Never do things just because other people do them.
Alfred Roberts
Mrs Thatcher, like the queen, was a daddy’s girl. Both women were shaped by intransigent men who disliked compromise. Their fathers were born in an era when class and social position were fixed at birth and remained unchangeable until you died. The two men found it impossible to escape their respective birthrights. Margaret’s father, Alfred Roberts, was a shopkeeper and local politician who rose to become Mayor of Grantham. With Alfred, life was about pulling yourself up by your boot straps and making something of yourself. By contrast, the queen’s father, George VI, was determined to resist change in whatever shape it might appear; for him, maintaining the status quo was the highest virtue. These paternal philosophies would stick like glue to their respective daughters. To understand both women, you must understand the fathers.
After St Francis of Assisi, the next man Margaret Thatcher paid tribute to outside 10 Downing Street on the day of her election was Alfred Roberts, ‘I just owe almost everything to my own father’.1 At such a moment, personal reflections on life, events, and the choices made are inevitable. Thatcher’s father had died in 1970, just before Margaret entered Ted Heath’s Cabinet. His Victorian values and his sober commercial outlook, rooted in his corner shop, formed the basis of what his daughter preached to Britain throughout the eighties. Thatcher’s biographer, John Campbell, perceptively wrote, ‘Alfred Roberts’ grocery shop had become a British equivalent of Lincoln’s log cabin.’2
Sir Bernard Ingham, one of Thatcher’s closest advisors and stalwart press secretary, stated:
Hers was a narrow upbringing in a strict Methodist household which she grew out of. But instead of going off the rails, she retained a strong Christian ethic, a high sense of moral duty … Her father taught her not to go with the herd if she thought the herd was wrong.3
When Margaret Thatcher became prime minister, bizarre rumours persistently circulated that, somehow, through some aristocratic ancestral affair, blue blood pumped through her veins.4 One version of the story is that Beatrice Stephenson, Mrs Thatcher’s mother, was the illegitimate daughter of Henry Cockayne-Cust, the nephew of Lord Brownlow, and Margaret’s grandmother Phoebe, who had briefly worked as a housemaid at the Brownlow stately home, Belton House, near Grantham. Phoebe had been a farmer’s daughter who, after leaving service, went on to work as a factory machinist. In 1876, she married a humble cloakroom attendant called Daniel Stephenson. They were extremely poor, and after their marriage, her grandmother went back to work in domestic service.5
Although there is no evidence for this, the fact that these rumours made the rounds illustrates the depth of Britain’s obsession with breeding, family connections and class.6 Clearly, there was a group within the political class which felt Thatcher’s power, leadership and charisma couldn’t have originated from over a grocer’s shop. Former Social Democratic Party leader, David Owen, thinks this is a sign of the outright snobbery that existed at the time within the Tory Party, ‘That’s the whole problem with the hereditary lot, they do believe their own propaganda’.7
Whether or not there was a secret aristocrat in Margaret Roberts’ lineage, she enjoyed a secure, if humble, upbringing presided over by a thoroughly self-taught, self-made man. Alfred was a man of diligence and considerable naked intelligence. Educated only until the age of 12 like many working-class men, his ambitions were thwarted by circumstance. Alfred Roberts didn’t complain; he just got on with it, fighting hard to gain respectability and security for his family.8 He never tolerated the words, ‘I can’t’, or ‘It’s too difficult’.9
One Tory MP indiscreetly, but accurately, observed that Britain was being governed by the wraith of Alderman Roberts, a sort of ghost of recessions past. He had handed on to his daughter a set of beliefs, values and social attitudes that she was now employing to guide the affairs of Britain. He added that, since Alderman Roberts had told her that you cannot spend more than you take at the till, she chopped away at public spending for all the world as if it were an unnecessary new hat.10
Margaret’s entry in Who’s Who is revealing. She describes herself as the daughter of Alfred. No mention is made of her mother, Beatrice. ‘Well, of course I just owe everything to my father,’ she gushed to Robert Harris, who was interviewing her for the Observer in 1988.11 She always made a point of honoring daddy foremost, and it seemed to fuel her sense of being special, ‘daddy’s precious little daughter’. There is little, if any, sense of indebtedness to her mother. ‘I loved my mother dearly, but after I was 15 we had nothing more to say to each other … it was not her fault. She was always weighed down by the home.’12
There is no doubt about the intensity of the relationship between the young Margaret and her father. At home, Alfred ruled the roost and his word was law. He was tall, almost 6ft 3in, with horn-rimmed glasses and a thick mop of hair, which in later years turned pure white. He improved his mind with books, reading anything he could lay his hands on, from biography to history and politics.13 Research shows that fathers who are challenging and somewhat abrasive raise the most socially competent, independent and intrinsically motivated daughters. In fact, social confidence in girls appears to be inhibited rather than enhanced by unconditional approval and passive acceptance.14
Whatever the romantic parentage of Beatrice Roberts, Grantham inhabitants described her as being poker-faced and ‘a right old battle axe’.15 She lived her life very much under her husband’s thumb. Beatrice was a quiet and plain looking woman. ‘Her mother was homely in every way,’ recalls schoolmate Margaret Wickstead.16 Beatrice was a quiet and gave the impression of someone who didn’t enjoy life. She was never demonstratively affectionate towards her children and, although she worked all the hours God sent, she was no match for her husband’s intellect and ambition.17
In one of Margaret’s more revealing interviews to broadcaster Dr Miriam Stoppard, the prime minister explained how when she complained to her mother about her friends having more material possessions, she was repeatedly told, ‘Well we are not situated like that!’ When asked if she accepted this injunction, Margaret replied, ‘one kicked against it, of course, one kicked against it. They [her friends] had more things than we did. Of course, one kicked against it.’ But the kicking seems to have been directed more at Beatrice than Alfred, even though he was just as frugal as his wife. Her subsequent choice of a generous and affluent husband was at some level an expression of her resentment at having been forced to live so economically.
In the interview, Margaret also recalled going out to buy new covers for the settee:
That was a great event; to have new covers for a settee was a great expenditure and a great event, so you went out to choose them, and you chose something that looked really rather lovely, something light with flowers on. My mother: ‘That is not serviceable!’ And how I longed for the time when I could buy things that were not serviceable!18
Margaret’s resentment towards her mother is palpable. Beatrice, in Margaret’s eyes, was someone who allowed herself to be sidelined. A contemporary at Oxford recalled, ‘… I used to feel, just occasionally that she rather despised her mother and adored her father’.19
The dominant matriarchal figure in the house was her maternal grandmother, Phoebe Stephenson, who ruled their cramped home with an iron grip, just as Alderman Roberts ruled the shop downstairs.20 She was, said Thatcher, ‘very, very Victorian and very, very strict’.21 Beatrice wasn’t even mistress in her own home.
Most daughters who distance themselves from their mothers retain a strong instinctive bond with them, even if the relationship has been overcast by tetchiness and mutual incomprehension.22 The total absence of this bond suggests Margaret felt deprived of motherly love. Her extreme competitiveness, aggression and obsessive conscientiousness implied a need to fight for attention during a childhood that was not as rosy as she later chose to paint it.23 Her anger with her mother would play out in her relationships with other women, from her school headmistress to female parliamentary colleagues and political wives, even to the audience chamber at Buckingham Palace.
Margaret also had an older sister, Muriel, four years her senior. In later life, Muriel never gave interviews, but she did write a few lines about Grantham life and stressed that Beatrice was an avid reader, perhaps in an attempt to give her an intellectual life in repudiation of Margaret’s colder judgement.24
Grantham itself is a little backwater railway town just 24 miles east of Nottingham. Its population of 30,000 was then almost exclusively employed in the factories, building railway coaches and rolling stock.25 Alfred Roberts had taken out a bank mortgage to open his corner shop on North Parade, the town’s main commercial street. After years of prudent, and some say tightfisted, management the business grew and prospered.26 A second store followed later. Margaret learnt to appreciate the free market as a simple and understandable manifestation, at the very front line where customers paid with cash in hand.27 From childhood, the unfettered market appeared to be a reliable mechanism by which people could be served and an honest living made.
Although the Roberts family lived well compared to many in the town, there were no extras. Hot water for washing was boiled in the small kitchen and decanted into porcelain pitchers and bowls for the bedrooms. Bathing took place in a galvanised tin tub. Under each bed was a porcelain potty to avoid a cold walk to the outside privy in the middle of the night. There was a yard, rather than a garden. It was all terribly basic, but by owning property Alfred was the first in the family to lift himself out of the working class.28 That was something of which he could feel very proud.
