Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  By the time of the move to Farnborough, Mrs Thatcher was a practising barrister. Having passed her Bar finals on 1 December 1953, she consulted John Senter QC, a leading light in Conservative legal circles and a well-known tax lawyer. He encouraged her, but said that she should first get a grounding in the criminal law. On Senter’s recommendation, she obtained pupillage with Fred Lawton (later, as Sir Fred, an Appeal Court judge),* one of the most remarkable and most liked lawyers of his generation, whose extensive common-law practice offered her experience in civil as well as criminal cases. Also in Lawton’s chambers was Airey Neave and, a little later, Robin Day,† who was to become the best-known television political interviewer of his time. When Mrs Thatcher was called to the Bar in February 1954, her name appeared in the alphabetical list between that of Dick Taverne, later a Labour MP whose defection from the party made him the trailblazer for the Social Democrats, and Jeremy Thorpe, later the Leader of the Liberal Party. The fee for pupillage was £50 for six months, plus five guineas for the clerk. ‘As I am costing Denis that much,’ Mrs Thatcher wrote to Muriel, ‘I shall just have to go about in rags when my present clothes drop off me!’51

  Pupillage was hard to obtain because of the continuing shortage of rooms as a result of war damage, and doubly hard for a woman because of prejudice. The entry form for would-be barristers at Lincoln’s Inn always used the male pronoun, so Mrs Thatcher had to insert ‘she’ and ‘her’ by hand. Barristers’ clerks, in particular, tended to oppose women because they thought they would earn them less money. Married women were thought particularly unlucrative. When Mrs Thatcher was finally established in chambers her clerk was heard to say, ‘I wish I could put Miss in front of her name instead of Mrs: she’d get more work.’52 But Fred Lawton had already had two women pupils whom he had forced his clerk to accept. He had a policy of taking only one pupil at a time, each for a year, so the relationship was close: ‘before very long,’ he said of Mrs Thatcher, ‘I came to appreciate that she was the best pupil I had ever had … She was diligent, quick on the uptake … She had a feeling for the law … And it’s equally clear that she was fascinated by the human aspects of the kind of work I did.’53* When the two met again at a party when she was prime minister, Mrs Thatcher ‘propelled me into a corner’ and started talking about a murder case in which Lawton had been involved when she was a pupil. Thirty years later, she remembered every detail of it.54 Lawton was always impressed by her ability to apply whatever knowledge she had acquired, noting in particular a case concerning a breach of warranty on the sale of chemicals in which she deployed her scientific background ruthlessly to cross-examine, pre-trial, all the chemical experts. He considered that, if she had stayed in the law, she would have been a highly successful QC, ‘but I don’t think she would have been the first woman Law Lord, because she hadn’t got that depth of mental capacity that you have to have if you’re a Law Lord.’ Her only shortcoming as Lawton’s pupil was that she never established a good relationship with the clerk, Stanley Hopkins. He came to Lawton and said: ‘I wish you’d tell that pupil of yours that I’m not the chambers boy who carries books.’55 Hopkins had never been friendly to the idea of women pupils. According to Lawton, however, ‘a rather randy Welshman’ in the chambers was friendly to the idea for the wrong reasons. He made a pass at her: ‘I gather she dealt with it very firmly.’56

  Mrs Thatcher perfected in her legal work the accuracy and meticulousness which she was to display in her career as a minister. When she became a Cabinet minister, she wrote to Lawton to tell him that it was the training she had received from him that made her redraft letters from civil servants, to their fury.57 But her feeling about the law went deeper than that. In conversation at her zenith and in her retirement, the phrases ‘the rule of law’ and ‘not just liberty, but law-based liberty’ probably came up more often than any other. She saw the law, even more than democracy, as the shibboleth that distinguished free from unfree societies.58 And in Mrs Thatcher’s mind, the rule of law had found better expression in Britain than almost anywhere else. ‘I was increasingly fascinated’, she wrote, ‘by the mysterious and cumulative process by which the courts of England had laid the foundation for English freedom.’59 She admired A.V. Dicey’s The Law of the Constitution with its emphasis on the sovereignty of Parliament, and her views on these matters contributed over the years to her growing suspicion of the claims of the European Union. Her period at the Bar was almost the last in which such opinions were unquestioned within the legal profession. Fred Lawton put it thus: ‘we all grew up I’m afraid with the jingoistic attitude that British law is best. It was something with which you never argued.’ In his view, the English lawyer of that time had ‘an astonishingly narrow intellectual training’. The English law was fundamentally different from the Continental in that, on the Continent, ‘all laws take into account human rights’ whereas English law ‘took the view that you took into account the rights of individuals’. On the Continent, rights existed only when proclaimed by law. In Britain, they existed automatically, without government fiat, unless the law abridged them. According to the English law, said Lawton, ‘a statute is to be construed by the words used in it and by nothing else … The Continental view is that statutes … are to be construed according to the purpose for which they were passed … Well, this was all foreign, strange to us in the 1950s.’60 It remained foreign to Mrs Thatcher for the whole of her life. She saw such wide-ranging law as a usurpation of the work of politicians, and its universal claims as contrary to national independence.

