Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  Anyway, for the course of the campaign for the general election of 25 October 1951, the engagement was concealed. Denis would appear in his Jaguar and help his secret fiancée canvass. On 15 October, he chaired Margaret’s public meeting at a primary school in Belvedere, declaring: ‘She has unlimited beauty, brains and charm, three qualities which we can do with in the House of Commons.’132 Patricia Luker, a young secretary who was appointed Margaret’s ‘follower’ for the campaign, and accompanied her every evening, remembered that Denis got very upset whenever Margaret was heckled and had to be restrained by her and others from intervening. She was impressed by Denis’s loyalty, but surprised that Margaret had accepted him: ‘I thought what a funny man for her to want to marry. He didn’t have an awful lot of conversation.’133 All the office was sworn to secrecy and the secret held, although at one point a man from the Daily Mirror (Margaret attracted national newspaper interest as a woman, and the youngest parliamentary candidate) came into the Conservative office, having got wind of it. He was sent away without a story. The news was eventually put out to the press on the eve of poll, a decision which was not Margaret’s. In later years, she believed it had been done by Beryl Cook to attract some last-minute votes.134 This irritated her.

  Between the elections of 1950 and 1951, Margaret consistently grew in stature as a candidate and as a rising figure in the Conservative Party. As at Oxford, she made herself available for what others would not. Clive Bossom,* the son of Margaret’s patron Sir Alfred and himself the Conservative candidate for Faversham in Kent at the time, remembered that she would always agree to weekend speaking engagements at places beyond her constituency, and that her speaking ability was high.135 W. F. Deedes,† also a Kent candidate (at Ashford) in 1951, noted the impact Margaret always made at the Conservative Prospective Parliamentary Candidates’ Association meetings. ‘Once she opened her mouth the rest of us began to look rather second-rate,’ he said, and indeed her knowledge and eloquence were a source of some irritation to her fellow candidates.136 Through the association, she met present and future leading lights of the party, notably the Colditz hero Airey Neave,‡ whose support in the leadership battle in 1975 would ensure her victory. ‘David Maxwell Fyffe [sic]§ came to address us [at the association],’ she told Muriel. ‘As usual he was brilliant in his analysis of the situation – His bearing is superb.’137

  Margaret started to become part of a Tory social network – at that time still dominated by the well-off, the ex-military and the landed Etonians – which, more than might have been expected, she enjoyed. At the beginning of each new parliamentary session in November, Alfred Bossom, who felt that ‘MPs’ wives had a raw deal,’ would give a huge party for the Tory clans at 5 Carlton Gardens, his grand London house, erecting a special tent with wooden walls running out from house to garden. Up from his castle in Kent came tapestries and even suits of armour for the occasion. The guests wore black tie and, after being briefed on the contents of the Queen’s Speech by the Prime Minister at dinner at No. 10, the Cabinet would go on to Bossom’s party, dressed in white tie. Although only a candidate rather than a Member of Parliament, Margaret received invitations to this famous annual event, and was treated with kindness by Alfred Bossom. When he heard that she and Denis were to be married in London, he immediately offered his house for the reception.138 Margaret was very happy to make use of such connections, and frequently did so in search of better jobs. ‘When Parliament assembles again,’ she wrote to Muriel from her newly rented flat about her renewed search for the right employment, ‘I’ll take up all the offers of “Come and have dinner with me” that I’ve had from various members and see what I can do in that direction.’139

