The question which John Hare had raised with me about how I would combine my home life with politics was soon to become even more sensitive. For in August 1953 the twins, Mark and Carol, put in an appearance. Late one Thursday night, some six weeks before what we still called ‘the baby’ was due, I began to have pains. I had seen the doctor that day and he asked me to come back on the Monday for an X-ray because there was something he wanted to check. Now Monday seemed a very long way away, and off I was immediately taken to hospital. I was given a sedative which helped me sleep through the night. Then on Friday morning the X-ray was taken and to the great surprise of all it was discovered that I was to be the mother of twins. Unfortunately, that was not the whole story. The situation required a Caesarean operation the following day. The two tiny babies — a boy and a girl — had to wait a little before they saw their father. For Denis, imagining that all was progressing smoothly, had very sensibly gone to the Oval to watch the Test Match and it proved quite impossible to contact him. On that day he received two pieces of good but equally surprising news. England won the Ashes, and he found himself the proud father of twins.
I had to stay in hospital for over a fortnight: indeed, one was expected in those days to wait three weeks before coming out. This meant that after the first few uncomfortable days of recovery I found myself with time on my hands. We had, of course, been expecting only one addition to the Thatcher household. Consequently, the first and most immediate task was to telephone all the relevant stores to order two rather than just one of everything. Oddly enough, the very depth of the relief and happiness at having brought Mark and Carol into the world made me uneasy. The pull of a mother towards her children is perhaps the strongest and most instinctive emotion we have. I was never one of those people who regarded being ‘just’ a mother or indeed ‘just’ a housewife as second best. Indeed, whenever I heard such implicit assumptions made both before and after I became Prime Minister it would make me very angry indeed. Of course, to be a mother and a housewife is a vocation of a very high kind. But I simply felt that it was not the whole of my vocation. I knew that I also wanted a career. A phrase that Irene Ward, MP for Tynemouth, and I often used was that ‘while the home must always be the centre of one’s life, it should not be the boundary of one’s ambitions’. Indeed, I needed a career because, quite simply, that was the sort of person I was. And not just any career. I wanted one which would keep me mentally active and prepare me for the political future for which I believed I was well suited.
So it was that at the end of my first week in hospital I came to a decision. I had the application form for my Bar finals in December sent to me. I filled it in and sent off the money for the exam, knowing that this little psychological trick I was playing on myself would ensure that I plunged into legal studies on my return to Swan Court with the twins, and that I would have to organize our lives so as to allow me to be both a mother and a professional woman.
This was not, in fact, as difficult as it might sound. The flat at Swan Court was large enough, even though it was not ideal: being on the sixth floor, we had to have bars put on all the windows. Without a garden, the twins had to be taken out twice a day to Ranelagh Gardens. But this turned out to be good for them because they became used to meeting and playing with other children — though early on, when we did not know the rules, we had our ball confiscated by the Park Superintendent. Usually, however, it was the nanny, Barbara, who took Mark and Carol to the park, except at weekends when I took over. Barbara had been trained at Dr Barnardo’s and turned out to be a marvellous friend to the children.
The fifties marked the start of a major change in the role of women. Until then they tended to be well into middle age when the last child of an often large family fled the nest; work within the house, without the benefit of labour-saving devices, took much longer; and home was also a more social place, visited throughout the day by a wide range of tradesmen, from the milkman to the window cleaner, each perhaps stopping off for a chat or cup of tea. Consequently, fewer women had the opportunity or felt the need to go out to work. The fifties marked the beginning of the end of this world, and by the eighties it had changed out of recognition. Women were younger when the children left home because families were smaller; domestic work was lighter owing to new home appliances; and home deliveries were replaced by a weekly visit to the mall or supermarket. And the 1980s saw yet another twist: the trend whereby women started to remain at work in the early years of marriage, but to leave the workforce to have children for a time in their thirties.
These changes led to a powerful and largely middle-class lobby for tax allowances for child care — either nannies or play groups or, in educational disguise, nursery provision. As Prime Minister I resisted this pressure. I did not believe that working wives, who would presumably be bringing more money into the family anyway, should in effect be subsidized by the taxes paid by couples where the woman looked after the children at home and there was only one income. This was a straightforward matter of fairness.
Of course, these general arguments were not ones which affected my own decisions as a young mother. I was especially fortunate in being able to rely on Denis’s income to hire a nanny to look after the children in my absences. I could combine being a good mother with being an effective professional woman, as long as I organized everything intelligently down to the last detail. It was not enough to have someone in to mind the children; I had to arrange my own time to ensure that I could spend a good deal of it with them. As regards being a barrister after I had become qualified, I would have a certain amount of latitude in the cases I took on, so I could to some extent adjust my workload in line with the demands of family. As regards politics, we lived in London, my husband worked in the London area, Parliament was in London — clearly, I must seek a constituency which was also in or near London. It was only this unusual combination of circumstances which enabled me to consider becoming an MP while I had young children.