  It is doubtful, however, strongly though she absorbed such doctrines, whether Mrs Thatcher gave a great deal of thought to them at the time. She was an ambitious, busy and in a sense conventional young woman, not an intellectual, and she needed to work out how to make the law, at least for the time being, a good career. Towards the end of her twelve months, she came to Fred Lawton and told him, as he remembered it: ‘There is nothing I would like more than to stay in these chambers and do the kind of work you do. But as a young married woman with young children I just could not lead the life you lead. I couldn’t sit in a room and have the clerk come in at 4.30 and tell me that I was first in the list at Norwich the next morning at 10.30, he’d booked me a room at the Royal Hotel and there was a train which I could catch at Liverpool Street at 6. That’s just not on for a married woman.’ She went on, said Lawton, ‘I shall have to find some other side of the law where I don’t have to lead that kind of life.’61 Influenced by John Senter, she chose tax.

  Tax meant doing pupillage in Chancery, and so she moved to the chambers of John, later Lord, Brightman.* It was probably at this point that Denis made one of his very few recorded interventions in his wife’s career plans. One night he came home and found her poring over papers concerned with accountancy. She explained that she thought a qualification in accountancy would be necessary for understanding tax law. Denis was firm: he knew about accountancy, and if she needed help about it, he would give it. She would be crazy to embark on yet another arduous branch of study.62 As she generally did in areas which she recognized as his province, Mrs Thatcher accepted her husband’s advice, and by the beginning of 1955 she was appearing in revenue cases before the Special Commissioners, with some trepidation: ‘Revenue is really most intricate and I sometimes despair of ever having a comprehensive grasp of it.’63 Her work also included company law, land law and trust law.

  As usual, there was resistance to a woman. Mrs Thatcher was John Brightman’s first ever female pupil. It would have made sense for her to use the room of Norman Daynes, an elderly QC who was very seldom present, but he had declared, ‘Brightman, on no account is a woman ever going to sit in my room,’ so she sat with Brightman in his own room, and he would ask his clients if they minded her sitting in on the conversation.64 According to Lady Brightman, who considered Mrs Thatcher ‘an attractive and charming woman’, this arrangement gave rise to jokes: ‘My husband’s colleagues teased me about her looks.’65 As was to prove so impo
rtant in her political career, Mrs Thatcher benefited, in a sense, from the rarity of women, particularly attractive women, at the Bar. Without the slightest hint of impropriety, she nevertheless made it clear that she sought and enjoyed the company of clever, older men. The Bar consisted of little else, and many of them responded enthusiastically. On one occasion at about this time, Melford Stevenson, who had spoken for her at the uproarious election meeting in Dartford and was later to become a famously fierce judge, brought Mrs Thatcher home for dinner with his wife without warning. Stevenson’s son, John, dated his mother’s lifelong hostility to her from this moment.66

  After her stint with Brightman, Mrs Thatcher became a pupil of John Senter, her original patron, and here too she did well. But, for reasons that have never been quite clear, Senter decided to contract his chambers and so did not offer Mrs Thatcher the seat in chambers that comes after pupillage which he had earlier promised her. According to Peter Rowland, a fellow barrister at the time, Senter was ‘a very strange man’; he was ‘very unfair’ to Mrs Thatcher and, in being so, went ‘very much against the wishes of other members of chambers’. Mrs Thatcher made no public complaint but ‘I knew from the occasional look that appeared on her face that she was extremely disappointed.’67 In the view of Pamela Thomas (see below), Senter would not stand up against his clerk.68 In any event, Mrs Thatcher had to look elsewhere for a seat in chambers. She ended up in those of C. A. J. Bonner at 5 New Square, Lincoln’s Inn. But she practised only for a few months before her political career intervened.

