Biographical Dictionary of British Prime Ministers

Robert Eccleshall, Graham Walker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134662302
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Biographical Dictionary of British Prime Ministers is a wide-ranging, comprehensive guide to the political lives of Britain's prime ministers from Sir Robert Walpole to Tony Blair. Written by some of the leading authorities on British politics this authoritative dictionary provides essential information about each premiership, including facts and analytical debate.
Each entry has been written to the same formula and contains:
* brief biographical information outlining career history and significant dates and events
* a brief summary of the significance and peculiarities of a particular prime minister followed by a more descriptive and interpretative account of his or her political life and impact on British politics
* references and further reading.
The Biographical Dictionary of British Prime Ministers addresses many of the key themes to understanding the role and impact of particular prime ministers such as: the political context; party management and reform; intra-party intellectual debate; and where relevant the evolution of the office of prime minister.

Margaret Hilda Thatcher (née Roberts), Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven

Born 13 October 1925, younger daughter of Alfred Roberts and Beatrice Stephenson. Educated at Kesteven and Grantham Girls Grammar School and Somerville College, Oxford. Married 1951 Denis Thatcher. MP for Finchley 1959– 92. Joint Parliamentary Secretary, Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance 1960–4; Secretary of State for Education and Science 1970–4; Leader of the Opposition 1975–9; Prime Minister 1979–90. Left Commons 1992, ennobled (hereditary peerage) the same year.

Thatcher’s premiership was remarkable by any standards. She was the first female prime minister in Britain, holding office without interruption for longer than anyone since Liverpool. She was the first serving prime minister to be removed by a ballot of her MPs. She was the only twentieth-century party leader to give her name to what was an ideology—affirming the virtues of limited but firm government—and also a project to rescue Britain from post-war collectivism. According to conventional wisdom Conservative prime ministers travel unencumbered by excessive ideological baggage and without a strong sense of direction: their task is to keep the ship of state bobbing along rather than navigating it—as socialists purportedly wish to do—towards beguiling horizons. But in pursuit of her mission to unravel the corporate state Thatcher displayed an evangelical fervour not seen since Gladstone’s time. With the possible exception of Lloyd George— another formidable outsider who reached the top unaided by a charmed circle of party elders—she was the most combative premier of the twentieth century, despising the ‘fudge and mudge’ of consensus and compromise, believing that a leader’s objectives can best be secured, inside and outside the cabinet, by robust argument and by the ruthless treatment of those enemies, within and without the country, liable to obstruct the march to national recovery. Her natural element appeared to be the politics of warfare, and in the struggle to make Britain great again she was often accused of being humourless, dogmatic and imperious: an impatient workaholic who was sometimes fractious and irritable, and unfailingly fussy, brisk and emphatic. Attlee, the only other twentieth-century prime minister to preside over the installation of a mighty political project—the planned, welfare economy which she was so determined to dismantle—was reserved and conciliatory. She was unflinching in her convictions, apparently relishing skirmishes with those she considered to be either spineless or not clearly ‘one of us’ in the task of restoring to Britain the riches and splendour of a glorious past, and conveying the impression that she wanted to manage everybody and everything.

Ironically, however, she did not invariably rush to embrace policies which others considered necessary to renew the enterprise culture and buccaneering spirit of what she liked to call ‘this island race’. There is some plausibility in the view that the Thatcherite agenda was a set of transparent policy initiatives driven for eleven years by a consistent strategy that had been largely set in place during the years in opposition following her election as party leader. Yet Thatcher, who was not without a sense of statecraft, was sometimes more cautious than other free-marketeers eager to proceed with the permanent revolution; ministers such as Nigel Lawson later complained that the Thatcherite project hit the rocks because of her willingness to dilute sound measures in a misguided calculation of expediency. Some who remained loyal to her, by contrast, intimated that she was less than courageous in retaining in cabinet those such as Lawson whose eventual departure from the project contributed to her downfall.