Not long after I had the twins, John Hare wrote to me from Central Office:
I was delighted to hear that you had had twins. How very clever of you. How is this going to affect your position as a candidate? I have gaily been putting your name forward; if you would like me to desist, please say so.
I replied thanking him and noting:
Having unexpectedly produced twins — we had no idea there were two of them until the day they were born — I think I had better not consider a candidature for at least six months. The household needs considerable reorganization and a reliable nurse must be found before I can feel free to pursue such other activities with the necessary fervour.
So my name was, as John Hare put it, kept ‘in cold storage for the time being’. It was incumbent on me to say when I would like to come onto the active list of candidates again.
My self-prescribed six months of political limbo were quickly over. I duly passed my Bar finals. I had begun by considering specializing in patent law because I thought I would be able to make use of my industrial and scientific knowledge. But it seemed that the opportunities there were very limited and so perhaps tax law would be a better bet. In any case, I would need a foundation in the criminal law first. So in December 1953 I joined Frederick Lawton’s Chambers in the Inner Temple for a six months’ pupillage. Fred Lawton’s was a common law Chambers. He was, indeed, one of the most brilliant criminal lawyers I ever knew. He was witty, with no illusions about human nature or his own profession, extraordinarily lucid in exposition, and a kind guide to me.
In fact, I was to go through no fewer than four sets of Chambers, partly because I had to gain a grounding in several fields before I was competent to specialize in tax. So I witnessed the rhetorical fireworks of the Criminal Bar, admired the precise draftsmanship of the Chancery Bar and then delved into the details of company law. But I became increasingly confident that tax law could be my forte. It was a meeting point with my interest in politics; it offered the right mixture of theory and practical substance; and of o
ne thing we could all be sure — there would never be a shortage of clients desperate to cut their way out of the jungle of over-complex and constantly changing tax law.
Studying, observing, discussing and eventually practising law had a profound effect on my political outlook. In this I was probably unusual. Familiarity with the law usually breeds if not contempt, at least a large measure of cynicism. For me, however, it gave a richer significance to that expression ‘the rule of law’ which so easily tripped off the Conservative tongue.
From my reading at university and earlier I had gained a clear idea that what distinguished free from un-free regimes was that law ruled in the first and force in the second. But what was the essence of this ‘law’? By what process had it evolved? And why did it have such deep roots in Britain and, as recent history showed, such shallow ones elsewhere? The legal textbooks that I now studied were not by and large intended to provide answers to such points. But the principles of law which they expounded continually raised in my mind these questions. Similarly, as I read about the great judges of the formative periods of English law, I was increasingly fascinated by the mysterious and cumulative process by which the courts of England had laid the foundations for English freedom.
But it was A.V. Dicey whose writing — above all his classic textbook The Law of the Constitution — had most impact on me. It had long been fashionable to attack Dicey for his doctrinaire opposition to the new administrative state, and there are plenty of learned commentators still inclined to do so. But I found myself immediately at home with what he said — it is not perhaps without significance that though Dicey’s was a great legal mind, he was at heart a classical liberal. The ‘law of the constitution’ was, in Dicey’s words, the result of two ‘guiding principles, which had been gradually worked out by the more or less conscious efforts of generations of English statesmen and lawyers’. The first of these principles was the sovereignty of Parliament. The second was the rule of law, which I will summarize briefly and inadequately as the principle that no authority is above the law of the land.[6] For Dicey, writing in 1885, and for me reading him some seventy years later, the rule of law still had a very English, or at least Anglo-Saxon, feel to it. It was later, through reading Hayek’s masterpieces The Constitution of Liberty and Law, Legislation and Liberty that I really came to think of this principle as having wider application.
When politics is in your blood, every circumstance seems to lead you back to it. Whether pondering Dicey, poring over the intricacies of tax law or discussing current issues with other members of the Inns of Court Conservative Society, political questions insisted on taking centre stage in my imagination. So when in December 1954 I heard that there was a vacancy for the Conservative candidature in Orpington — which of course, being next to my old constituency of Dartford, I knew, and which was not too far from London — I telephoned Central Office and asked to have my name put forward. I was interviewed and placed on the short-list. Sitting just outside the selection meeting with Denis, I heard Donald Sumner, the local candidate (and Association Chairman), advancing in his speech the decisive argument that in Orpington what they really needed was ‘a Member who really knows what is going on in the constituency — who knows the state of the roads in Locksbottom’. Denis and I roared with laughter. But Donald Sumner got the seat.
I was naturally disappointed by the decision, because Orpington would have been an ideal constituency for me. It seemed extremely unlikely now that a similarly suitable seat would become available before what looked liked an increasingly imminent general election. So I wrote to John Hare to say that I would now ‘continue at the Bar with no further thought of a parliamentary career for many years’. Knowing me better than I knew myself perhaps, he wrote back urging me at least to reconsider if a winnable seat in Kent became available. But I was adamant, though I made it clear that I would always be available to speak in constituencies and would of course be active in the general election campaign.
