Thatcher

Graham Goodlad

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317297246
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

Thatcher provides an accessible and scholarly introduction to the personality and career of Britain's first female political leader and the twentieth century's longest serving Prime Minister. Providing a balanced narrative and assessment of one of the most significant figures of the post-war era, this new biography examines the reasons why Margaret Thatcher has been admired by many as an architect of national revival, yet loathed by others as the author of widening social and geographical division.

The book begins by examining the making of Margaret Thatcher, her education, the beginning of her political career and her rise through the Conservative Party to her appointment as unexpected leader. Moving on to her tenure as Prime Minister, Graham Goodlad then examines her impact at home and abroad, covering her controversial economic policies and hard line with the trade unions, leadership through the Falklands conflict and during the last decade of the Cold War, and influence on Britain's relationship with a more closely integrated Europe. Finally, the biography closes with a review of Thatcher's legacy before and after her death in April 2013, and considers how far she shaped the politics and society of the 1980s and those of our own time.

Thatcher is essential reading for all students of twentieth-century history and politics.

1 From corner shop to cabinet room_ 1925–1970

DOI: 10.4324/9781315647180-2

Growing up above the shop

Few British Prime Ministers can compare with Margaret Thatcher in the intense significance that she ascribed to her formative years. Her rise to power was one of the least likely of the twentieth century. She was born above her parents’ corner shop in Grantham, an unremarkable market town in Lincolnshire, about a hundred miles north of London, on 13 October 1925. Her father, Alfred Roberts, was a self-educated grocer and sub-postmaster, whose own political career did not extend beyond participation in the affairs of the local town council. Thatcher certainly did not begin life with the social advantages which assisted those who led the Conservative Party in the years when she came to political maturity, in the era of Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan. The male-dominated political culture of the period of course made her ascent all the more remarkable. When she entered Parliament in 1959, only three women had ever sat in a British Cabinet and only one of these, Florence Horsbrugh, Minister of Education in 1951–4, was a Conservative.

At the same time it is important not to exaggerate the obstacles that stood in Thatcher’s way. The young Thatcher did not experience poverty as did, for example, the Labour Prime Minister whom she displaced in May 1979, James Callaghan, the son of a widowed mother in early twentieth-century Portsmouth. The Roberts family was higher in the pre-war social scale than that of Edward Heath, the man whom she was to supplant as leader of the Conservative Party in 1975, whose parents were a skilled carpenter and a former maid. Nor did the young Margaret Roberts know the economic insecurity suffered by another Labour leader whom she was to face across the floor of the House of Commons, Harold Wilson, whose industrial chemist father was unemployed during the slump of the 1930s. And, for all her championship of opportunity and social mobility, in old age she was privately to look down on her successor as Prime Minister, John Major, the ‘boy from Coldharbour Lane’¹ – a reference to his father’s descent from modest business success in Surrey to more straitened circumstances in Brixton.

Life in the Roberts household took its tone from the deeply ingrained values of its head. Alfred Roberts was an intensely active man, who extended his business interests with the purchase of a second shop in the town whilst also playing a part in local government. In 1943 he was chosen by his fellow councillors as an alderman, an office which has since disappeared but which carried considerable local distinction at the time. Two years later he served a term as mayor of Grantham. He did not dominate the borough in the manner of an urban political party ‘boss’, but he was without doubt a figure of some standing in his own community. He had accumulated his modest fortune through hard work and thrift, values whose importance he inculcated in his two daughters, Margaret and her elder sibling, Muriel. He imposed an austere life-style on them through deliberate choice rather than strict necessity. Their home lacked a garden, an indoor lavatory and even hot running water. Roberts’ wife, Beatrice, was an efficient and economical household manager, who made the girls’ clothes and was obsessive about cleanliness and tidiness. Holidays and outings were rare and there were few luxuries; the choice of films which the girls were allowed to see at the local cinema was strictly regulated and the family did not possess a radio for the first ten years of Margaret’s life. The emphasis was on learning and self-improvement, reinforced through regular borrowing of educational books from the local library, and on the avoidance of waste and frivolity. Roberts actively supported her education at the local girls’ grammar school, to which she won a scholarship at the early age of ten, helping her to develop a habit of intense study and an ability to think and to speak in public. Underpinning the Roberts family’s values of self-discipline, duty and denial was their membership of the Methodist Church. Roberts was a lay preacher and attendance at chapel at least twice every Sunday was an established feature of his daughters’ childhood routine.

Thatcher’s upbringing was suffused with an emphasis on individual effort and independence. In her memoirs she recalled seeing queues of jobless people during the economic downturn of the 1930s, either seeking work or claiming benefits. It was typical of the emphasis that she placed on self-reliance that she noted ‘how neatly turned out the children of those unemployed families were’ – a recollected detail which perhaps sounds coolly distant to modern ears. Yet she also noted the way in which, through their own efforts and the voluntary support provided by others, the unemployed remained part of the community.² The notion that victims of misfortune should look primarily to their families and neigh-bours for assistance, rather than to the state, was one to which the mature Thatcher would return.