Caution and timidity were not characteristics associated with Thatcher in the public perception, however, and her dominant personality and ideological zeal provoked passionate responses. People tended to adore or loathe her. For her admirers she fulfilled Callaghan’s prediction, made during the 1979 general election campaign, of an impending ‘sea-change in politics’ by turning the tide of national decline; and they acclaimed her as a heroine whose stance as the ‘iron lady’, battling against East European communism and the federalist drift of the European Community, had given the country a place on the world stage not enjoyed since the Second World War. Indeed the ‘warrior-queen’ liked to think of herself as the heir to Churchill, with whom she shared a romantic view of Britain as a mighty nation which in stirring historical moments had been rescued from nemesis by the sturdiness of its people and the determination of its leaders. Many on the right, among them academics, reckoned that she had outpaced even Churchill to become ‘the greatest British leader of the twentieth century’ (Charmley 1996:197). For her detractors, within the Conservative party and beyond, she was a heartless virago whose blinkered adherence to free-enterprise nostrums split the country into the two nations of rich and poor lamented by Disraeli in his novel Sybil, and whose strident pursuit of a misconceived national interest left Britain isolated and derided abroad.

Thatcher’s legacy is ambiguous. Her counter-revolutionary project to restore to Britain the competitive spirit and international influence of the Victorian age revived a sense that the nation could be steered in a purposive direction instead of being buffeted by the storms of economic vicissitude and the demands of sectional interests. Political scientists no longer lamented, as they were prone to do during the Heath and Callaghan administrations, that the country had become ungovernable, and Thatcher won sneaking admiration from some on the left who by no means shared her distaste for collectivism. Yet her libertarian impulse to create ‘the first post-socialist society’ by curtailing the functions of government resulted, paradoxically, in a state that was more centralized and bureaucratic, and less tolerant of certain individual liberties, than the regime she inherited. And her confrontational demeanour, fundamentalist rhetoric and ultimate inability to reconcile the various groups within the broad church of Conservatism, left the party more divided than at any time since the repeal of the Corn Laws.

Not that it immediately collapsed after her political demise. Major’s unexpected victory in the general election of 1992 obscured the situation that Thatcher had brought about. But Major’s premiership, during which he presided over the fag-end of the Thatcherite agenda, revealed lingering wounds which some claimed— perhaps with a touch of hyperbole—signalled the party’s terminal decline. Peel was less ideologically vociferous than Thatcher. Yet for whatever reasons—stub-born refusal to compromise over matters of principle, increasing remoteness from many of the parliamentary party, lack of diplomacy— two commanding prime ministers bequeathed to their successors bickering, dispirited factions. It remains to be seen whether post-Thatcher Conservatives are quicker to re-form themselves into a strong organization with a unity of purpose than were their predecessors after the débâcle of 1846.

Thatcher was the younger daughter of a lower-middle-class family in the small Lincolnshire town of Grantham. Her father was a self-made grocer who owned the shop above which the family lived. Her mother was a former seamstress who helped in the business. From their disciplined, Sabbatarian home the two girls were expected to walk to chapel four times on a Sunday, and Margaret was encouraged to eschew trivial pursuits in favour of self-improvement through, for instance, piano lessons and attendance at lectures on current affairs. Her mother imparted the skills of running an efficient household and managing a hectic schedule. From her father she learned much more. Alfred Roberts, a local Independent councillor who became mayor of Grantham, was self-taught and a lay preacher steeped in the Methodist ethic of self-help and hard work, a man of simple but steadfast convictions, committed to public service, and staunchly patriotic. He introduced Margaret to the necessity of financial rectitude by teaching her to balance the shop’s accounts, and widened her horizons by bringing home library books about politics. Alderman Roberts, whom Margaret idolized, may not have been quite the pillar of civic respectability depicted in her speeches and memoirs. In 1937 Grantham residents were scandalized when they seemed to recognize some of their burghers in a farcical novel, written by a young journalist using the pseudonym Julian Pine, which exposed the corruption of small-town politics through regular character assassinations in the Weekly Probe. According to one story a local councillor, who happened to be a grocer, used his position as a committee chairman to ensure that the contract for floodlights in the town’s main street was given not to a firm making electric lamps, but to a gas company in which he owned shares. One evening, having neglected to draw the blinds, he induced a young female assistant to ‘serve behind the Counter in a rather Unusual Way and she Served readily because otherwise she feared she might lose her Job and then her widowed Mother who was dying of Consumption might Starve!’. The floodlight outside the shop went on, and