Although I was in general a loyal Conservative, I had felt for some time that the Government could have moved further and faster in dismantling socialism and installing free-enterprise policies. But it had not been easy for them to persuade popular opinion — or indeed themselves — that a somewhat stronger brew would be palatable. In fact, by 1955 a good deal of modest progress had been made as regards the removal of controls and, even more modestly, returning nationalized industries to the private sector. The rationing of food had finally been brought to an end. Large steps had been taken towards restoring the convertibility of the currency. Iron and steel nationalization had been halted and a start made in selling road haulage. Above all, the proportion of GNP taken by the state had been reduced steadily in the years from 1951. And there was one development of great importance for the future: the breaking of the BBC’s monopoly of broadcasting and the beginning of commercial television.
SUEZ AND AFTER
Conservative thinking about policy matters was also becoming more self-confident and more radical. This can be illustrated by a comparison between the two most influential publications produced by the Party over these years — One Nation (October 1950) and Change is our Ally (May 1954). Both were written by an overlapping group of remarkably gifted young Members of Parliament, including Enoch Powell, Angus Maude, Robert Carr and (One Nation only) Ted Heath and Iain Macleod. Admittedly, One Nation dealt with social policy which, particularly at a time when it was clear that a Conservative government would have to rein back on public expenditure, was a tricky topic. But still the relative blandness of that document — which emphasized (soundly enough, of course) Conservative commitment to a ‘safety net’ of benefits securing a living standard below which none must fall, and to Anthony Eden’s notion of the strengthening of the weak rather than the weakening of the strong — suggested a defensive exercise and indeed a defensive mentality.
Change is our Ally is a far more exciting document which, when I re-read it in the late 1980s, I found to contain very much the same analysis as that we had adopted since I became Party Leader. It began by tracing the growth of collectivism in the British economy between the wars. It then boldly attacked the notion that the planning of the Second World War economy could appropriately be extended into peacetime. It even pointed out — what everyone knew to be true, but what for years after the war went largely unsaid — that the wartime system of planning had been inefficient, wasteful and bureaucratic, however necessary in the emergency the nation faced at the time. The follies and absurdities of the economic plan, with its detailed predictions and quantified targets, were further exposed by retrospective comparisons between the assumptions made in Lord Beveridge’s unofficial study Full Employment in a Free Society, published in 1944, and the situation a decade later. It was all admirably commonsensical. What the authors of Change is our Ally, and indeed those of the following year’s Conservative manifesto, did not do — and I certainly claim no credit for thinking at the time that they should have done — was to propose the root and branch dismantling of collectivism in industry or fundamental reform in the Welfare State. But in the mid–1950s the Conservative Party was at least playing with a consistent free market analysis which would, in due course and given the opportunities of government, have led to free market policies. This, however, was not how matters were to develop.
In April 1955 Churchill resigned as Prime Minister to be succeeded by Anthony Eden, and there was in quick succession a snap general election, a new Conservative Government, the débâcle of Suez and the arrival at No. 10 of Harold Macmillan, the wizard of change.
During the general election campaign of May 1955 I spoke in a number of constituencies. But for me it was generally a dull affair. Once you have been a candidate everything else palls. Moreover, there was very little doubt of the outcome on this occasion. Sure enough, the Conservatives won an overall majority of fifty-eight. But the Eden administration’s political honeymoon turned out to be a short one. It quickly appeared that Rab Butler’s pre-electio
n Budget had been too loose, and there followed a much tighter emergency Budget in October, which badly damaged Butler’s reputation — he was replaced as Chancellor by Harold Macmillan six months later — and seriously dented the Government’s. But it was, of course, to be foreign affairs which would be Eden’s real undoing.
The background to the Suez crisis of July to November 1956 has been much discussed. At the time the general feeling, at least among Conservatives, was that Britain was a great power which should not be pushed around by Nasser’s Egypt and that the latter needed to be taught a lesson, not least pour encourager les autres. Many of the details, for example the degree of collusion between Britain and France on the one hand and Israel on the other, were not available to the wider public at the time. To us, therefore, it appeared almost incomprehensible that first Anthony Nutting and then my old friend Edward Boyle should resign from the Government in protest at the intervention. Now their actions are more understandable, though even all these years later I could not endorse them.
The balance of interest and principle in the Suez affair is not a simple one. I had no qualms about Britain’s right to respond to Nasser’s illegal seizure of an international waterway — if only action had been taken quickly and decisively. Over the summer, however, we were outmanoeuvred by a clever dictator into a position where our interests could only be protected by bending our legal principles. Among the many reasons for criticizing the Anglo-French-Israeli collusion is that it was bound to tarnish our case when it became known, as it assuredly would and did. At the same time, Suez was the last occasion when the European powers might have withstood and brought down a Third World dictator who had shown no interest in international agreements, except where he could profit from them. Nasser’s victory at Suez had among its fruits the overthrow of the pro-Western regime in Iraq, the Egyptian occupation of the Yemen, and the encirclement of Israel which led to the Six Day War — and the bills were still coming in when I left office.
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