Eventually, the family moved into a sizable semi-detached property in a row of Edwardian houses just across the road from the shop. Here, for the first time, they had a garden and the comforts of modern plumbing.
Everything the Roberts family achieved was the result of grinding hard work, methodical savings and careful budgeting. Owning property made Alfred the master of his destiny, and life for the family revolved around the needs of the business. As Margaret would write:
For one thing you’re always on duty. People knocked on the door at almost any hour of the night or weekend if they had run out of bacon, sugar, butter or eggs. Everyone knew that we lived by serving the customer, it was pointless to complain, so nobody did.29
The Roberts’ corner shop was unlike today’s modern convenience stores. It had sacks of flour and sugar, lentils, dried peas and pearl barley which used to arrive in bulk, along with barrels of jam and treacle, chests of tea, bags of coffee beans, tins of dried fruit and giant slabs of butter. Everything had to be meticulously weighed, measured and decanted into smaller containers or brown paper bags. It was a job Muriel and Margaret helped out with.30 If they made mistakes customers would be short changed, or profits eroded. The Roberts sisters learnt to be methodical and diligent.
Either Alfred or Beatrice would always be on duty during opening hours. This meant the family would never take a day off together, apart from bank holidays or Sundays. When the shop was closed, they might travel to Nottingham for afternoon tea and a visit to the cinema or, at Christmas time, a visit to the pantomime. Such days were a treat looked forward to for weeks. Summer holidays by the seaside at Skegness were equally prized, but, to keep the shop open, both parents took their break at different times. Margaret and Muriel went with their mother during the school holidays, Alfred took his holiday later to coincide with bowls week.
What little time was left over from the family business was taken up by the Methodist Church. ‘I was born into a family which was practical, serious and intensely religious.’31 Methodism, which was a popular denomination in Grantham, had a profound effect on her. Its religious regime was exhausting. Thatcher remembered, ‘We had no alcohol in the house until (my father) became mayor at the end of the war, and then only sherry and cherry brandy.’32 No newspapers or entertainment were permitted in the house on Sundays. There was no question of the girls being allowed to mix with friends or even play an innocuous game like snakes and ladders. Their grandmother Phoebe wouldn’t even let them knit or sew. Sundays were reserved for God, religious thought and discussion:
The values instilled in church were faithfully reflected in my home … The family went to Sunday morning service at 11 o’clock, but before that I would have gone to Sunday school. There was Sunday school again in the afternoon; later, from about the age of 12, I played the piano for the smaller children to sing the hymns. Then my parents would usually go out again to Sunday evening service.33
The Roberts family also practised Christianity through good deeds. Beatrice Roberts baked bread twice a week, and it was young Margaret’s job to deliver surplus loaves and cakes to less fortunate neighbours.34 ‘There was always something from those Thursday or Sunday bakes which was sent out to elderly folk living alone or who were sick.’35
The church became Margaret’s main source of amusement, there she learned how to play the piano and, briefly, the pipe organ. There she sang and listened to choral music. It was hardly a free and fun environment, but it was one that shaped her character. If the young Margaret objected, Alfred simply preached, ‘never do things just because other people do them’. It became his favourite expression, and one Margaret adopted as if it were gospel.
Alfred Roberts sought to make something of himself beyond the realm of his little business by taking an active role in both his local Methodist church and by serving on the local council.36 Lay preaching was one of the few ways working-class men could acquire ease and fluency in public speaking. Part of his Sunday would be spent visiting neighbouring villages travelling by pony and trap and, in later years, the church provided him with a taxi when he became one of the most popular preachers in the area.37 This oratorical tradition was passed down to his daughter, who started her public speaking career reading passages from the Bible in her local church pulpit.38 That preaching style never left her.
For Alfred Roberts, like Margaret later, there was just a small step between faith and politics. He was eager to do the right thing and, inspired by Christianity, he took a lively interest in both local concerns and the bigger issues of the day. There has been some debate whether her father was a natural Tory, then the party of privilege, land and wealth. His views were arguably more progressive. Even Thatcher conceded that, ‘his politics would perhaps be best described as “old fashioned liberal”’.39 Individual responsibility was his watchword, and sound finance his passion. Although he remained independent throughout his municipal career, without fail, he voted with the Conservatives in council on every single issue.40
At the time, both Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and his successor, Neville Chamberlain, were great appeasers of Adolf Hitler, desperately trying to avoid a repetition of the slaughter of the First World War. Alfred Roberts was passionately interested in what went on elsewhere, particularly in ideological terms. Huddling around their kitchen radio, the Roberts family shaped their opinions differently and favoured swift rearmament:
We had a deep distrust of the dictators … Unlike many conservative-minded people, my father was fierce in rejecting the argument, put forward by some supporters of Franco, that fascist regimes had to be backed as the only way to defeat communists. He believed that a free society was the better alternative to both.41
This view would only have been reinforced in 1938 when Muriel’s 17-year-old Jewish pen friend, Edith Muhlbauer, fled from Vienna to escape the Nazis and came to stay with the Roberts. Edith brought with her tales of life under the Third Reich, which Margaret listened to with horror and fascination. She became far more conscious than her school contemporaries of what the war was all about. However, the Roberts family didn’t have the money or the time to take Edith in permanently. So Margaret, then 12, and Muriel, 17, set about raising funds and persuading the local Rotary club to help. Edith stayed with more than a dozen Rotary families for the next two years, until she could join relatives in South America.
While staying with the Roberts family, Edith slept in Margaret’s room, and she left an impression. ‘She was 17, tall, beautiful, evidently from a well-to-do family,’ Margaret later wrote in her memoir. Most importantly, however, ‘she told us what it was like to live as a Jew under an anti-Semitic regime. One thing Edith reported particularly stuck in my mind: The Jews, she said, were being made to scrub the streets. For Margaret, who believed in meaningful work, this was as much a waste as it was an outrage. Had the Roberts family not intervened, Edith recalled years later, ‘I would have stayed in Vienna, and they would have killed me’. Margaret Roberts never forgot the lesson. ‘Never hesitate to do whatever you can, for you may save a life,’ she told audiences in 1995, after Edith had been located, alive and well, in Brazil.42
Everything changed with the outbreak of the Second World War. There were considerable disruptions to life; shortages, rationing, blackouts and air raids. For a relatively small town, Grantham felt the pressure of the war more than most. The mainline road and rail routes, along with its factories, made it a prime target for air raids. At one stage, it even had one the highest ratios of bombs to fall, per head of the population, in Britain.43 Edith Muhlbauer wasn’t the only new arrival. Hundreds of British and American airman arrived in Lincolnshire, and life in Grantham was turned upside down. Alfred threw himself into the war effort on the Home Front, gaining the distinction of being Food Officer for the town, as well as chairman of the Council Finance Committee, chairman of the National Savings Committee and, by 1943, he had served one term as mayor. In this later role, he was torn between upholding the tenets of his faith and keeping spirits up during the war. Eventually, he reluctantly allowed the town to relax the strict rules forbidding entertainment on the Sabbath and, for the first time, cinemas opened on Sundays. For Margaret, it was her only window onto a wider world. She wrote in her memoirs:
It was … the coming of cinema to Grantham that really brightened up my life. [My parents] were content that I should go to ‘good’ films, a classification which fortunately included Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals and the films of Alexandra Korda. On my visits to the cinema I roamed to the most fabulous realms of the imagination. It gave me the determination to roam in reality one day.44
Alfred was equally ambitious for his daughter, and her education reflected that. Although it included music and culture, he stressed achievement and vocational educational goals. Not surprisingly, his daughter studied to be first a scientist then a lawyer. Not for her the interpretive subjects such as classics, philosophy or history.45 Margaret was sent to Huntingtower Road School, despite the longer commute, as it was better than other local schools both academically and socially. At 9, the hard-working little girl had been congratulated by a teacher for her luck in winning a poetry reading contest, ‘I wasn’t lucky,’ she replied, ‘I deserved it.’46
Margaret shone as one of brightest pupils in her year and, under her father’s guidance, the learning never stopped. She was encouraged to read instructive books and to discuss them; she was taken to lectures and concerts, and preached to by her father on a wide range of topics, including finance. Margaret was encouraged to save her pocket money and buy savings stamps. She was never free to indulge in childish frivolity. There was no garden behind the shop to play in, and no bicycle to ride. This wasn’t due to lack of money, but her father’s extreme carefulness; not one penny was spent unless it was necessary.