several House-Wives of the Lower Classes, whose faces were pressed against the Window coveting the Pork Pies they could not afford to Buy, saw Everything. So the Naughty Councillor was in more Senses than one Undone and he had to resign from the Town Council and go out of Business and finally he Hanged Himself with a pair of Woolworth’s braces in a Public Convenience.

(Anderson 1989:142).

There is no certainty that Alfred Roberts, who died in bed attended by his second wife, indulged in such naughtiness, though in the 1990s Grantham pensioners who had known him were still insisting that he was ‘a mean old bugger’ who exploited his employees, economically and sexually (Creasy 1997; Crick 1997; Nuthall 1997).

From the constellation of values acquired in this earnest household of thrifty endeavour Thatcher never wavered, though the moral absolutes of childhood were later fortified by the intellectual certainties of free-market economics. There, as she often announced when party leader, she learned about the sin of idleness, the need to pay your way and not get into debt, the importance of adhering to principle, and the imperative to love one’s country and respect the forces of law and order. These homespun verities were to underpin her affirmation of an enterprise society of low taxation which rewards individual achievement, where personal responsibility replaces dependence upon a morally enervating ‘nanny state’ of extensive welfare provision, and in which government acts firmly against social indiscipline while ensuring the nation’s prominence in the councils of the world. As prime minister she was not unhappy to be cast as a busy housewife operating on a grand scale, Britannia who in her struggle against collectivism was recovering the vanishing values of middle England.

Thatcher’s background gave her the ambition to succeed against the odds, and also immunized her against the noblesse oblige ethos of patrician Tories for whom high public expenditure is a legitimate means of safeguarding the lower classes from unemployment and indigence. From Kesteven and Grantham Girls Grammar School, a grant-aided institution where her father was a governor and she was known as ‘Snobby Roberts’, she went to Somerville College, Oxford, immediately joining the Conservative Association and eventually graduating with a second-class degree in Chemistry—which was to make her the first British prime minister with a university education in the physical sciences. She worked for a while in industrial and commercial chemistry, and in 1949 became the parliamentary candidate for Dartford, failing to win the seat in the general elections of 1950 and 1951. By now she was reading for the Bar, a more conventional route into politics than chemistry, and after passing her exams in 1953 was to practise for a few years as a tax lawyer.

The other boost to her political career was her marriage in 1951 to a man of substance whom she had met two years earlier on her adoption night at Dartford. Denis Thatcher, still bearing the scars of a failed wartime marriage, was ten years her senior and the managing director of a family business which manufactured paints and chemicals. During Thatcher’s premiership her consort, whose retirement coincided with her election as party leader, was lampooned in the press as an old buffer, cowering before the Boss, and made stupid by a concoction of gin and the racial and other prejudices of the English middle classes. Denis certainly startled guests at official functions by his blunt expression of antediluvian political opinions. But, as the affectionate memoir by his journalist daughter reveals, he provided an oasis of calm for his frenetic partner as well as having better insight into character (C.Thatcher 1996). Margaret was a poor judge of men—she tended to avoid the company of women and did little to promote their political careers—and often, having succumbed to the charms of her male colleagues, subsequently became disenchanted and withdrew her patronage. During her long reign many ministers were to leave the cabinet, a few because they could no longer tolerate her but most because they were dismissed, sometimes brutally. An early victim of her habit of continuously tinkering with her team—who was downgraded in her first shadow cabinet shift to make way for a more ardent free-marketeer, but was rehabilitated and held cabinet posts for much of the Thatcher decade—noted that no prime minister in ‘recent years used the reshuffle more regularly and methodically than Margaret Thatcher’ (Fowler 1991:84). One reason she failed to win enough votes in the leadership contest which brought about her downfall as prime minister was the number of disgruntled former courtiers eager to settle old scores. Denis, unimpressed by sycophants but loyal to his friends, was a constant source of succour and sound advice. The Thatchers’ son— the twins Carol and Mark, who were born in 1953, were their only children— inherited few of his father’s qualities. In 1982 he was to terrify his doting mother and infuriate his father by disappearing for a week in a desert during a car rally. Later he embarrassed the whole family by involving himself in shady financial deals.