  As Mrs Thatcher well knew from the beginning, the Bar was a good entrée to politics, and many barristers were politically engaged. She joined the Inns of Court Conservative and Unionist Association, whose secretary, Pamela Thomas, got her on to its tax committee. Other Conservative barristers at that time included Patrick Jenkin,* later one of her Cabinet ministers, Tony Barber,† later Edward Heath’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Geoffrey Howe,‡ her eventual nemesis. Pamela Thomas, who used to talk politics over coffee with her almost every day at the Bar, said that Mrs Thatcher was slightly right of centre in the party at that time, and that she was much distressed (as she confirms in her memoirs) by the collapse of the Suez adventure, when Britain, France and Israel attacked President Nasser’s Egypt in 1956 after Nasser had seized the Suez Canal: ‘She felt Eden* had been let down by others’69 and she was perplexed and saddened by the fact that her old friend Edward Boyle opposed Suez, and resigned from the government over the issue. In her memoirs, she identified Nasser’s political (though not military) victory in Suez as the cause of a great deal of the ensuing trouble in the Middle East: ‘the bills were still coming in when I left office.’ And she noted two other vital lessons of the debacle. The first was that it marked the moment when ‘the British political class … went from believing that Britain could do anything to an almost neurotic belief that Britain could do nothing.’ The second arose from the fact that the United States had not supported the Suez adventure, permitting a run on the pound which forced Eden to withdraw: Britain, she learnt, should never again get on the wrong side of America in any great enterprise.70 In domestic matters, too, her views as a young barrister foreshadowed those in later life. Patrick Jenkin said that she already exhibited the toughness over economic policy for which she was later famous, rejecting the idea of co-partnership in the steel industry with the words: ‘No, it must be a proper private sector business.’71 She was a ‘tip-top lawyer’, said Pamela Thomas, but her political ambitions were clear – she wanted to be Chancellor of the Exchequer, the least ‘female’, perhaps, of all political jobs.72

  Politics never really went away. On 12 June 1952, Mrs Thatcher’s patron and admirer Beryl Cook wrote a memo to John Hare at Conservative Central Office. Miss Cook, the Home Counties and south-east area agent, recorded: ‘Mrs Thatcher came to see me yesterday. To quote her own words – “It’s no use; I must face it: I don’t like being left out of the political stream.” ’ She added: ‘Mrs Thatcher tells me that her husband is quite in agreement with her views and would do all he could to back her if she did get a seat … I know myself that she can do this [nurse a seat] because now that she is married to a man who is comfortably off she will not have the financial worries she had while she was at Dartford.’ ‘Politics’, said Miss Cook, ‘is in her blood.’73 A week later, Hare recorded a ‘Note of interview’ with Mrs Thatcher at Central Office: ‘Miss Beryl Cook describes her as the best woman candidate she had ever known. I would also agree, as … she struck me as being a woman of immense personality and charm with a brain quite clearly above the average. I did my best to warn her of the horrors of life in the House of Commons especially in so far as this life affects the home. Nothing I said deterred her. She would like her name to go forward for Canterbury …’ Hare added that he would recommend her for any marginal or safe seat within a 30-mile radius of London.74 Mrs Thatcher was unsuccessful at Canterbury, which is more than 50 miles from London, but it is interesting that her ambition was such that she was prepared to go well outside the 30-mile radius recommended by Hare.

  Since there was never, truly, a point when Mrs Thatcher laid aside political ambition, though there was, as we shall see, one occasion when she claimed to be doing so, there may be no need to explain the timing of this attempted return to the fray. But it did coincide with an important incident in the political career of her father – its abrupt end.

  Alfred Roberts had been made an alderman of Grantham in 1943. At that time, party politics did not dominate the local government of the town, but after the council elections of 1950 the Labour Party controlled Grantham Council. After the elections of 1952, Labour, with further gains, decided that it was dissatisfied with the equal Labour and non-Labour representation on the aldermanic bench (aldermen were chosen by the council rather than directly elected). The principle that Labour was entitled to more aldermen than its rivals was not disputed, but trouble arose because two of the three aldermen retiring were Labour and therefore, if the party was to gain an aldermanic majority, it would have to kick someone out. Because Alfred Roberts’s term, which he wanted renewed, happened to end at that moment, he was the Labour Party’s chosen victim. This provoked outcry. Aldermen had never been removed for party political reasons in Grantham before, and Roberts, because of the respect in which he was held, was considered a particularly unsuitable victim. A sermon in Grantham’s parish church of St Wulfram’s hurled anathemas against the evils of party politics, and even Denis Kendall, now no longer the town’s MP but a member of the council, supported his former adversary and described the removal of Roberts as a ‘mucky trick’.