A straightforward sense of justice underpinned the Roberts family’s view of international affairs. They were acutely conscious of the evils of the Hitler regime, and towards the end of the decade temporarily took in a teenage Jewish Austrian girl who had escaped from Nazi persecution. It seems likely that the seeds of Thatcher’s later suspicion of continental Europe were sown in the era of appeasement, and in the Second World War which soon followed. Unlike many of her male near-contemporaries, with whom she was to serve in Cabinet in the 1970s and 1980s, she was a witness rather than a participant in the military conflict of 1939–45. She responded to the patriotism of Churchill’s radio broadcasts, beginning a life-long devotion to Britain’s wartime leader. In later life she would habitually refer to him as ‘Winston’, even though she was never personally acquainted with the great man. She also came to see the Atlantic relationship as the key to Britain’s wartime survival and future security. The retired Conservative leader who was to embarrass her successors by writing in 2002 that ‘during my lifetime, most of the problems the world has faced have come … from mainland Europe, and the solutions from outside it’,³ was no doubt thinking of the traumatic period that she knew as a teenager.

The adult Margaret Thatcher was deeply ambivalent about her childhood. She seems to have had limited rapport as a young adult with her mother. Certainly she spoke respectfully in later years of Beatrice’s abilities as a homemaker, and she learned from her a number of practical skills of which she made use throughout her life. In later life her competence in a range of domestic tasks was part of her public persona, and it was noted that she continued to prepare her husband’s breakfast after they moved into Downing Street. It is impossible to imagine any other Prime Minister, for example, sewing on a button for a policeman on guard duty at Number 10. The truth, however, was – as she acknowledged in later life – that as her own horizons broadened, she had less and less in common with her mother.

It was with her father that Thatcher had the more important bond. Some writers have speculated that Alfred Roberts focused his ambitions on his younger daughter as a substitute for the son he never had. From him she developed her earliest awareness of politics and her party loyalties. Following the convention of the time, which tended to keep party labels out of local government, he stood as an independent councillor rather than a Conservative. There can be little doubt, however, that he was a man of the political right. One of his foremost concerns was to keep the rates – the local taxes then paid by householders – as low as possible. It was the socialist group on the council which removed the rank of alderman from him nine years after his elevation, in a party political manoeuvre which caused his daughter great distress. When Margaret Roberts was adopted as the party’s parliamentary candidate for Dartford in Kent, in February 1949, her father addressed the local Conservative worthies alongside his daughter. In his speech he declared that although his family had traditionally been Liberals, he now felt that the Conservative Party stood for much the same things as the Liberal Party of his youth. Such a transition was not unusual for middle-class Methodists and members of other nonconformist denominations in the interwar years, as the old Liberal Party both adopted increasingly collectivist social policies and continued to decline as a political force, opening up an opportunity for the Conservative Party to attract many of its supporters.

As a major political figure in the 1970s, Thatcher made much of her father’s example when asked about her fundamental values. So well established was the popular image of the late Alderman Roberts that, as she entered Downing Street after winning the May 1979 general election, more than nine years after his death, a reporter asked Thatcher for her thoughts ‘about Mrs Pankhurst and your own mentor in political life – your own father’. Britain’s first female Prime Minister sidestepped the reference to the celebrated leader of the pre-1914 campaign for women’s voting rights, characteristically declining to be identified with any individual or organisation associated with feminism. Yet she answered without hesitation that ‘I just owe almost everything to my own father…. He brought me up to believe all the things that I do believe…. And it’s passionately interesting for me that the things that I learned in a small town, in a very modest home, are just the things that I believe have won the election.’⁴ In another interview, a few months before the 1983 election, she cited her father’s belief in rugged individualism when challenged that her gov ernment showed insufficient compassion. ‘Of course we have basic social services, we will continue to have those,’ she assured her listeners, ‘but equally compassion depends upon what you and I, as an individual, are prepared to do. I remember my father telling me that at a very early age.’⁵ Two years later Thatcher gave a fuller picture of her father’s influence in an interview of a more personal kind. The dominant theme which emerged was of a parent who encouraged his daughter to stand up for what she believed in, without regard for the opinions of others: ‘You first sort out what you believe in. You then apply it. You then must argue your case, but you do not say, “Well I am going to do it because someone else did it!” and always you do not compromise on things that matter.’⁶

The influence of Thatcher’s father can be overstated. As she emerged into adulthood, she rebelled against the more restrictive aspects of her upbringing. She developed a taste for elegant clothes and, although work always remained her firm priority, she enjoyed parties and dancing. After her marriage she adopted her husband’s Anglican faith, moving away from the Methodism of her youth. The hymns and readings used at Thatcher’s funeral, which she had carefully chosen, reflected the personal tastes of someone who had come to love the traditional language of the services of the Church of England. She rarely returned to Grantham, and it is telling that her children did not have strong memories of their maternal grandparents. On one occasion she failed to remember the date of her father’s death, inaccurately thinking that he had lived to see her appointment to Edward Heath’s Cabinet in June 1970, whereas in fact he had died four months earlier. It appears that she attended his funeral service at Grantham but, oddly for a close family member, was not actually present at the subsequent cremation. Her official biographer excuses this absence on the grounds that she had to return to London in readiness for the next day’s official engagements. He also points out that she had visited her father during his final illness, though it turns out that she stopped off en route to a meeting in Scotland, rather than making a purpose journey to the family home.⁷ To make mention of this is not to condemn. It is not unusual for children to grow apart from their parents as a result of the new opportunities brought by education and a career. In any case to fit in regular visits home, whilst working and managing family responsibilities at a distance, is a challenge to even the most devoted offspring. At the same time, it does not suggest a great enduring personal closeness between father and adult daughter.

