The brilliance may have owed some of its sparkle to being the equivalent of ‘preaching to the choir’. It consisted mainly of a trenchant attack on the Labour government’s economic policies expressed in language that was both simple and super-patriotic: ‘The Government should do what any good housewife would do if money was short – look at their accounts and see what was wrong’, declared the candidate. Furthermore, ‘If the Socialists continued with their disastrous policy, unemployment and other evils would result and the working people would suffer’.16
This message of thrift and anti-socialism must have gone down well with the person in the audience whose presence meant most to the candidate – Alfred Roberts. It was the first time father and daughter had spoken from the same platform. Their dynastic duet was emotionally moving and politically astute. At a time when the party leader, Winston Churchill, was wooing the Liberal vote, Alfred testified that his family had always been Liberal but it was now the Conservatives who stood for the old Liberalism.17
One other listener in the hall destined to become a dynastic pillar in the family life of Margaret Roberts was Denis Thatcher. He warmly applauded the new candidate’s anti-socialist rhetoric, and congratulated her on it after the meeting. They had an opportunity to talk at a supper party after the adoption given by staunch Tory supporters Mr and Mrs Stanley Soward. He worked in the constituency for the Atlas Preservative Company of Erith and had invited along his managing director, Denis Thatcher.
Denis was well liked by the staff of his family business. They called him ‘The Major’ on account of his war record. But he was a shy man, particularly in the company of women. So it was a surprise when towards the end of the evening Denis asked the candidate, ‘Miss Roberts, how are you going to get home?’18
The offer of a lift was useful because the newly adopted candidate could not afford a car. In those days, there was no Dartford Tunnel connecting Kent and Essex. The only way she could cross the Thames and get back to her flat in Colchester was by returning to central London, then taking a train on the north side of the river. So when Denis Thatcher said he would be glad to drive her to Liverpool Street Station, he solved her difficult late-night transport problem.
The solution took longer than either of them expected, because by the time they reached Liverpool Street Station, all the trains to Colchester had gone. She had to wait for the early morning milk train, which departed at 3.40 a.m. Denis gallantly kept her company until this hour. He may have been personally interested in her, since he had been invited to the adoption meeting by his friend, Stanley Soward, with the words: ‘Come to dinner: I want you to meet a very pretty girl.’19 Unfortunately for him, the pretty girl, now revealed as the new candidate, did not reciprocate Denis Thatcher’s stirrings of interest. As she described the scene in a letter to Muriel: ‘A Major Thatcher, who has a flat in London (age about 36, plenty of money), was also dining with them, and he drove me back to town at midnight. Not a very attractive creature – very reserved but quite nice.’20
Denis took a more favourable view of his passenger. Years afterwards, he was asked by the wife of a rugby-playing friend what he had first found attractive about Margaret. He replied, ‘Several things; she’s got a good pair of legs’.21
THREE MEN ON A STRING
Her good legs became energetic legs as Margaret Roberts buckled down to the task of nursing the Dartford constituency. But away from her public duties of canvassing and addressing meetings she was also showing her paces in a private life of some complexity. During the period 1949–51 she dated three different men at the same time, carefully considering marriage to each one of them. This trio of potential bridegrooms were a Scottish farmer, a distinguished surgeon and Denis Thatcher. The way Margaret Roberts handled them showed that she could be both manipulative and mixed up in her relationships.
The Scottish farmer was Willie Cullen. He met and fancied Margaret but ended up marrying her sister Muriel. The manoeuvring and matchmaking behind the plot of this Roberts girls’ operetta was complicated.
Willie Cullen was a thirty-four-year-old Scotsman who had come south to buy a farm in Essex, Foulton Hall. He met Margaret at a Conservative event in Colchester, fell for her and pursued her with dinner invitations, visits to the theatre and presents such as chocolates and nylons, some of which he delivered in person to her office at BX Plastics. Soon after she had been his date and dancing partner at the Colchester Caledonian Ball in the town hall, Margaret wrote to Muriel: ‘He [Willie] is awfully sweet; I am getting quite fond of him, and a very welcome relaxation.’22
The fondness ripened into many more dates, dinners, movies, gifts of perfume and visits to the races. Margaret took him seriously but not seriously enough to make him her husband. After she had stayed at Willie’s farm near Foulton, she came to the conclusion that he would make a better match for her sister than for herself.