  According to Muriel Cullen, ‘Daddy was expecting it. Mother wasn’t’; he was upset, however, ‘because he really loved Grantham’.75 Certainly Alfred Roberts was prepared to make a drama of the occasion. Candidates stood fully robed as the aldermanic results were declared. When Roberts was voted off, he said, ‘It is now almost nine years since I took up these robes in honour, and now I trust in honour I lay them down,’76 and as he spoke, he pulled off his robes and laid them on the table in front of him. A fuller description was given in the Grantham Journal in Roberts’s obituary in 1970; ‘He stood, took off his robe, looked longingly at it as he laid it on the aldermanic bench, and then said with tremendous emotion and so quietly it was almost inaudible: “No medals. No honours, but an inward sense of satisfaction. May God bless Grantham forever.” ’77*

  The incident had a profound effect on Roberts’s younger daughter. In what was probably the most revealing television interview she ever gave, with Miriam Stoppard in 1985,78 Mrs Thatcher described her father being ‘turned off that council’ and said it was ‘such a tragedy’. As she spoke of it, tears came into her eyes, and she had to pause for a moment. It was as if she had a premonition of the ingratitude which, she later believed, allowed her to be displaced from the Conservative leadership in 1990. As she put it, confusedly yet revealingly, to Jim Allen, Grantham’s local historian, when he in
terviewed her after she left office: ‘I thought my father’s example there was so wonderful. So hurtful but so wonderful, and so dignified. But he was overwhelmed with letters, as I was. I didn’t forget.’79 It may not be too fanciful to see some of the impetus for Mrs Thatcher’s attempted re-entry into politics in her father’s downfall. His departure meant that, for the first time in her memory, he had no part in public life. Roberts left the aldermanic bench in May 1952, and Mrs Thatcher reapplied to Conservative Central Office in June.

  In fact, as shown above, the arrival of the twins prevented Mrs Thatcher from going forward in politics quite as fast as she had hoped, but did nothing to quench ‘the necessary fervour’. It seems likely that she had dropped the idea of standing in the coming general election because of her duties as a mother, but when the seat of Orpington became vacant because of the death of Sir Waldron Smithers, the sitting Conservative, it seemed too good a chance for Mrs Thatcher to miss. Orpington was close to Dartford, but much more Conservative, the heartland of the Tory suburban Kent to which marriage to Denis had introduced her. She telephoned Conservative Central Office to express her interest in December 1954, and was encouraged by John Hare.80 Mrs Thatcher was shortlisted, but defeated by Donald Sumner, the chairman of the local party association. This rejection brought her closer than ever, before or since, to departing the political scene. Writing to Hare on 3 January 1955, Mrs Thatcher told him that she wanted to pursue tax and estate duty at the Bar. Orpington had been ‘the only political temptation left for the next 10 years’ because she had ‘long had an affinity for it’, but now that the temptation had been removed she wished to have her name withdrawn from the candidates’ list.81 Hare wrote back, urging her to reconsider if a winnable seat came up, but she replied that she had ‘quite made up my mind to pursue law to the exclusion of politics’ and would not consider any offers before the coming election, though she was happy to make herself available as a speaker.82 The ten years’ self-denial, however, turned out to be thirteen months. On 28 February 1956, Mrs Thatcher wrote to Donald Kaberry, the new vice-chairman of the party responsible for candidates, and asked to come and see him. Once again, she used the word ‘temptation’ – the ‘temptation to return to active politics’. She told Kaberry that her study of tax and company law had only made her more interested in a parliamentary career: it had turned her attention to ‘the body which is responsible for the legislation about which I have come to hold strong views’.83 Kaberry agreed to see her and got her to fill in the necessary form to become a candidate once again. Mrs Thatcher returned it with a note. ‘When I come to write it all down on one sheet of paper,’ she lamented, ‘I seem to have done very little in the last 30 years.’84 Few would have agreed, but, in any event, the second thirty years would overcompensate for any slacking in the first.