From Grantham to Oxford

Where Thatcher’s background did have a genuinely important impact was in the way that it instilled notions of industry and ambition which stayed with her throughout her career. Her extraordinary capacity to focus on the task in hand; her insistence on being better briefed on any topic than her colleagues or opponents; her inability properly to relax – holidays seem to have induced a restless desire to return to work – all of this can be traced back to her early years and the example of Alfred Roberts. At school she demonstrated a high level of application and a consistently serious approach to everything, earning a reputation for asking penetrating questions of visiting speakers from a relatively early age. Drive and determination manifested themselves again in her desire to win a place at Oxford University so that, in the autumn of 1943, she became the first member of her family to go on to higher education. In preparing for entry she displayed early evidence of her readiness to defy others in pursuit of an objective on which she had decided. She refused to be discouraged by the rather negative attitude of her school’s headmistress, Miss Gillies, who – for reasons which have never fully been explained – was unwilling to support her application. Perhaps Miss Gillies wanted to take her thrusting young pupil down a peg or two; or she may have genuinely doubted her readiness for the rigours of the Oxford entrance process. One of the key requirements was knowledge of Latin, which Margaret Roberts acquired through coaching outside school. A less attractive side of her personality manifested itself many years later, when she publicly corrected the headmistress’ use of Latin on a visit to the school as a recently elected MP. She was not a person who readily forgave or sought reconciliation with a former adversary.

Oxford took the young Margaret Roberts into a world far removed from the one in which she had grown up. It was not one in which she was particularly happy. Although she had rubbed shoulders with local grandees at civic events in Grantham, and her father was distantly acquainted with Lord Brownlow, a prominent Lincolnshire landed magnate, she was socially ill at ease with the more privileged members of the university. She was alienated from the prevailing politically liberal attitudes of the Oxford establishment. Nor did she possess the financial resources and personal contacts which provided easy access into the social world of the university. Her gender was, at that time, another obstacle to full participation in its activities. The prestigious debating society, the Oxford Union, was still closed to women. In time, however, she came to enjoy herself to some extent. We now know that at Oxford she had her first serious boyfriend, army cadet Tony Bray. Academically Margaret Roberts was able but not outstanding, gaining a respectable second class degree in her chosen discipline, chemistry. She graduated in the summer of 1947 after taking a fourth year to carry out a research project. Yet the subject did not enthuse her. She had opted for it because she was good at it at school, and after university it provided a means of earning her living – first in a plastics firm in Essex and then in the research department of the catering company, J Lyons, testing cake fillings and ice cream. Whilst still at Oxford her mind was turning towards studying for a degree in law, which would be a more appropriate preparation for her real career.

Outside her academic studies, Margaret Roberts’ energies were mainly absorbed by membership of the Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA). Her sex was no barrier to advancement in university politics. By applying herself diligently to the administrative work of the association, in her final year at Oxford she became the third woman to serve as its president. OUCA by no means provided an automatic entry into national politics, but it did give Margaret Roberts valuable experience of arranging meetings and of ‘networking’ with well-known Conservative politicians, who visited the university as guest speakers. The circumstances in which she first decided to seek selection as an MP are unclear. She seems to have first admitted that this was her ambition when the subject came up at a social gathering at a Lincolnshire friend’s house, late in 1944. At the time this must have seemed a distant and somewhat implausible dream for someone of her background. The following summer, in the runup to the general election which was to bring Clement Attlee’s Labour Party to power with a crushing 146-seat majority, she delivered her first recorded political speech, on behalf of the Conservative candidate in Grantham. There is no evidence that the nineteen year old Margaret Roberts had in any way been touched by the leftward shift in public opinion during the Second World War. Like most Conservative supporters she was unmoved by the growing national demand for improved welfare services and greater social justice, which paved the way for the Labour landslide. She shared the dismay of other Conse...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chronology
• Introduction
• 1 From corner shop to cabinet room: 1925–1970
• 2 The unexpected leader: 1970–1979
• 3 The challenges of office: 1979–1982
• 4 Post-imperial fall-out – Rhodesia, the Falklands and Hong Kong: 1979–1984
• 5 Establishing supremacy: 1982–1985
• 6 Pinnacle of power: 1985–1988
• 7 The troubled Union – Northern Ireland: 1979–1990
• 8 Between the superpowers: 1979–1990
• 9 Building and resisting European union: 1979–1990
• 10 Decline and fall: 1988–1990
• 11 Life after political death: 1990–2013
• 12 The Thatcher legacy
• Further reading
• Index