In 1936, Margaret gained a place at the Kesteven & Grantham Girls’ School where her sister was already a pupil. Manners, discipline and correct English were expected from every Kesteven girl, particularly the scholarship girls, who were all keenly aware of the opportunities that the school offered.47 Margaret’s desire to be recognised also expressed itself in a fascination with acting and she joined the dramatic society, acting in many of the school productions. She loved the glamour, but mostly a sense of being centre stage and the focus of attention.48 She had a strong drive to be singled out and recognised as special, demonstrating an enormous streak of self-confidence. When visiting speakers invited questions at the end of their presentations ‘it would always be Margaret Roberts that got to her feet … asking clear, well-formulated questions, while her friends just looked at each other and raised their eyes to heaven’.49
Margaret never made close friends at school, her time was always taken up with a combination of church, shop work and homework. As a consequence, she never quite fitted in with her peers and, because her father always expected her to be serious, she may have given the impression that she couldn’t be bothered with giggly, silly girls.50 Several of her classmates remembered her being ridiculed as ‘priggish’, ‘bookish’ and ‘ambitious’.51 Some classmates felt she was such a damper on the fun that they would walk a different route to school so as not to meet up with her on the way.52 Many found her impeccable behaviour tedious.53
However, Margaret Roberts didn’t value her peers’ opinions much. Smart girl that she was, she quickly realised that education was the best way to escape the grim provincial world of Grantham. She had the zeal and higher purpose to apply for a place at Oxford University a year early because, at 17, she wanted to ‘get on’.
Margaret had always come top in her exams through sheer effort and industry. The intellectual qualities most frequently attributed to her were ‘logic and diligence’.54 However, her ill-tempered Scottish headmistress, Dorothy Gillies, thought her star pupil was too young to leave home. ‘You’re thwarting my ambition,’ Margaret reportedly said.55 There was also another obstacle: Margaret hadn’t studied Latin, an essential prerequisite to a place at such an august university. Not to be derailed, she conscripted her father’s support and sweet-talked him into paying for private Latin coaching from a teacher at the local boys’ school.
All that was to be done now was to apply. Alfred wrote the cheque out to accompany the examination fee, and Margaret took it to Miss Gillies as a fait accompli.56 A local vicar, Canon Goodrich, whose daughter, Margaret, had recently gone up to Lady Margaret Hall College at Oxford, was also recruited to give extra coaching. The two Margarets became friends. The Goodrichs’ modest but comfortable middle-class home, littered with books, pictures and finer furniture, became a glimpse into a better, more elegant and comfortable way of life which she desired for herself.57
Not only did Margaret complete her High School Certificate a year early, she also successfully crammed a five year Latin course into a few months. It was with some satisfaction that she went up to Oxford to sit the entrance examination, hopeful for a scholarship to read chemistry at Somerville College.58 Chemistry proved a shrewd choice. Far fewer girls applied for science degrees and, had Margaret switched to law or a more popular subject like English, the competition would have been far greater. However, the news from Oxford was initially disappointing. Margaret was turned down, but her name was put on the waiting list. This gave her two options, go to another university, like London or nearby Nottingham, or apply next year when she was 18.
Margaret chose the latter option and went back to school, where she was made joint head girl with classmate Madeline Edwards. She had shared this distinction for only two weeks when a telegram arrived from Oxford. Would Miss Roberts care to take up a place forfeited by someone else? In a fortnight, Margaret Roberts, always one to seize the main chance, disappeared from Grantham for good.59
Pulling up roots must have been painful at only 17. Arriving at Oxford, she appeared to be an unpolished girl whose homemade clothes and clunky shoes set her apart from the usual posh Country Life types.60 Somerville was an all-women’s college, its alumni included Indira Gandhi, Edith Summerskill and Shirley Williams. In those days the girls fell into three distinct social groups, exemplified by where a person sat at table in the hall. The foreign students took the top three tables, nearest the principal’s chair. At the bottom three tables sat the wealthy and impeccably aristocratic girls from polished schools like Cheltenham Ladies’ College and Roedean. In between sat the solid daughters of the middle classes and the scholarship girls, with brains and robust work ethics. It was this middle group with whom Margaret fitted in most, but again she came across as awkward and gauche; making herself an instant outsider and social misfit.61
‘I was the first Roberts to go to Oxbridge,’ she declared, aware that she was a meritocratic pioneer. However, she also witnessed at firsthand the huge advantages enjoyed by richer undergraduates with good connections. Their confidence and wealth were intimidating.62 There is a note of animus and jealousy in her observation63 that, ‘I might have had a more glittering Oxford career, but I had little money to spare’.64 Many patronised the earnest Methodist girl with small-town manners and a lingering Grantham accent. ‘I began by keeping myself to myself, for I felt shy and ill at ease in this new environment.’65 She was also mercilessly teased because of her naive and outspoken ambition to better herself. Her biggest faux pas was telling everyone that she had taken elocution lessons. She spoke like Eliza Doolittle in George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, with a clear grip of the basic idea of what was needed, yet without the finesse to carry it off.66
Quickly and cruelly, Margaret became the subject of ridicule, just as she had at school. She never appeared to realise that she was making a fool of herself until it was too late, and once teased would blush crimson. She spoke incessantly about ‘daddy’. Daddy, the Mayor of Grantham, rather than daddy, the grocer. What daddy thought of this and that, what daddy said she should do and how she should behave; and the books daddy said she should read.67
Meanwhile, Margaret also failed to integrate herself in the chemistry lab, where the students were tight knit as a result of the long hours of work carrying out laboratory practice. Margaret remained aloof, while the others joined in and had fun. As a result, she ended up spending her four years at university making few real friends, and inadvertently generated a feeling shared by many of her contemporaries that she was only prepared to offer friendship to those people who might be of some use to her.68 Margaret, moreover, was never very close to any of her female contemporaries. The three for whom she had the most time were two fellow Methodists, Mary Osbourne and Jean Southerst, and Canon Goodrich’s daughter, Margaret. She clearly preferred the company of men.
Margaret’s social isolation was further exacerbated by the left-wing politics of Somerville College under its distinguished principal, Dame Janet Vaughan. Margaret arrived at Oxford an unshakable Conservative, and Dame Janet remembers no one quite as intransigent, as she never questioned her own political convictions once in all her undergraduate years.69
Barred from the Oxford Union, which only admitted men, she joined the next best thing, the Oxford University Conservative Association, which became both a refuge and inspiration.70 Former members included ex-prime ministers such as Gladstone, Asquith, Salisbury, Macmillan and Heath. Margaret could easily hold her own in any political argument and found herself in a private club designed to forge social and political connections, as well as an unofficial marriage bureau with its social evenings revolving around dancing and dining. Margaret Roberts was too straightforward, naive and prickly to use this opportunity to find a rich husband.71 Perhaps also, although attractive, she was too unpolished and unsophisticated to be viewed as good marriage material by the Oxford male population, but this didn’t stop her trying.
For an ambitious girl, there were many potential suitors. As one contemporary, Pauline Cowan, said of her, ‘We all knew that Margaret had set her cap at a young man with money and title.’72 The grandest by far was Johnny Dalkeith, heir to the dukedom of Buccleuch. He was favoured by the queen mother as a potential beau for Princess Elizabeth. Margaret had a crush on him after he raised money from the other well-heeled students to buy the future prime minister a bicycle, because she was doing so much work on behalf of the student body and needed transport to get around. Mrs Thatcher would later describe him as a ‘rather marvellous person’.73 It is intriguing to speculate that Elizabeth and Margaret were once potentially interested in the same man.
Another male friend within the union was Edward Boyle, an old Etonian and baronet. She was taken to meet his mother in her apartment in Portman Square and was overwhelmed with its scale and treasures inside. ‘To me it was a different world. I had never been in a flat like it.’74
However, it was Lord Craigmyle, a young history undergraduate at Corpus Christi College, with whom Margaret fell seriously in love for the very first time. This young aristocrat had a large shipping fortune and a title inherited from his father. He was also heir to his grandfather’s grander title, the Earl of Inchcape. The unsophisticated Margaret made no secret of her feelings, and was quite gushing about him, although she laid herself open to further ridicule from female contemporaries who, by this time, were growing quite disillusioned by her blatant social climbing.75 Unfortunately for Margaret, this shy young man was very close to his mother. When he took Margaret home to meet her at the family’s London home, Lady Craigmyle found Miss Roberts provincial and therefore a highly unsuitable future countess. Her comment was, ‘In trade and in science! We know nobody who is in either.’76 Margaret thus failed to catch herself a title; yet again, another woman had blocked her progress.