  Between the two elections, the tone of politics changed. The Korean War, which began in June 1950, brought home the reality of the Communist threat and raised the spectre of a wider war. Communism was an issue on which Margaret knew where she stood. In a letter to Muriel unusual for the extent to which it discusses the content of politics, she described a meeting of the United Nations Association in Dartford at which she spoke with her Labour opponent, Dodds, and several others, including Lord and Lady Strabolgi: ‘Lord and Lady Strabolgi – Red as you make them – were the main speakers … The other three were very leftist. By the time they had finished you would have thought Communist countries a demi-paradise and that Britain must disarm. I gave them 10 minutes of what I thought about their views! As a result Dodds wouldn’t speak to me afterwards and Lord and Lady S. went off without speaking as well. Several people congratulated me, so I wasn’t bothered.’140 In a speech in Dartford two months later, she warned that the ‘Communist menace … might break out in other places’,141 and two months after that she declared: ‘If Germany were to become another Korea tonight, every one of us would shake in our shoes.’ ‘The only thing that allowed Britain time to negotiate’, she added, ‘was her atomic superiority.’142 And the subject was the theme of her New Year message in the Dartford Chronicle: ‘we must firstly believe in the Western way of life and serve it steadfastly. Secondly we must build up our fighting strength to be prepared to defend our ideals, for aggressive nations understand only the threat of force.’143 The idea of Britain as a strong nation alone and brave had religious echoes in Margaret’s mind, deriving from the biblical idea of the righteous remnant. At the Dartford Free Church Federal Council annual meeting, she chose the text from Genesis in which Abraham pleads with God to spare the righteous from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah – ‘Peradventure ten shall be found there.’ Margaret pointed out that ‘Had those ten righteous men been found they could have saved the cities from destruction,’ and that in the New Testament it was twelve righteous men – the Apostles – who saved the world. She then applied the text to our age. ‘In their own lifetime,’ the Dartford Chronicle reported her as saying, ‘it depended on the few men of the Battle of Britain to save civilisation from immediate doom.’144 Throughout her career, the story of 1940 was the myth (by which is not meant untruth) which most dominated her imagination.

  Unable to maintain his party’s tiny majority in Parliament, and suffering from divisions between left and right which had provoked the future Prime Minister Harold Wilson* and the left-wing orator Aneurin Bevan to resign from the government in protest over the imposition of charges for false teeth and spectacles, Clement Attlee called a general election for 25 October 1951. As earlier agreed, Margaret stood in Dartford for the second time. In the election campaign itself, the issue of Communism and the threat to peace was still running strongly. At her adoption meeting, Margaret told her audience, who first sat down together to listen to Winston Churchill’s party political broadcast on the radio, that the ‘most serious aspect of the situation was the Socialist insistence that the Conservatives were warmongers’. This charge was repeatedly levelled by the front page of the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror, which ran the headline ‘Whose finger on the trigger?’, suggesting that Churchill’s was more trigger-happy than Attlee’s. ‘If we can co-operate on matters of defence,’ Margaret went on, ‘through the Empire and the United States, and so to greater things, we can defend the world on a world basis.’145 These words contained the germ of her later developed belief that the ‘English-speaking peoples’ alone could ensure freedom and security. Her election address contained a similar call to arms: ‘Britain … must be strong, strong in arms, and strong in faith in her own way of life. The greatest hope for peace lies in friendship and co-operation with the United States of America.’

  The woman who argued for strength was exhibiting it in her own patch. Although she remained as popular as ever in the constituency, it was clear that her power did not rest in her charm alone, but also in her steel. Early in what turned out to be the election year of 1951, Margaret discovered that her friend and association chairman John Miller had invited the socialist mayors of Dartford, Erith and Crayford to the association’s annual ball. She was beside herself, and described her reaction to Muriel:

  I w
as absolutely furious – they all actively campaign against us and personally against me at election time, and it happens to be my Anniversary Ball. I flew to the phone and asked John who had invited them … John said he had invited them on the grounds that they were above politics. I was very cross indeed … I told him it was an insult to me and highly discourteous not to have let me see the list before it went out. John told me that I was being very awkward, that he hadn’t been able to get me on the ’phone. I said there was such a thing as a 2½d stamp …146

  Fraternizing with the enemy was something that Margaret never enjoyed. She recalls in her memoirs how much she and her fellow Tories took heart from Aneurin Bevan’s jibe that they were ‘lower than vermin’, forming a Vermin Club of those who won new recruits for the party.147

  The campaign itself was hard fought and boisterous. In those days, election controversy was not permitted on BBC Radio, or on television (which few possessed), except in the controlled and stilted form of party political broadcasts. So elections were fought in the newspapers and, much more than today, in each constituency. Election meetings, in large places and small, were often packed. Margaret fought with all her vigour. One meeting, at Crayford town hall, shortly before polling day, got out of hand. While Margaret was speaking elsewhere, the warm-up was being given by Melford Stevenson KC, later to become famous as the most outspoken conservative judge on the bench. He seems to have warmed them up too thoroughly, for by the time Margaret arrived the chairman of the meeting told her that he had just sent for the police. ‘For God’s sake don’t do that,’ said Margaret. ‘Leave it to me.’148 She succeeded. The Dartford Chronicle recorded that ‘For the first nine minutes of her speech – during which time she dealt with Conservative policy with regard to peace – there was not one comment from the body of the hall …’149 This time, she had a straight fight with Dodds, with no Liberal candidate. The result was:

  Norman Dodds (Labour) 40,094

  Miss M. H. Roberts (Conservative) 27,760

  Labour majority 12,334

  She had cut Dodds’s majority by a further 1,300. In the country as a whole, Labour actually got more votes than the Conservatives and more than in 1950, but the votes stacked up too heavily in safe Labour areas, allowing the Conservatives to gain more seats. The Tories also had a 4 per cent lead over Labour with women voters, a reward for their emphasis on the problems of consumption and rationing. Under Churchill, they returned to power for the first time since the war, with an overall majority of seventeen, but Margaret Roberts went off to get married.

  6

  Marriage, the law and Finchley

  ‘The necessary fervour’

  The first surviving letter from Mrs Thatcher, rather than Margaret Roberts, dates from the middle of February 1952, two months after her marriage to Denis. Writing from 112 Swan Court, Chelsea Manor Street, London, Denis’s sixth-floor bachelor flat, Margaret informs her sister Muriel that the couple’s planned first cocktail party together is postponed because of the death of King George VI on 6 February. Although perfectly content in tone, the letter is certainly not ecstatic. It is practical, and its main theme, as so often for people in London even well into the 1950s, is shortage. There is an ‘egg famine’ in town, she declares, and she wants to buy some eggs from Muriel and Willie’s farm ‘on a strictly business basis’. She has also been in search of clothes: ‘I’ve got the turquoise set from Peter Jones but the only pleated waist slips they have are in that rather violent pink.’ She is starting a law course with Gibson and Waldron (‘the law tutors’) – ten weeks, for three days a week – but only in the criminal law: ‘Roman law I realise I can cram on my own.’1 Another aspect of the mourning for the late King was the cancellation of the rugby international, which Denis would otherwise have attended. Margaret’s substitute activity was probably less to her husband’s taste: she took Denis off to hear her speak at a dedication service in Camden Town of the Methodist chapel run by Mr Skinner, the kindly minister with whom she had stayed on her sole pre-war visit to London. The next day they attended Sunday service at Wesley’s Chapel in the City Road to hear Mr Spivey, the minister, who, with Mr Skinner, had married them there.

  The wedding had taken place on 13 December 1951. The bride remembered it as ‘a cold and foggy December day’.2 As befitted the weather – and perhaps her slightly uneasy status as a woman marrying a divorced man – she did not wear white, but a velvet dress of sapphire blue, modelled on the black velvet dress she had cherished at Oxford, and a striking hat, in the manner of Gainsborough’s portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, clinging to the back of her head with ostrich feathers cascading down the right-hand side. The photograph shows a sparkling, happy and pretty young woman, with a bridegroom who looks – and was – older and more shy. The couple were married to the strains of ‘Immortal, invisible’ and ‘Lead us, heavenly Father, lead us’. The words of the latter hymn were to prove prophetic as the marriage successfully carried the couple for more than half a century ‘o’er the world’s tempestuous sea’. About fifty people attended, and the reception was held at Alfred Bossom’s great house in Carlton Gardens. The best man was Kent Green, with whom Denis had spent his last holiday as a bachelor. Denis failed to make a speech. Forty years later, he told his daughter that (oddly in view of the fact that he had been married before) ‘I didn’t know I was meant to’.3 Perhaps he was already observing the rule which, in later life, he made firm, that he would never make a speech ‘in front of Her’.