Muriel had recently broken up with her boyfriend, and this was the catalyst for Margaret to start playing Cupid. She did it with considerable skill. Muriel was invited down to Essex. Meetings with Willie Cullen were subtly engineered. He was encouraged to, and did, like the older of the two Miss Robertses. His preference stayed firmly for Margaret, but it gradually became clear that she was transferring his affection away from herself. ‘Though very fond of him, I am not in love with him,’ she wrote to Muriel, ‘and a marriage between us would falter after 2 or 3 months. We have completely different outlooks, and quite different sorts of friends. While I get on all right with his, he would feel out of water with mine.’23
This was Margaret’s way of leaving the water clear for Muriel. Willie Cullen jumped, or was pushed, into it. He married Muriel in April 1950, and they lived happily ever after. The tale may well have been more tangled than either privacy-loving sister let on. Throughout it, Margaret called the shots. She probably knew in her heart of hearts that she could not settle down as a farmer’s wife, so she created a clever vacuum in order to do her sister a good turn. This was partly because Margaret had bigger and better fish to fry.
The surgeon, a big fish in his profession, was Robert Henderson, a forty-seven-year-old bachelor who had invented the iron lung for polio patients, and been awarded a CBE for services to medicine. He met Margaret towards the end of 1949 when he was medical superintendent of the 1700-bed Southern Hospital in Dartford. Despite the twenty-four-year age gap between them, the doctor and the candidate hit it off romantically. Robert took her to parties, dinners, drives around the Weald of Kent and to Eastbourne for the weekend. There are several clues in Margaret’s letters from this period that his courtship was making him her favourite suitor.
Denis Thatcher, however, had not faded out of her life. After their drive on the night of her adoption to Liverpool Street Station, the ‘perfect gentleman’ who she had not found very attractive continued to keep in touch. He took her on a series of dates to the Royal Tournament, the Festival of Britain, the National Paint Federation dinner and to a West End play His Excellency. At first Margaret pretended that she was not giving him much encouragement. ‘I can’t say I really ever enjoy going out for the evening with him’, she wrote to Muriel, after the play. ‘He has not got a very prepossessing personality.’24
Either she was dissembling about her feelings, or somewhere along the line she changed her mind. For in early 1950, one of Denis’s close friends, David Roe, unexpectedly dropped into the Thatcher bachelor flat in Chelsea. ‘I was very surprised to find that we were greeted by a lovely smiley girl’, recalled Roe. ‘Denis introduced us, and she soon disappeared into the kitchen while he and I sat talking for a few minutes. When she came back she brought some tea and sat on the floor, joining in the conversation … Her name was Margaret Roberts’.25
The impression created by this story is that Margaret and Denis were behaving, if not living together, as a couple. Yet this was at the same time when she was also going out with Robert Henderson, apparently with rather more enthusiasm. Some might call it playing the field, hedging her
bets or even two-timing. There was certainly rather more to the private life of the demure Miss Roberts than met the eye. But public life was always her first priority.
THE GENERAL ELECTION OF 1950
For an ambitious newcomer to politics, a first election campaign can be as passionate an affair as a first love. Margaret Roberts launched her campaign in the general election with two fiery slogans: ‘Vote Right to Keep What’s Left’ and ‘Stop the Rot: Sack the Lot’. She had no truck with the message transmitted by many Tory candidates, including Edward Heath in Bexley, that some of Labour’s reforms such as nationalisation and heavy public spending on welfare were there to stay as part of the new post-war consensus.