Oxford made Margaret painfully aware that her background did not match up, and she never seemed to have much fun at the university. Not only was she trying to climb the matrimonial ladder, but also a political one as she socialised with the future Tory Party elite. Although she was enormously impressed by the wit of young war hero Quintin Hogg (a future Lord Chancellor) and the aristocratic charms of Anthony Eden and Alec Douglas-Home (both future prime ministers), the admiration wasn’t returned. These sophisticated Tory grandees, who shared the same backgrounds and upbringing as the Buckingham Palace coterie, found her inherently vulgar, a viewpoint explicitly expressed by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Most spoke of her as ‘that common woman’. To them, she was someone who served the carriage trade, someone whom they would be happy to patronise provided she was standing on the other side of the shop counter, ideally with an apron on. Although the Second World War had supposedly swept aside the old aristocratic Conservatives, Tory Cabinets which operated from 1951 contained no fewer than eleven hereditary peers. The old Establishment was holding on to power and privilege tightly.
Margaret Thatcher returned home from Oxford with a chip on her shoulder. After the urban world of university the social deficiencies of her own family were obvious. Oxford ‘made her father seem a rather ordinary man,’ guessed Margaret Goodrich.77 But she wasn’t crushed by the snobbish dimensions of Oxford. Her father had installed into her great confidence, which subsequently developed into narcissistic grandiosity and an incapacity to tolerate self-doubt.78
Politically she went far, meeting an array of up-and-coming young political stars alongside whom she would eventually work in Parliament, and becoming president of the university’s Conservative Association. Academically, she gained a second, not a first-class degree. Her critics have made much of this, although the fact she later qualified as a barrister in just two years, while raising twins and securing a parliamentary seat suggests a great deal of intellectual stamina. She also won the Kirkcaldy Essay Prize in her third year, and no accolade from Somerville should be sniffed at.
Margaret saw and used Oxford, including the people she cultivated there, as a stepping stone to the House of Commons, and for very little else. She wasn’t some dreary bluestocking, and the young men surrounding her had barely seen a woman before in their lives. She stood out from the crowd and captured their attention. ‘Some of us were making it before women’s lib was even thought of!’ she infamously snapped.79
The obvious next step into politics for Margaret was via the law. However, further study required money which she didn’t have. After graduation, Margaret needed to find work to make use of her chemistry degree and landed a research position at BX Plastics, situated in a drab factory outside Colchester, earning £350 per year (about £15,000 in today’s money). She rationalised her position thus, ‘Very few people greatly enjoy the early stages of a new job and in this I was no exception.’80 Margaret was one of the first women ever to be employed in such a capacity. She found it agonising, and was quite incapable of communicating with the men on the factory floor. Her rather grand style earned her the nicknamed ‘Duchess’ or ‘Aunty Margaret’ which stuck to her throughout her three years working at the firm. Yet she was steering a precise course, quite indifferent to opinion around her. All her spare time was spent with members of the local Conservative Association where she made friends, or rather, useful contacts.
Marriage provided the big escape for Margaret, just as it did for Elizabeth. Matrimony transformed them both. Elizabeth became a grown woman at last, and Margaret married up and metamorphosed into a rich middle-class Tory wife.
When Margaret Roberts accepted Denis Thatcher’s proposal, the story of a lower middle-class girl struggling against the odds ended.81 Although her later career might have been possible without Denis’s emotional and financial support, it would have been far harder. Marriage to Denis changed everything for her; their wedding was arguably one of the best decisions she ever made politically. It was also clearly a love match, as they were devoted to each other. ‘I think Denis was very, very important,’ said former Cabinet minister, Cecil Parkinson. ‘I think he, you know, gave her a feeling of financial stability that the family if you like was well financed, and Margaret always liked to be sure that finances were in good order.’82 ‘Denis paid for all those things like child care and holidays that made life easier,’ said Edwina Currie.83
As a couple, the Thatchers seemed to complement each other perfectly, where the queen and her husband tolerated each other’s differences. The marriage between Denis and Margaret would also remain free from the scandals that engulf many in the public eye. Solid and middle class, the Thatchers left sexual indiscretions to the aristocracy.
The queen, by contrast, would be confronted by rumours of her husband’s mistresses and various alleged adulteries (whatever the truth behind the rumours, at least the alleged affairs appeared to have taken place discreetly).
Margaret and Denis each admired the other’s self-sufficiency and were supportive to each other. Both wanted their own careers and accepted the other’s ambition. ‘He [Denis] had a robust sort of good sense; he never pandered to her, he was immensely proud of her, but he always spoke his mind, and I think she just found that very refreshing,’ said Cecil Parkinson.84 Sir Bernard Ingham points out, ‘She was an achiever, but whether she would have got as far without Denis Thatcher is entirely another matter. He brought financial security, emotional satisfaction … and the support that enabled her to go for it. She described him as her “rock”.’85
Major Denis Thatcher was ten years older, a bit of a war hero who had been mentioned in dispatches and had served in France, Sicily and Italy;86 not least of all, he was tall, athletic, good-looking and very taken with his bride-to-be. Denis was also managing director of the family paint and wallpaper company, Atlas Preservatives, in Kent, which made him comparatively rich, with a flat in Chelsea and a flash Jaguar motor car which he called his ‘tart trap’. He took her to smart dinners at fashionable restaurants like The Ivy and L’Ecu De France.
Margaret did not say ‘yes’ at once to his marriage proposal. Denis was a divorcee and Margaret worried about becoming the second Mrs Thatcher. The first, Margot Kempson, a glamorous horse riding beauty from Hertfordshire,87 was blonde, and a more sympathetic, more beautiful version of her successor, but the marriage suffered the separations of war. After two years, she left him for a second husband with a title, Sir Howard Hickman. Denis was shattered and refused to talk about it.88
Marriage to Denis was a smart move for Margaret. As mothers around the world have wisely reminded their daughters, it is just as easy to love a rich man as a poor one.89 Denis understood the priorities of businessmen and informed his wife of them. Margaret was a great believer in commerce, she would never have fallen for a playboy. Denis’s company, Atlas Preservatives, took him around the world and she admired that. She was a great advocate of enterprise and Atlas Preservatives was just the sort of British company the economy needed.
Their wedding was a quiet affair. The ceremony took place with fifty close friends and relatives in Wesley’s Chapel in City Road. Margaret wore a blue velvet dress, a replica of an outfit worn by Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, in a painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds, complete with a little sapphire hat and ostrich feather. For their honeymoon, the newlyweds travelled to Portugal, Madeira and Paris, combining a little of the bridegroom’s business with pleasure.90
As well as changing her name and class, Mrs Thatcher also switched religion from her Nonconformist Methodist roots to the more Establishment, Church of England.91 Margaret was now the suburban Kent-based wife of a millionaire. After one year she became pregnant and gave birth to twins, Mark and Carol, in August 1953. They were looked after by a nanny during their early years, before continuing to elite schools, Harrow and St Paul’s Girls. Only occasionally did her voice now betray a Lincolnshire lilt. Mostly, she sounded like a privileged and somewhat patronising stockbroker-belt southerner.92
Denis’s money now meant she could afford to train as a barrister, and while still in the maternity ward of Queen Charlotte’s Hospital in London she applied to the Council of Legal Education to study for the Bar. Women were then tolerated in the legal profession if they kept to subjects such as family law. That wasn’t Margaret’s style; after passing her exams she focused on building a taxation practice, which was then very much an elite male preserve. Qualifying as a lawyer was merely to prepare her to be a better parliamentarian.
Pursuing both a legal and political career took its toll on family life. It meant rationing her attention to her children in what Carol later called ‘impenetrable tunnel vision’.93 Margaret often forgot to wave to the twins when she left home, neglected Denis and refused to consort with his mother. The new young mother seemed to resent her domestic commitments, entitling the relevant chapter in her autobiography, ‘House Bound’.94
In November 1954 she was shortlisted, but missed selection for, a by-election in Orpington. It was the same story again two years later in Beckenham, then Ashford and again in Maidstone. In her memoirs, Thatcher is clear about the sex discrimination she met:
I would be shortlisted for the seat, would make what was generally acknowledged to be a good speech – and then the questions, most of them having the same purpose, would begin. ‘With my family commitments, would I have time enough for the constituency? Did I really think that I could fulfill my duties as a mother with young children to look after and as an MP?’