After four unsuccessful bids for a safer seat than Dartford, Thatcher was chosen in 1958 for the prized constituency of Finchley, entering parliament in the general election of the following year. Two years later she became parliamentary secretary at the Ministry of Pensions, and during the years of Conservative opposition moved through several junior posts until her promotion to the shadow cabinet, where eventually she had responsibility for education. As Secretary of State at the Department of Education and Science (DES) in the Heath administration from 1970 to 1974 she hectored obstructive civil servants, particularly as she considered the ethos of the DES to be ‘self-righteously socialist’ (M.Thatcher 1995: 166), campaigned for an extension of nursery education, fought—ironically, given her distaste for high public expenditure— with cabinet colleagues to increase her budget and, in a foretaste of the hostility she was to endure as prime minister, was demonized in the popular imagination as Mrs Thatcher, milk snatcher for abolishing free milk for primary schoolchildren above the age of 7. Through these thirteen years she assiduously attended to the details of her various portfolios, only rarely raising her head above the parapet to make the odd speech attacking what were to become the bête-noire of Thatcherism, the evils of big government and consensus politics. She was a competent, diligent, reliable and loyal—if sometimes infuriating—politician of the middle rank. There was nothing to indicate that she would soon be pushed up the greasy pole by a ‘peasants’ revolt’.

The revolt consisted in the decision of Conservative backbenchers in 1975 to abandon Heath, partly because of his curmudgeonly and unclubbable style but largely as revenge for him losing the two general elections of the previous year. Two years into office the Heath administration, which had pledged to trim the state, abandoned its ‘quiet revolution’ by supporting ailing industries and implementing a comprehensive prices and incomes policy. A few weeks after the first general election defeat of 1974, Sir Keith Joseph who—like Thatcher—had been a loyal and high-spending minister in Heath’s government, announced his conversion to ‘authentic’ conservatism, and established the Centre for Policy Studies with the intention of reformulating the party’s strategy and changing the ‘climate of public opinion’. Joseph, a tormented intellectual prone to recant past errors, had begun to devour the writings of free-market gurus such as Milton Friedman and F.A.Hayek, and was struck by the latter’s claim, in a book published in 1944, that there could be no sanctuary between unbridled capitalism and communist regimentation: for Hayek Keynesian-style techniques of economic demand-management were irretrievable steps along The Road to Serfdom. The Heath administration had been compelled to make its ignominious U-turn down this road, Joseph concluded, because of the ‘ratchet effect’ of post-war collectivism which burdened successive governments with increasingly impossible demands. Consensus politics placed upon government the intolerable responsibility of guaranteeing full employment and rising living standards by means of economic fine-tuning and redistributive taxation. In consequence Britain had become a ‘totalitarian slum’ of excessive bureaucracy and economic and moral stagnation (Joseph 1976:79). Entrepreneurial endeavour had been stifled by misguided attempts to regulate competition as well as by crippling levels of direct taxation; trade unions had become so powerful that at the end of the Heath administration the miners had made the nation ungovernable; and the poor were trapped in a stranglehold of welfare dependency that sapped any incentive to self-improvement. The solution lay in reducing the state to its proper functions of maintaining the rule of law and a stable currency, leaving the distribution and generation of wealth to the spontaneous interaction of private individuals in pursuit of their varied interests. All this was Thatcherism in the making.