  The Thatchers spent their wedding night in the Savoy Hotel in London – ‘a wonderful hotel’, Margaret wrote to Muriel. ‘… You just press a bell and a valet or maid or waiter appears.’4 Then they flew to Estoril in Portugal by flying boat. Thence, after a few days, to Madeira, and another Savoy Hotel, where they spent Christmas: ‘Some of the people with us are very nice but some are rather “tatty” tourists: Jews and novo [sic] riche. Talking of Jews – one of the directors of J. Lyons, a Gluckstein, is with us. He and his wife are very nice.’5 In her memoirs, Mrs Thatcher did not recall much lotus-eating. Nor did Denis: ‘We stayed in the capital, Funchal,’ he told Carol, ‘and did a sort of economic survey: we went and looked at people making lace and other things and went and toured the Madeira Wine Company.’6 But at the time Mrs Thatcher entered happily into the pleasures of the place. On Christmas Eve, she sent a postcard to Muriel: ‘Funchal really goes gay at Christmas … We change for dinner every night and dine and dance either here or at Reids hotel … You can get pure silk shirts made to measure for £3 each & nylon socks for 15/- a pair so it is indeed a paradise for men buying clothes.’7 The weather was too bad for the return journey to involve a flight to mainland Portugal, and they crossed by boat with Mrs Thatcher very sea-sick. They returned to England via Paris, where Denis had business to transact.

  Mrs Thatcher enjoyed her newly married life. She had improved social status, a husband she liked and respected, and a comfortable mansion-block flat which she set about redecorating with her customary domestic energy. Writing to Muriel on 28 January 1952, she excitedly described the whirl of events – the annual dinner of the Inns of Court Conservative Association where Anthony Eden, Foreign Secretary in the new government, ‘seems a new man since he came back to office’, parties, meetings. ‘The days simply fly past.’8 In her memoirs, she waxes lyrical about this period, especially for young married people like herself: ‘The 1950s were … the reawakening of normal happy life after the trials of war-time and the petty indignities of post-war austerity.’ Echoing Wordsworth as she had in Dartford, she said that to be in her situation at that time was ‘very heaven’.9 But there was to be no slackening of pace, no exile from the great world to the kitchen. The death of the King gave her the opportunity to set out her views of what the new reign should bring for her sex and generation. In an article entitled ‘Wake up, women’ in the Sunday Graphic, Mrs Thatcher announced, ‘If as many earnestly pray, the accession of Elizabeth II can help to remove the last shreds of prejudice against
women aspiring to the highest places, then a new era for women will indeed be at hand.’ She advocated the combining of marriage and a career for more women, and regretted that ‘The term “career woman” has unfortunately come to imply in many minds a “hard” woman devoid of all feminine characteristics.’ She traced this prejudice: ‘Far too often, I regret to say it comes from our own sex.’ In her view, though, ‘The idea that the family suffers is … quite mistaken’; a career meant ‘a wife can be a much better companion at home.’ She praised various current women role models, including Janet Vaughan from Somerville, and asked ‘Why not a woman Chancellor – or Foreign Secretary?’, though judiciously stopping short of calling for a woman prime minister. Using a technique to subvert the opposite sex at which, in later life, she became very practised, Mrs Thatcher added: ‘And if they [women] made mistakes, they would not be the first to do so in those jobs!’10

  When she had left Dartford after the general election of 1951, Margaret Roberts had said, ‘I shall not be contesting this division again, but I have no intention of leaving politics,’ and this was no more than the truth. In the letter to Muriel quoted above, she refers to coming on to stay with the Cullens after a political conference in Maidstone. At the beginning of April 1952, Alfred Roberts wrote to his elder daughter: ‘We had a letter from Margaret … obviously scrawled in great haste for it appears that, if anything, she is busier now than before marriage … I hope she isn’t chasing Denis about too much after his being so poorly.’11 And he mentioned that she was to speak at a Regional Savings Conference in Nottingham. It was also at this time that Mrs Thatcher had what was to be her only experience of being married to a political candidate. In the Kent County Council elections of April 1952, Denis was persuaded to stand as a Ratepayer, a label that tended to be used by Conservatives in areas where national parties were thought inappropriate for local government. He lost without, it seems, investing much emotional or physical energy in the contest, and without canvassing. As Mrs Thatcher put it succinctly in a letter to Muriel: ‘Denis went the way of all the others who were fighting bad seats in the County Council elections but he wasn’t too disappointed.’12* But although, as we shall see shortly, politics never vanished from her mind, Mrs Thatcher’s immediate career preoccupation was with the law.