In her opening campaign speech at the meeting on 3 February to adopt her as the Conservative parliamentary candidate, Margaret Roberts described the election as ‘a battle between two ways of life, one which led inevitably to slavery and the other to freedom’.26
Her three-week campaign proved an exhilarating but exhausting experience. Like many a new candidate she had not learned to pace herself, but her youth, her passion and her adrenalin kept her going. In those pre-television days, an energetic candidate was expected to speak at two or three public meetings every night. Hers were astonishingly well attended, with the doors sometimes having to be closed a quarter of an hour before the start time because the hall was full. The atmosphere could be electric, with noisy clashes between supporters and opponents. At one early meeting in Crayford, a Labour heckler shouted: ‘What have you got that we haven’t?’ A Tory yelled back, ‘Brains!’27
The retort was appropriate because the intellectual and physical qualities of Margaret Roberts were getting noticed. The national press – the Daily Mail, the Daily Graphic, the Evening Standard and the Illustrated London News – gave her favourable coverage as the youngest woman Conservative candidate in the country with well-planned photo opportunities. The Daily Mail ran a picture of her behind the bar pulling pints in a Dartford working men’s club.28 The Sunday People gave her the tabloid treatment, headlining her as the ‘Election Glamour Girl’, and declaring: ‘She is young – only 24 – and she is beautiful. Lovely fair hair and beautiful blue eyes … By the way she’s got brains as well.’29
Although Margaret Roberts had a showman’s touch when it came to attracting column inches in the newspapers, her self-presentation to the electorate was serious. For daytime campaigning she dressed in a tailored dark suit and a feathery black hat trimmed with blue ribbon. For evening events she wore a black velvet dress. Many of her policy warnings from the platform were sombre. Her recurrent theme was that Britain was losing its influence in the world and its economic strength at home because of socialist failures. At the start of her campaign she wrote a 1,500-word article for the Gravesend and Dartford Reporter in which she set out her stall in a series of rhetorical questions followed by the line, ‘YOU will decide’.30
One of her strongest demands, to be repeated with similar consistency when she became Prime Minister in 1979, was for sound public finances. As she put it in her 1950 article:
Are YOU going to let this proud island race, who at one time would never accept charity, drift on from crisis to crisis under a further spell of shaky Socialist finance? Or do you believe in sound finance and economical spending of public money, such as the Conservatives will adopt? YOU will decide.31
As the campaign reached its third week, the Dartford Chronicle thought they could scent a surprise upset in the constituency. Margaret Roberts herself entered the familiar fantasy land of young candidates fighting hopeless seats, and began to believe that she might actually win. ‘We really thought that we might conceivably do it’, she told one of her earliest biographers, Tricia Murray.32
Older heads at Conservative Central Office had no such illusions, but were impressed by the campaigning efforts of the Dartford candidate.
‘I do not think there is a hundredth chance of winning the seat,’ wrote Beryl Cook, Conservative Central Office Agent, Home Counties South East, ‘but I am quite sure the majority will be down with a bump. This will be an entirely personal triumph for Miss Roberts.’33 It was. She reduced the Labour majority by a third, cutting the majority of Norman Dodds MP from 19,714 to 13,638.#
Although this was an excellent result, there was a downside to it. Because both the Dartford and the national swing to the Conservatives had been so strong, and because the overall result of the general election was so close, it soon dawned on Margaret Roberts that it would be difficult for her to move on to a better constituency from what remained an unwinnable seat.
FRUSTRATION, CONSOLIDATION AND ENGAGEMENT
With a second general election expected within a year, Margaret Roberts had little alternative but to stick with Dartford. Politically this was frustrating, but emotionally the warmth of her party workers uplifted her. She felt a moral obligation not to abandon them, so she consented to early re-adoption in March 1950. At an enthusiastic special meeting of the Association, she was presented with a Marcasite brooch and a scroll signed by 991 supporters. Some of them had become real friends, including her chairman, John Miller, and her landlords, Raymond and Lucy Woollcott.