Thatcher signalled, albeit faintly, her disenchantment with consensus politics and approval of minimal statism by becoming vice-chairman of the Centre for Policy Studies in June 1974. It was Joseph, however, who strode into controversy with a series of speeches promulgating the new political creed, and his faithful lieutenant hoped that the mantle of party leadership would eventually pass to him. But the agonizing Joseph, to whom she was to dedicate her memoirs, was temperamentally unsuited for the post, and in an October speech crassly suggested that the ‘human stock’ was threatened by high birth-rates among those ‘least fitted to bring children into the world’: working-class mothers. Having been vilified in the press as a deranged eugenicist intent on solving the world’s problems with an ample supply of contraceptives, Joseph realized that he was unfit to challenge Heath. The following month Thatcher announced that she would do so, and having been recently switched from Environment to the post of deputy Shadow Chancellor she enhanced her reputation among Conservative MPs by some sinewy parliamentary performances. In the leadership election she campaigned on the need to rescue Britain from socialist mediocrity by recovering the values of her provincial childhood, and in the first ballot secured 130 votes as against 119 for Heath, who then withdrew from the contest. In the second ballot, held a week later on 11 February 1975, she was challenged by latecomers ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Preface
• Robert Walpole, First Earl of Orford
• Spencer Compton, First Earl of Wilmington
• Henry Pelham
• Thomas Pelham-Holles, Duke of Newcastle
• William Cavendish, Fourth Duke of Devonshire
• John Stuart, Third Earl of Bute
• George Grenville
• Charles Watson-Wentworth, Second Marquess of Rockingham
• William Pitt, First Earl of Chatham
• Henry Fitzroy, Third Duke of Grafton
• Frederick North, styled Lord North 1752–90, Second Earl of Guilford
• William Petty, Second Earl of Shelburne
• William Henry Cavendish-Bentinck, Third Duke of Portland
• William Pitt ‘the Younger’
• Henry Addington, First Viscount Sidmouth
• William Wyndham Grenville, First Baron Grenville
• Spencer Perceval
• Robert Banks Jenkinson, Second Earl of Liverpool
• George Canning
• Frederick John Robinson, First Viscount Goderich, First Earl of Ripon
• Arthur Wellesley, First Duke of Wellington
• Charles Grey, Second Earl Grey of Howick
• William Lamb, Second Viscount Melbourne
• Robert Peel
• Lord John Russell, First Earl Russell
• Edward George Geoffrey Smith Stanley, Fourteenth Earl of Derby
• George Gordon (later Hamilton-Gordon), Fourth Earl of Aberdeen
• Henry John Temple, Third Viscount Palmerston
• Benjamin Disraeli, First Earl of Beaconsfield
• William Ewart Gladstone
• Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, Third Marquess of Salisbury
• Archibald Philip Primrose, Fifth Earl of Rosebery
• Arthur James Balfour, First Earl of Balfour
• Henry Campbell-Bannerman
• Herbert Henry Asquith, Earl of Oxford and Asquith
• David Lloyd George, First Earl of Dwyfor
• Andrew Bonar Law
• Stanley Baldwin, First Earl Baldwin of Bewdley
• (James) Ramsay MacDonald
• (Arthur) Neville Chamberlain
• Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill
• Clement Richard Attlee, First Earl of Prestwood
• (Robert) Anthony Eden, First Earl of Avon
• (Maurice) Harold Macmillan, First Earl of Stockton
• Alexander Frederick Douglas-Home, Lord Home of the Hirsel
• (James) Harold Wilson, Lord Wilson of Rievaulx
• Edward Richard George Heath
• (Leonard) James Callaghan, Lord Callaghan of Cardiff
• Margaret Hilda Thatcher (née Roberts), Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven
• John Major
• Anthony Charles Lynton Blair