I detected a feeling that the House of Commons was not really the right place for a woman.
Margaret blamed women themselves as much as men. ‘Perhaps some of the men at selection committees entertained this prejudice,’ she wrote. ‘But I found then, and later, that it was the women who came nearest to expressing it openly.’95
Eventually, success came with a safe seat in Finchley in north London, just after the Thatchers had rather frustratingly bought themselves a new house in Farnborough, south of London. To succeed, she still had to overcome considerable ‘anti-women’ prejudice in what had boiled down to a contest between racial and sexual discrimination. Her predecessor complained that, ‘We’ve got to choose between a bloody Jew and a bloody woman’.96 The bloody woman won.
Margaret threw herself into her constituency, giving speeches, attending social functions and bazaars, visiting old people’s homes and schools and driving herself across London in her old blue Ford Anglia. Finchley may have been a safe seat, but Margaret fought the election with extreme passion, winning a majority of nearly 3,500 more than the previous incumbent. Her mission statement was, ‘I will let the people know what Conservatism is about and I will lead the troops into battle.’97
At last, in 1959 Margaret Thatcher was a Member of Parliament. Aged only 34, she was the youngest woman in the House, and by 1961, she became parliamentary under-secretary for pensions and national insurance. Then, the Conservatives were in power under the old Etonian, Harold Macmillan. As Edwina Currie explains, Margaret was too clever to be ignored:
The job they gave her in pensions was seen as the right sort of job for a bright woman. Pensions was very much seen as one of those female departments like education. They still exist in a sense, as you haven’t seen a female Minister of Defence yet.98
Margaret made an impact, challenging colleagues and antagonising officials, usually correcting and occasionally tearing up letters they drafted for her. She crunched numbers and devoured raw data.99 She hungered for work. She became known for her mastery of economic statistics as well as her good looks. ‘I have the latest red hot figure,’ she once stated in the House of Commons. It shows her lack of humour that she was baffled by the ensuing laughter.100 Roguish members praised her vital statistics, others treated her with a galumphing chivalry which, in that all-male club, she quickly exploited.
Those whose only image of Margaret Thatcher is her Spitting Image puppet and the unflattering photos taken in middle age must remember that these show Margaret in her late 50s and 60s. When she first entered Parliament she was young, blond and clear-skinned. Her husband’s money could pay for her immaculate grooming, expensive hair colouring and clothes. Because career women were a rare commodity in the 1950s, she stood out and very much enjoyed being the only woman in a room full of men. That was a character flaw which never left her. However, she used being a woman to her advantage and never allowed it to disable her.101 Edwina Currie MP explained:
She flirted and twisted men around her finger … She wore a blue suit with a very white collar. Then she had this amazing gold hair, standing out like Joan of Arc. She stood out in the House of Commons amongst all the men, you could always easily spot her in the crowd.102
Tim Bell, one of the key figures behind Thatcher’s success, explained:
She was perfectly capable of crying. She was perfectly capable of being coquettish, and she was perfectly capable of bringing her femininity to the way that she discussed things. But, only when it suited her to get her own way … they weren’t deeply held views … they were just techniques. Politics is about relationships between people – and the relationships that the men in the Tory Party had with women tended to be their wives, mistresses and daughters. Suddenly they were confronted with a superior colleague, senior colleague. And, you know one or two of them found it quite difficult. I think it was Julian Amery who said, ‘when you left home you left nanny and then suddenly you find she was running the office’.103
At this time she also returned to Kesteven as an honoured guest for an ‘old girls’ reunion. Miss Gillies, the headmistress who had counselled Margaret to wait a year before applying to Oxford and was, by that time, retired and rather elderly, misused a Latin phrase during a speech. Thatcher, who followed her to the podium, made a point of correcting her old headmistress’s Latin to the horror of her appalled ex-schoolmates. It showed a streak of spitefulness that she never eliminated.104
In 1964, the Tories were ousted, and Margaret served in a number of shadow cabinet posts – being one of only a handful of women, she stood out. She worked very diligently and her hard work was noticed. Few who watched Thatcher in Westminster during the 1960s and early 1970s either identified her as the woman who would become the first female prime minister, or foresaw that she would espouse a philosophy that would radically reshape both her party and her country. While Thatcher was still a backbencher she frequently took on senior cabinet ministers and permanent secretaries, revealing a degree of political aggression that many disliked. Officials did not know how to handle such a forceful woman who did not play by bureaucratic rules.105
In 1964, Denis had some kind of breakdown after going through a particularly bad patch of business worries and working too hard. He spent several months away from home travelling in South Africa, where he saw old friends and relatives and took up photography. He found the long sea voyages to and from the Cape particularly relaxing. Margaret now became the stoic one, the fighter. Denis, later on, was always more likely to surrender. He became more emotionally and psychologically fragile than his wife. Finally, he decided to dispose of Atlas Preservatives, which was profitable but undercapitalised, and sold to Castrol Oil. It proved a profitable and shrewd move, as he joined Castrol’s main board of directors and secured the financial stability of the Thatcher family.106
During the 1970 June elections, Ted Heath’s Conservative Party promised the healing policies of trade union reform, lower taxes, public spending cuts and a free market for entrepreneurs. It was a winning combination, and the newly elected Heath named Margaret Thatcher Secretary of State for Education & Science.
However, Thatcher’s aggressive posture did not decrease when she became a Cabinet minister. Although there is a distinct pecking order in Cabinet, with her role being in the lower echelons, ministers at this level are not normally expected to become involved in debate, except by express invitation or on the specific subject of their department. Margaret was either unaware of, or unimpressed by, such convention, speaking up about subjects that engaged her with an impressive display of facts and figures. ‘That’s enough from you Margaret,’ Ted Heath barked.107 In a very short time she was unpopular with her Cabinet colleagues,108 with her determination to win arguments at whatever cost in bruised egos.109
When Mrs Thatcher finally found the publicity she craved, it almost destroyed her Cabinet career. After the election, Prime Minister Heath wrote to his cabinet with difficult news, ‘We shall need determination and a willingness among spending ministers to accept reductions in programmes which, from a departmental stand point, they would be reluctant to make.’
In August 1970, as the new Secretary of State for Education, Thatcher responded to a Treasury demand by deciding to end free milk for primary school children to save £8 million. At the time, it was a stark choice between losing the milk and facing cuts to a new primary school building programme.110 Throughout this period, Margaret fought attempts to cut the education budget overall, and although she failed, despite her wishes, to prevent local authorities closing grammar schools, she succeeded in saving the Open University, an egalitarian institution worthy of her father’s ideals, which her Cabinet colleagues had wanted to scrap.
However, for public relations, the milk debacle was a gigantic personal catastrophe. The chant ‘Thatcher, Thatcher, Milk Snatcher’ rang out at almost every public meeting and made eye-catching tabloid headlines. Mothers throughout the country were astonished that a women would take free milk from children. Tory grandee, Lord Carrington, was a firsthand witness; she was, he said, ‘unlucky to be called Thatcher because it rhymes with snatcher’.111 In the House of Commons, MPs barracked her every time she rose to speak with screams of ‘ditch the bitch’.
