makes this a very unbalanced portrait of her character and legacy.

That, though, is not the most fundamental problem with this book. The really infuriating thing about it is its sheer laziness. The pages groan, and the reader with them, under the weight of great slabs of extracts from the memoirs of Tory cabinet ministers that anyone interested will probably have read already. A boring remark by John Major  "she was a woman of contrasts"  strikes Shephard as so scintillating that she repeats it three times. Her own observations about Mrs T are trite. "The Falklands conflict certainly stretched her to the limit. She was acutely aware that the final decision to send Britain to war was hers, and she had to take responsibility for it." You don't say.

The only new material comes from some interviews. Lumpen, unedited extracts are cut and paste and thrown on to the page in italicised text whether or not they merit being given the space, which they rarely do. Almost none of the interviewees have anything revelatory, gripping or funny to say. Their anecdotes, often related at remorseless length, are for the most part bland. Their reflections and conclusions are entirely predictable.

I yearned for this book to tell me one thing that I didn't already know about Thatcher, or to present me with one surprising insight or fresh perspective or novel way of thinking about her. Love her or hate her, she was a remarkable woman, one of the most significant, dynamic and vivid personalities to inhabit No 10. The great dramas of her career included the conflict in the south Atlantic, the miners' strike, the Brighton bomb and the poll tax riots. I never thought it would be possible to produce a dull book about such a fascinating subject, but Shephard proves me wrong.

Chateau Despair is available at gostbooks.com

"I voted quickly and went over to stand at the exit from the No Lobby. Mrs T as usual was the last one out. She timed her exit so that colleagues wishing to lobby her could do so. 'Shall I follow you, Prime Minister?' I asked. 'People usually do,' was the reply."

So Labour MP Frank Field describes one of his regular tete-a-tete's with Margaret Thatcher at the apogee of her pomp and prime. This is a book about those glory days of Gloriana. Crafted as a response to Meryl Streep's portrayal of the former prime minister as a dotty old pensioner in The Iron Lady, it is a set of reminiscences to remind us of Thatcher as a world-historic figure. As such, it is part of the beatification of the blessed Margaret as Britain's finest postwar premier and, when the sad hour arrives, a leader worthy of a state funeral.

Unfortunately, former Conservative education secretary Gillian Shephard does her cause few favours with this poorly constructed work. It is clumsily written, shoddily edited, and often embarrassingly reverential. Within Shephard's collection of accounts of working with Thatcher  as provided by former advisers, ministers, and journalists  there do lurk some gems. But the best way to read this book is as a marked critique of the David Cameron premiership. What Tory grandee Baroness Shephard suggests is that everything the heroic Mrs T was in office, the callow Old Etonian is not.

Beginning with hard work. "In my family we were never idle, partly because idleness was a sin, partly because there was so much work to be done, and partly no doubt we were just that sort of people." Thatcher was a roundhead (who liked to be surrounded by cavaliers). Brought up in a provincial nonconformist household by her Methodist father, life at school, Oxford University, parliament, and in government was a serious matter to be lived conscientiously.

This book is littered with accounts of her puritanical industriousness. "Is it one o'clock?" she asked policy adviser David Willetts during one speech-writing session. "I get a new lease of life at this time of the morning." Other rewrites continued until 3am. "On we went, draft following draft," recalled special adviser Elizabeth Cottrell. "We were both now in stockinged feet, with a drink to sip; whisky for her, gin for me." But however late the editing ran, the following morning Thatcher always liked to drop a passing reference to Farming Today, to show she had been up at 6am, cooking eggs and bacon for Denis.

What was equally remarkable was her prime ministerial command of evidence. In Shephard's view, "She combined a ferocious appetite for work and the all-important detail of how policies would actually work, with an iron grasp of strategy and long-term aims". Time and again, advisers had to be on top of their brief  Thatcher enjoyed little more than flaying flabby ministerial memos. Not for her the laid-back role of chairman of the board that our current PM has allocated himself. All of which, as Shephard notes, made the disaster of the poll tax more peculiar.

Much of the personal fragility behind Thatcher's rise to power has, of course, been written out of the story. "History, having concluded that Margaret Thatcher was a tremendous, convinced, directed and unstoppable force, has all but forgotten the fragile self-confidence, the hurt, the panic, the changeability and despair that, I keep having to remind myself, I saw in the early days," as Matthew Parris wisely puts it. Instead, Shephard is keener to focus on her heroine's personal mettle  during the Falklands war, the Brighton bomb, and those decades of condescension as she sought to rise up in the Tory party. "Only ample amounts of dedication, courage, intelligence, hard work, persistence, and personality broke the barriers, and Margaret Thatcher had every one of them," thought fellow female Tory MP Jill Knight.

The book's finest pages are played out through this prism of gender and power: Thatcher's battle for parliamentary selection, management of the House of Commons, ability to command a cabinet of men. As a junior minister in her government, Shephard quite rightly criticises Thatcher for not promoting enough women, but she also rewards us with intriguing accounts of the prime minister's Aquascutum wardrobes, tips for pressing dresses, and secrets behind the impregnable blond coiffure.

Another rewarding undercurrent to the book is a sense of the lost ecology of the Tory party tribe. If tedious in detail, Shephard's accounts of speeches to the North-West Conservative Women's Association, the spring conference, constituency luncheon parties, and agent's receptions highlights that vibrant Tory civil society. And Thatcher never regarded its workers or volunteers as an embarrassment. "She had a great and enduring love for the party, took a great interest in its members and staff, and seemed prepared to devote an almost infinite amount of time to it."

There are numerous faults to this book: it is too hagiographical, offers little sense of the ideology of Thatcherism, or a truthful analysis of the breakdown between prime minister and parliamentary party. It is best just to luxuriate in the anecdotage. "Do you know, Tony, I am so glad I don't belong to your class," Mrs Thatcher once informed her foreign affairs adviser Sir Anthony Parsons. To which he responded, "What class would that be, Prime Minister?" "The upper-middle class, who see everybody's point of view but have no view of their own," la Fille d'Epicier responded.

But if French President Giscard d'Estaing (who coined this insult) could not bear her, President Mitterand remained mesmerised. "How had her downfall come about? Were British politicians mad to get rid of such an outstanding prime minister? What role did the Queen play in all this  surely she could have prevented such a disaster?" were among the battery of questions fired at Shephard by Mitterand during a chance meeting in 1992. And, most revealingly of all, "What did I think of her husband, and what kind of a man could be married to such a woman?"