Margaret had fought a good election in 1950. Even her opponent, Norman Dodds, praised her campaigning skills and invited her to lunch in the House of Commons. On another occasion they were photographed dancing together at the Mayor’s Charity Ball. He insisted that she should choose the dance and the music. She picked a fast-paced tango, which she said was ‘her favourite dance’, and a tune with political overtones – ‘Jealousy’.34
In fact there was not a trace of such negativity in their roles as political opponents. Norman Dodds was a chivalrous Old Labour stalwart who came to admire his young challenger. They campaigned against each other fairly and with mutual respect.
Respect was also growing for Margaret Roberts within the Conservative party. In election post-mortems she was credited not only for having fought exceptionally well in her constituency, but for having played a significant role in helping Ted Heath to squeak home by 133 votes in his next-door constituency of Bexley. The Central Office view was that the vigour of her battle had dissuaded many Labour Party workers in Dartford from coming over to Bexley to help with the vital polling day drive of getting their supporters out to vote. Heath showed no particular appreciation for this assistance. There was already a chill in the atmosphere between the two neighbouring candidates. She found him ‘somewhat aloof and alone’, even when he was ‘at his most affable’.35
Margaret Roberts gained confidence from the success of her first campaign in Dartford. Her share price rose on the invisible stock market of young political comers. She became prominent in attending meetings of the Conservative Candidates’ Association. She gave up her holidays to study policy courses at the party’s staff college at Swinton Castle in Yorkshire. She stood out as a rare woman candidate at these predominantly male gatherings. Some of the men with whom she would soon be competing for nominations in winnable seats were ambivalent in their attitudes towards her.
As one of them, twenty-five-year old Edward du Cann,** the candidate for Walthamstow West, recalled:
She was strikingly attractive, obviously intelligent, a goer. But she didn’t do herself any favours or win any friends. She tried too hard, in a slightly overbearing sort of way. She was invariably the first one of us in all the sessions to get to her feet and ask the opening question. Most of her fellow candidates found this habit off-putting: they thought her too keen by far, too pushy.36
Grumbles about her pushiness among contemporaries were balanced by golden opinions from party elders. Alfred Bossom continued to champion her cause. He invited her to grand political soirées in his London home, and arranged speaking invitations for her in Kent.
She was becoming in demand on national platforms, too. Her most exciting opportunity came when she was invited to second the vote of thanks to Winston Churchill at a Conservative Women’s rally at the Royal Albert Hall o
n 7 June 1950. This was the first time she had met the great man whose wartime broadcasts had inspired her during her teenage years in Grantham. Alas, there is no record of the conversation between the past and future prime minister at this encounter.37
The lame duck Labour government of 1950–51 took eighteen months to expire. It was a time of political career frustration for Margaret Roberts, but her ambition to find a husband was gathering momentum.
Early in 1951, Alfred Bossom took her out to lunch together with his son Clive, who had recently been adopted as Prospective Conservative Parliamentary Candidate for Faversham. Clive Bossom recalled:
Father banged on to both of us with a list of dos and don’ts for young politicians. And at the end he became rather serious, saying to us, ‘Politics can be a very lonely life, so to both of you I say, find. the right partner to marry, to relax with and to share your life with’. I noticed that Margaret kept nodding when he said that.38
Who she had in mind when she nodded was a mystery that she had not yet solved for herself. She was still hesitating between two suitors. Robert Henderson remained her no. 1 choice. The weekend after the count, he took her dining and dancing at the Berkeley Hotel where she wore a new white frock. ‘I go out with him most weekends and one night during the week,’ she wrote to Muriel in the spring of 1950, ‘but whether it will ever come to anything I very much doubt, for he thinks the difference between our ages is very great.’39
A stomach operation for Robert in June, followed by a long convalescence, slowed their courtship down. Margaret found herself a new job working as a research chemist for the food manufacturer J. Lyons in Hammersmith. She also rented a flat in Pimlico. One of the reasons for her move was that her Dartford landlady, Mrs Woollcott, was taking too much interest in her private life. ‘You know how I hate everyone knowing my own affairs’, she wrote to Muriel. ‘Robert refuses to come in now, and as often as not I go to the end of the road and meet him at the traffic lights.’40
Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality Page 9