Oxford University would later refuse her an honorary degree because of her cuts to the education budget generally. ‘Is Mrs Thatcher human?’ asked the Sun, before declaring her, ‘the most unpopular woman in Britain’. Margaret was hurt, she refused to talk to the press and then treated every question they asked as a trap.112
At this moment, it was to Ted Health alone that Mrs Thatcher owed her political survival. He invited her very publicly to Chequers and the press were briefed that the education secretary had the prime minister’s full backing. The attack immediately ceased.113 Lord Carrington said:
Ted Heath actually did everything he possibly could to support her, he said to her, you know, ‘this is not your policy; it’s the government’s policy, and we’ll support you through thick and thin’. And he did. Um, whether or not that had any effect on his opposition to Margaret afterward – he may have felt that having, so to speak, supported her through thick and thin, when she challenged him, that was a poor reward, but that if it was, it was a very silly reaction.114
By 1974, it was obvious that Ted Heath’s leadership of the country had failed. The Tory Party was disorientated and this provided Margaret’s turning point. She looked around at ‘her party’ and feared it was sliding too far left. In her mind, only one person was capable of setting things right and that was Margaret Thatcher herself. It was the decision of a loner. No family discussions. No advisers. Early on in the leadership contest old school Conservatives wrote her off as a freak, and Heath regarded her challenge against him in the leadership contest a complete joke. When Margaret had gone to tell Heath that she was standing for leadership, he kept her standing while he sat at his desk and said, ‘you’ll lose’. The contempt was palpable.115 Enoch Powell attempted to cut her down to size by stating that the party ‘wouldn’t put up with those hats and that accent’.116
However, she won to her cause three men who showed her the ropes of successful campaigning. The first was Airey Neave. Neave was a Tory Party legend who had escaped from the notorious Nazi prison, Colditz, during the Second World War. He had also trained women agents and he liked Mrs Thatcher’s metal after his wife spotted her potential while sitting in the visitors’ gallery.117 Neave was not a particularly great parliamentarian. He operated best behind closed doors.118 Airey’s tactics, explained Edwina Currie, had been to go around back bench MPs telling them that Mrs Thatcher was a great talent, and she shouldn’t have her career destroyed so early because of an embarrassingly poor vote, and that she deserved a decent show. Enough MPs believed him and voted for her. No one expected her to win.119
The second was Gordon Reece, a flamboyant television producer who reputedly lived on champagne and cigars.120 He suggested that Margaret adopt a softer hairstyle and change her ‘fussy’ clothes. Crucially, he also advised her to speak more slowly and avoid hectoring people.121 She also lost half a stone, which helped get rid of the double chin and slight tubbiness.122
The final mentor was Ronald Millar. For him, Thatcher was a twentieth-century Gloriana and he injected the spirit of Tilbury into her speeches and drilled into her the mantra, ‘Cool, calm and elected’,123 and ‘Remember dear, less is more!’124 He worked on the pitch of her voice, drafting in experts, including Laurence Olivier, to make her sound less ladylike. Vocal training made her sound progressively deeper, more measured, less shrill and less like the queen did in 1953, the coronation year.125 Millar would always hold a special place in her affections, she loved his camp showbiz qualities and he made her feel like a star.126
Together, these volunteers made history. On 11 February 1975, the grocer’s daughter from Grantham was elected to lead a political party, made up almost entirely of the old guard Establishment that was both snobbish and chauvinist.127 Observing from the Labour front bench, Barbara Castle wrote that Mrs Thatcher, ‘the best man’ the Tories had, looked radiant, ‘She is in love, in love with power, success and with herself’.128
Her biggest strength was that she was different. She stood out as something new, exciting and optimistic. Margaret declared, ‘It’s been said that all that politicians are doing now is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Well, here is one who isn’t.’129 She was offering a fresh start.
The Conservative Party elected Margaret Thatcher their leader in a moment of crisis. There was no one else. Many in the actual shadow cabinet disliked her, finding her world view distressingly narrow and her personality both dominant and controlling. She displayed such command of even the minutest details of her government that even her friends felt that she looked too much like a childish know-it-all. They warned her against sounding ‘too headmistressy’.130 But Margaret was unapologetic, ‘I have known some very good headmistresses who have launched their pupils on wonderful careers.’ She went on to say, ‘I am what I am. Yes, I do believe in certain things very strongly. Yes, my style is one of vigorous leadership. Yes, I do believe in trying to persuade people that the things I believe in are things they should follow.’131 Take me or leave me, she was saying. There was no choice, and she knew it.132 As she pointedly explained to her PR guru Tim Bell:
‘If you’ve got a box of tricks that will get me elected please don’t use them because if the people don’t want me it won’t work.’ And that’s what she understood. Want me doesn’t mean like me or adore me. Want me means think that I can do the job better than anybody else.133
Bell saw that Margaret never courted popularity, she never thought that being popular was what mattered for being elected.
All her potential rivals for the leadership of the Conservative Party during this period had made mistakes, she hadn’t. Margaret beat off Ted Heath in the first ballot and he resigned the leadership. In the second ballot, she saw off William Whitelaw, Heath’s preferred successor. A shadow cabinet colleague, Norman St John-Stevas, called it the ‘assumption of the Blessed Margaret’. She gloated over the feeble showing of her chief rivals,134 among them Edward du Cann. His shadowy dealings in the City excluded him, as he was about to be subject to a press investigation. As the chairman of the powerful 1922 Committee, he had led the back bench hostility towards Heath.
Then there was Sir Keith Joseph, who made an unfortunate speech on eugenics as a potential solution to immigration. Finally, William Whitelaw, who managed to anger the right-wing members of the party by being too close to the failed premier Ted Heath.
Thatcher was, in a sense, the last woman standing. According to historian Richard Vinen, had either Joseph or du Cann stood, Thatcher would almost certainly have withdrawn. He said, ‘Thatcher had been almost no one’s first choice for the leadership, probably not even her own.’135
Enoch Powell credited Thatcher’s success to luck, saying that she was faced with ‘supremely unattractive opponents at the time’, and that, ‘she didn’t rise to power. She was opposite the spot on the roulette wheel at the right time, and she didn’t flunk it.’136 Old Etonian Whitelaw allegedly cried from shock when he didn’t win, viewing the job as one he was entitled to. Ted Heath spent the rest of his career in a political huff, red-faced and sitting on the back benches.
In truth, she was very inexperienced by the standards of the time, having held none of the great offices of state, nor even shadowed them. She lacked a solid reputation.137 Many just saw her as ‘untried, unsympathetic and alarming’.138 Tim Bell explains, ‘I don’t think we ever used words like sexism. We spoke in English.’ He concedes, however, that there was caution inevitably, but ‘it was just a perfectly natural caution people had about doing something for the first time’.139
Mrs Thatcher charmed all the back bench MPs who wanted a comforting maternal figure. She seemed to remind them of matron, or the school nurse from their respective boarding schools. No one should underestimate the fear that bank bench MPs suffer when they see their majority slipping away. In this despairing mood, Conservative MPs submitted to the lady and paved the way for the first woman prime minister in Europe.140 Fearful, and in a state of panic, the old boys’ club turned to the Grantham woman and the stoic provincialism that she represented.
‘It is almost impossible to overestimate the difficulty she faced, in getting elected,’ said Cecil Parkinson:
I mean, there was, I mean, the Labour prime minister summed up her dilemma, if you like, when, when he heard that she had won the leadership, he said, ‘We have just won the next election.’ He just didn’t believe that the Conservative Party led by a woman was electable and he summed up the views of quite a few people in the Party. In fact, if you were to analyse her vote, I once said she led a peasants’ revolt … the make-up of her support was sort of the disaffected, the idealistic, the people who believed in … the economic policies she believed in. But basically she was an outsider, and she rallied around her a group of people, who for various reasons preferred her to Ted Heath. But it was not a great, ringing enthusiastic endorsement of her, it was the fact that she represented the only viable alternative to Ted. And that is what attracted a lot of people; so she wasn’t elected on a wave of popularity, you know, it was a slightly grudging election, that got her there, and I mean, I often think when she looked at her shadow cabinet, the first meeting she had after she was elected, there were only about four people around the table who had voted for her. So she took on a hell of a job leading a party that was questioning about what it had done and the shadow cabinet that in the main didn’t agree with her. So you add all that up and she faced very substantial obstacles.141
The vote had polarised along right–left lines with, in addition, the region of origin, experience and education of the MP having their effects. Thatcher was stronger among MPs on the right, those from southern England and those who had not attended Oxbridge.142 However, very few inside the shadow cabinet itself voted for her. Mrs Thatcher had a fight on her hands within her own Tory Government, from the old school club which dominated then, and still does, the British Establishment, government and monarchy. To them she was a shrill governess who had risen above her station.143
Thatcher may well have become party leader, but she was now surrounded by men like Sir Ian Gilmour and Christopher Soames, who struggled to conceal their disdain for someone they considered an arriviste. When Sir Edward du Cann invited Margaret and Denis to his smart London townhouse, he likened their manner to that of a couple coming to be interviewed for a job as ‘housekeeper and handyman’.144 Without doubt, Edwina Currie explains, ‘she was the victim of snobbishness’.145
‘Word came back from a lunch where a rather outspoken critic of hers, I think he would be probably classified as a grandee, said that the Conservative Party was a cavalry regiment led by a corporal in the Women’s Royal Army Corps,’ said Cecil Parkinson. ‘The grandees felt very put out.’146
Lord Carrington feels it wasn’t snobbishness, so much as surprise that such an unknown got the top job:
She [Mrs Thatcher] really took very little part in Ted Heath’s Cabinet. I mean, when people say this is where she, sort of, made her mark, but she didn’t make her mark at all – she hardly said anything.147
I don’t think anybody was very hostile to her. I mean, she got people’s backs up in various ways in the end – of course she did. But I don’t think there was hostility – I think there was absolute astonishment that she’d been elected … She wasn’t very club-able as a person, was she? No, she wasn’t cosy. [Laughs]. But then, you … do you want your prime minister to be cosy?148
Tim Bell is more stoic:
Everybody is the victim of snobbishness at some point or another in their lives. You have to cast your mind back to the era we’re talking about which is the middle seventies and the Tory Party still had its ruling-class roots. Lord Salisbury was still an important person. The hierarchy of the Tory Party, the various area directors were all … either very successful businessmen or well-connected landowners. So, there was inevitably some snobbishness but nothing that was particularly aggressive.149
While the Tory Party had startled themselves with their new leader, the Labour Party clung to the hope that the long general election campaign would expose Thatcher’s habit of making unguarded statements. The metropolitan elite deplored her vulgarity. Left-wing intellectual Jonathan Miller said he found Mrs Thatcher ‘repulsive in every way’ and excoriated her ‘odious suburban gentility’.150 Labour strategists were certain that Margaret Thatcher was the Tories’ weak spot. Her advisors told her to save her energies until late in the campaign to keep her out of the firing line. Gordon Reece encouraged her to take her mind off the election by going to see a West End play or musical, so she took herself off to see Evita.
Eventually, under the guidance of Reece and Millar, Thatcher embraced a US-style campaign, much to the horror of some Tory Party snobs. Popular performers like Lulu and Ken Dodd provided the warm-up act, and she swept onto the political stage to the theme of ‘Hello Dolly’, although in Margaret’s version it was re-lyricised to ‘Hello Maggie’! It was something neither Ted Heath nor Harold MacMillan would have contemplated doing.151
Nothing served Margaret better for her public image than an insult from the Soviet Union, which turned into a backhanded compliment. The Soviet Army paper, Red Star, responded to her frequent anti-Communist speeches by dubbing her the ‘Iron Lady’. Thatcher repeated the phrase whenever possible, and the jibe bolstered her efforts to distance herself from the shrill heckling housewife image that plagued her in the House of Commons. Callaghan’s ‘Sunny Jim’ nickname, meanwhile, was fast becoming an unhelpful endearment during the winter of discontent.
Carol Thatcher points out that, for all her outward modesty, her mother was not surprised herself when the Conservative Party voted her as the leader:
The outside world may have been surprised … but she had clearly seen herself in a central role. I was reminded of the famous scene in the Robert Redford film, The Candidate, where the victorious politician grabs an aide in the loo and barks at him, ‘OK, what do we do now?’ My mother knew exactly what to do and embraced the leadership as if had been her destiny.152
When she visited the United States in 1976, everywhere she went she spoke with enormous confidence. ‘The question is not whether we will win,’ she told crowds in New York, ‘but how large the majority will be.’153 Election victory was within her grasp.
When power finally came on 4 May 1979, she had one man she could rely on completely, her husband Denis. Although much more relaxed about politics, he embodied her beliefs in practice. It was not an accident that Conservative politics bought them together.
Denis would transform himself into the perfect consort. When asked, ‘Who wears the trousers in your marriage?’ Denis replied happily, ‘I do. I also wash them and iron them.’ He was never subservient, and he was one of the few men whom she failed to domineer; in fact, she would meekly defer to him. Denis expected his wife to keep house, to entertain and to be a traditional 1950s housewife at one level.154 Her speciality in the kitchen was Coronation chicken, cold chicken pieces curried in mayonnaise with chunks of apricot. The dish was invented for the queen’s coronation banquet during the post-war austerity of 1953.155
‘Better keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool rather than open it and remove all doubt,’ Denis reportedly said another time.156 He fully understood his role as consort and was socially useful to his wife, particularly at royal occasions. The queen mother was very fond of him, and he broke the ice at state dinners and Balmoral, exerting an easygoing charm with women and a chummy camaraderie with men. Denis knew that he had to be always present, but never there; he perfected the role of omnipresent discretion. He became her best friend, and they were much closer in Downing Street than they had been in the earlier part of their marriage.157
Denis also kept an eye on the most disloyal members of his wife’s Cabinet and parliamentary party. He helped stiffen Margaret’s resolve in 1981 when she had to stand up to what journalist Quentin Letts described as the ‘sneering snoots’ inside her first Cabinet. He was never browbeaten by the humbug of the old boys’ club. He knew the type from his rugby days, and they failed to either menace or inspire him. Politicians he disliked he would describe as, ‘as much use as a one legged man in an arse-kicking contest’. In doing so, he would lift his wife out of her darker mood.158
However, the media, through their inevitable requirement to report on something about the Thatcher marriage, set upon Denis. The satirical magazine Private Eye introduced their ‘Dear Bill’ column, and painted Denis as an inebriated racist and henpecked dimwit. But he was in no way subservient to his wife, and neither was he the fool portrayed. The Thatchers played along with the joke, in one speech to the Scottish Tory conference Margaret claimed, ‘Denis likes Scotland – particularly Glenfiddich, Glenmorangie and Laphroaig.’159 She never saw him as this chumpish Private Eye lampoon. In her eyes, he was the staunch and steadfast older man who had given her the financial support and stability needed to juggle a political career and children.160
1 Margaret Thatcher, Penny Junor (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1984).
2 The Iron Lady, John Campbell (Penguin, 2009).
3 Author’s correspondence with Sir Bernard Ingham, 2013.
4 There is No Alternative, Claire Berlinski (Basic Books, 2008).
5 ‘Did Blue Blood Run in Lady Thatcher’s Veins?’ Daily Express, 21 April 2013.
6 There is No Alternative, Claire Berlinski (Basic Books, 2008).
7 Interview, David Owen, 2013.
8 Margaret Thatcher, Penny Junor (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1984).
9 Margaret Thatcher, Tricia Murray (Star, 1978).
10 Simon Hoggart, Tatler, January 1984.
11 Robert Harris, Observer, 3 January 1988.
12 Margaret, Daughter of Beatrice, Leo Abse MP (Jonathan Cape, 1989).
13 Ibid.
14 ‘Reciprocal Rights and Responsibilities in Parent Child Relations’, Diana Baumrind, Journal of Social Issues, 1978.
15 ‘The Blooming of Margaret Thatcher’, Gail Sheehy, Vanity Fair, June 1989.
16 Ibid.
17 Margaret Thatcher, Penny Junor (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1984).
18 TV Interview for Yorkshire TV, Woman to Woman (transcript): Margaret Thatcher and Dr Miriam Stoppard interview, 2 October 1985. (Thatcher Archive.)
19 The Thatcher Phenomenon, Hugo Young and Ann Sloman (BBC Books, 1986).
20 Margaret, Daughter of Beatrice, Leo Abse MP (Jonathan Cape, 1989).
21 Margaret Thatcher, Tricia Murray (Star, 1978).
22 The Iron Lady, John Campbell (Penguin, 2009).
23 Women in Power: The Personalities and Leadership Styles of Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, and Margaret Thatcher, Blema S. Steinberg (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008).
24 Margaret, Daughter of Beatrice, Leo Abse MP (Jonathan Cape, 1989).
25 Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage, Nicholas Wapshott (Penguin, 2007).
26 Margaret Thatcher, Penny Junor (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1984).
27 Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage, Nicholas Wapshott (Penguin, 2007).
28 Ibid.
29 The Path to Power, Margaret Thatcher (HarperCollins, 1996).
30 Margaret Thatcher, Penny Junor (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1984).
31 The Path to Power, Margaret Thatcher (HarperCollins, 1996).
32 Ibid.
33 Margaret Thatcher, Penny Junor (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1984).
34 Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage, Nicholas Wapshott (Penguin, 2007).
35 The Path to Power, Margaret Thatcher (HarperCollins, 1996).
36 Margaret, Daughter of Beatrice, Leo Abse MP (Jonathan Cape, 1989).
37 Margaret Thatcher, Penny Junor (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1984).
38 There is No Alternative, Claire Berlinski (Basic Books 2008).
39 The Path to Power, Margaret Thatcher (HarperCollins, 1996).
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid.
42 Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage, Nicholas Wapshott (Penguin, 2007).
43 The Path to Power, Margaret Thatcher (HarperCollins, 1996).
44 ‘Thatcher and the Jews’, Charles C. Johnson, Tablet, 28 December 2011.
45 Margaret Thatcher, Penny Junor (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1984).
46 Margaret, Daughter of Beatrice, Leo Abse MP (Jonathan Cape, 1989).
47 Margaret Thatcher, Penny Junor (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1984).
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid.
51 Maggie, Chris Ogden (Simon & Schuster, April 1990).
52 Margaret Thatcher, Penny Junor (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1984).
53 ‘The Blooming of Margaret Thatcher’, Gail Sheehy, Vanity Fair, June 1989.
54 Women in Power: The Personalities and Leadership Styles of Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, and Margaret Thatcher, Blema S. Steinberg (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008).
55 The Iron Lady, Hugo Young (Noonday Press, November 1990).
56 Margaret Thatcher, Penny Junor (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1984).
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid.
59 ‘The Blooming of Margaret Thatcher’, Gail Sheehy, Vanity Fair, June 1989.
60 Ibid.
61 Margaret Thatcher, Penny Junor (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1984).
62 Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage, Nicholas Wapshott (Penguin, 2007).
63 Ibid.
64 The Path to Power, Margaret Thatcher (HarperCollins, 1996).
65 Ibid.
66 Margaret Thatcher, Penny Junor (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1984).
67 Ibid.
68 Ibid.
69 Ibid.
70 ‘The Blooming of Margaret Thatcher’, Gail Sheehy, Vanity Fair, June 1989.
71 Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage, Nicholas Wapshott (Penguin, 2007).
72 Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality, Jonathan Aitken (Bloomsbury, 2013).
73 Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography (Volume One), Charles Moore (Allen Lane, 2013).
74 Ibid.
75 Ibid.
76 Margaret Thatcher, Penny Junor (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1984).
77 Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality, Jonathan Aitken (Bloomsbury, 2013).
78 ‘The Blooming of Margaret Thatcher’, Gail Sheehy, Vanity Fair, June 1989.
79 Margaret, Daughter of Beatrice, Leo Abse MP (Jonathan Cape, 1989).
80 There is No Alternative, Claire Berlinski (Basic Books, 2008).
81 The Path to Power, Margaret Thatcher (HarperCollins, 1996).
82 There is No Alternative, Claire Berlinski (Basic Books, 2008).
83 Interview, Cecil Parkinson, 2013.
84 Interview, Edwina Currie, 2013.
85 Interview, Cecil Parkinson, 2013.
86 Author’s correspondence with Sir Bernard Ingham, 2013.
87 Margaret Thatcher, Tricia Murray (Star, 1978).
88 Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality, Jonathan Aitken (Bloomsbury, 2013).
89 Sir Denis Thatcher Bt. Obituary, Daily Telegraph, 27 June 2003.
90 Margaret Thatcher, Penny Junor (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1984).
91 ‘The Blooming of Margaret Thatcher’, Gail Sheehy, Vanity Fair, June 1989.
92 There is No Alternative, Claire Berlinski (Basic Books, 2008).
93 Bang! A History of Britain in the 1980s, Graham Stewart (Atlantic Books, 2013).
94 Memories of Margaret Thatcher, Iain Dale (Ed.) (Biteback Publishing, 2013).
95 Eminent Elizabethans, Piers Brendon (Jonathan Cape, 2012).
96 The Path to Power, Margaret Thatcher (HarperCollins, 1996).
97 Eminent Elizabethans, Piers Brendon (Jonathan Cape, 2012).
98 Women in Power: The Personalities and Leadership Styles of Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, and Margaret Thatcher, Blema S. Steinberg (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008).
99 Interview, Edwina Currie, 2013.
100 Eminent Elizabethans, Piers Brendon (Jonathan Cape, 2012).
101 Ibid.
102 There is No Alternative, Claire Berlinski (Basic Books, 2008).
103 Interview, Edwina Currie, 2013.
104 Interview, Tim Bell, 2013.
105 Maggie, Chris Ogden (Simon & Schuster, 1990).
106 The Iron Lady, John Campbell (Penguin, 2009).
107 Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality, Jonathan Aitken (Bloomsbury, 2013).
108 Shirley Williams interview, The Downing Street Years, BBC.
109 Margaret Thatcher, Penny Junor (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1984).
110 Women in Power: The Personalities and Leadership Styles of Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, and Margaret Thatcher, Blema S. Steinberg (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008).
111 BBC Website: UK Confidential, 1 January 2001.
112 Interview, Lord Carrington, 2013.
113 Margaret Thatcher, Penny Junor (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1984).
114 Interview, Lord Carrington, 2013.
115 Ibid.
116 Not for Turning, Robin Harris (Bantam Press, 2013).
117 Times ‘Diary’, 11 September 1974.
118 Interview, Edwina Currie, 2013.
119 Not for Turning, Robin Harris (Bantam Press, 2013).
120 Interview, Edwina Currie, 2013.
121 ‘The Blooming of Margaret Thatcher’, Gail Sheehy, Vanity Fair, June 1989.
122 ‘How Maggie Thatcher Was Remade’, Patrick Sawer, Daily Telegraph, 8 January 2012.
123 Not for Turning, Robin Harris (Bantam Press, 2013).
124 Eminent Elizabethans, Piers Brendon (Jonathan Cape, 2012).
125 Not for Turning, Robin Harris (Bantam Press, 2013).
126 Eminent Elizabethans, Piers Brendon (Jonathan Cape, 2012).
127 Not for Turning, Robin Harris (Bantam Press, 2013).
128 ‘The Blooming of Margaret Thatcher’, Gail Sheehy, Vanity Fair, June 1989.
129 The Castle Diaries 1964–1976, Barbara Castle (Macmillan, 1990).
130 Party Political Broadcast, 5 March 1975.
131 Not for Turning, Robin Harris (Bantam Press, 2013).
132 The Path to Power, Margaret Thatcher (HarperCollins, 1996).
133 Women in Power: The Personalities and Leadership Styles of Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, and Margaret Thatcher, Blema S. Steinberg (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008).
134 Interview, Tim Bell, 2013.
135 Eminent Elizabethans, Piers Brendon (Jonathan Cape, 2012).
136 Thatcher’s Britain, Richard Vinen (Simon & Schuster, 2009).
137 The Writing on the Wall: Britain in the Seventies, Phillip Whitehead (Michael Joseph, 1985).
138 Elizabeth, the Queen, Sally Bedell Smith (Penguin Books, 2012).
139 The Iron Lady, Hugo Young (Noonday Press, November, 1990).
140 Interview, Tim Bell, 2013.
141 Eminent Elizabethans, Piers Brendon (Jonathan Cape, 2012).
142 Interview, Cecil Parkinson, 2013.
143 ‘Peasants’ Uprising or Religious War? Re-Examining the 1975 Conservative Leadership Contest’, Philip Cowley and Matthew Bailey, British Journal of Political Science, 2000.
144 Eminent Elizabethans, Piers Brendon (Jonathan Cape, 2012).
145 Thatcher’s Britain, Richard Vinen (Simon & Schuster, 2009).
146 Interview, Edwina Currie, 2013.
147 Interview, Cecil Parkinson, 2013.
148 Interview, Lord Carrington, 2013.
149 Interview, Tim Bell, 2013.
150 Eminent Elizabethans, Piers Brendon (Jonathan Cape, 2012).
151 Ibid.
152 Below the Parapet, Carol Thatcher (HarperCollins, 1997).
153 Margaret Thatcher, Penny Junor (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1984).
154 Not for Turning, Robin Harris (Bantam Press, 2013).
155 Elizabeth, the Queen, Sally Bedell Smith (Penguin Books, 2012).
156 Article by Quentin Letts, Daily Mail, 9 April 2013.
157 The Iron Lady, John Campbell (Penguin, 2009).
158 Article by Quentin Letts, Daily Mail, 9 April 2013.
159 Daily Mail, 27 April 2004.
160 Article by Quentin Letts, Daily Mail, 9 April 2013.