Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  This understanding was reached in theory, but was, in reality, more of a misunderstanding. In a memo of 7 January 1960, a Ministry of Housing and Local Government official, C. J. Pearce, reported on an exhausting session with Mrs Thatcher and the parliamentary draftsman, John Fiennes. The new Member was being demanding:

  Mrs Thatcher wanted the Bill strengthened in ways which seemed to indicate that she was expecting a much more drastic Bill than we have had in mind. Some of her remarks suggested, moreover, that she would not put much conviction into opposing amendments which in her view would strengthen the Bill … Mrs Thatcher … is obsessed with the minority of the councils who might act irresponsibly, whereas we have had in mind the great majority of local authorities whose relations with the press are basically satisfactory. I could not help thinking that it was a pity … that a Bill of such importance to local authorities should be in the hands of a Private Member whose knowledge of local government is limited, and who clearly holds a low opinion of local authorities, their members and officials.19*

  Tension rose. On 11 January Mrs Thatcher wrote to Keith Joseph, the junior minister at the Ministry, saying that she was ‘somewhat disappointed with the present attempts to deal with a penalty clause’; she was also unhappy that the Bill was not permitted to extend the same rules beyond councils to what, twenty years later, became known as quangos (quasi-autonomous non-governmental organizations). Dame Evelyn Sharp, the Ministry’s Permanent Secretary, who was later to become famous through her appearances in Richard Crossman’s Diaries, became alarmed. Mrs Thatcher, she said, ‘seems to be going back on the clear understanding which I thought we had reached with her’. Dame Evelyn told Brooke that ‘if she writes to me I would propose to remind her in no uncertain terms of what passed between us.’20 In this tussle between civil servants who essentially wanted the Bill to achieve very little, and Mrs Thatcher, who wanted it to do what it purported to do, one can see, in miniature, the character of a thousand future disagreements between her and officials. On 11 January, Henry Brooke appended a shrewd little handwritten note to Dame Evelyn’s memo. Mrs Thatcher’s technique, he wrote, ‘is to say she must have much more than she really expects to get!’ Brooke pursued a serpentine course of supporting the Bill and distancing himself from it at the same time.

  Margaret Thatcher rose for the first time in the House of Commons on 5 February 1960, and moved the second reading of her Bill. W. F. Deedes, the Member for Ashford, who was sitting just behind her, noticed that she had turned herself out particularly well for the occasion. With a certain male vagueness, he remembered her wearing ‘a patterned gown. The dominant note was chestnut.’ He noted also how economically she used her notes – ‘a model of how to use notes in the House of Commons’: her speech was learnt pretty well by heart and delivered with great self-confidence. The speech’s success is indicated by Deedes’s erroneous memory that it was only seven minutes long:21 it was actually twenty-seven minutes.* Because she was legislating, Mrs Thatcher explained at once, she would dispense with the usual formalities of a maiden speech, which required that the speech be uncontroversial and make frequent reference to the joys of the constituency: ‘… I know that the constituency of Finchley which I have the honour to represent would not wish me to do other than come straight to the point.’ The ‘point’ was the same, she said, as the purpose of the original 1908 Bill of ‘guarding the rights of members of the public by enabling the fullest information to be obtained for them in regard to the actions of their representatives upon local authorities’. She emphasized what large sums local authorities spent (£1,400 million a year in England and Wales), and declared that ‘the first purpose in admitting the Press is that we may know how those moneys are being spent.’ The second, related basis of the Bill, and here she quoted from Sir Oliver Franks’s report on Tribunals of Inquiry, was that ‘Publicity is the greatest and most effective check against any arbitrary action.’

  Private Members’ Bills were, by convention, debated on a Friday, and it was therefore not unusual for the House to be thinly attended for them as MPs returned to their constituencies for the weekend. With her customary thoroughness, though, Mrs Thatcher had written individually to 250 of her backbench Conservative colleagues (‘I have always believed in the impact of a personal, handwritten letter – even from someone you barely know’)22 asking them to attend and vote. Many did. Her Bill was carried overwhelmingly, by 152 votes to 39. And although some of the House’s favourable reaction to her speech was formulaic – the convention that a new Member be heard politely and praised afterwards – it is clear that she had won genuine admiration. Barbara Castle,† who was to become, after Mrs Thatcher, the most important woman politician in British history, was enthusiastic from her left-wing point of view: ‘it is always the progressive movements which are supporters of publicity.’ ‘It is conservatism’, she added, ‘which always needs secrecy to survive, and not Socialism.’ Charlie Pannell, who opposed the Bill, nevertheless praised Mrs Thatcher’s ‘rather beautiful maiden speech’.* W. F. Deedes, winding up in support, congratulated Mrs Thatcher on ‘her courage in laying hands on such a Bill’. As for representatives of the government, they were ready in their praise, if cautious in their endorsement. Henry Brooke said that Mrs Thatcher’s ‘fluency’ had achieved the unusual feat of making a parliamentary reputation on a Friday: ‘no words of mine can be too high praise for the brilliance of the speech.’ He stood at a distance from the Bill, however, suggesting that it was a ‘labyrinth’ for a private Member, that he preferred a code of conduct to law and that the Bill might fail.23 As so often in the key moments of her early political career, her husband was not there to see it: Denis was on a business trip to the Middle East.

  The immediate result of the speech was a new rash of press attention. ‘Fame and Margaret Thatcher made friends yesterday,’ said the Sunday Dispatch (though really it had been the day before), and the paper manoeuvred her into betraying her ambition even as she disclaimed it: ‘I couldn’t even consider a Cabinet post until my twins are older.’24 Later in the month, she was writing in the Evening News, however, under the headline ‘I SAY A WIFE CAN DO TWO JOBS.’25 And a few days later, she told the Daily Express ‘What my daughter must learn in the next nine years’. Margaret wanted Carol to go to university: ‘I don’t want Carol to be taught too many practical subjects in her last years at school, but to learn academic subjects – yes, to slog away.’ She wanted her to learn ‘the domestic arts’ too, but much of non-academic education could come from home, however wearing the process: ‘Teaching manners and the social graces to a child of six and a half gives rise to alternate hope and despair. The nagging seems endless …’† Girls should do their best to look good, she thought, because ‘a girl’s appearance is very important for her self-confidence,’ and if Carol wouldn’t listen to her mother on the subject of make-up, she would ‘send her to a teenage beauty centre’.

  Margaret’s hopes for her son and daughter were not very different, she told the paper. She wanted both to have a good education and a worthwhile career. ‘If money were short,’ she went on, revealing her absolute assumption that her children would have a private education, ‘and I had to choose between educating my son or my daughter, I would choose entirely on merit. (Except that my husband would probably insist that Mark went to his old school.)’* But she added that a boy can regulate the course of his life via his career more than a girl because ‘To her there is one great unknown factor – marriage.’ She considered the range of possibilities about her little daughter’s marriage – being a young mother or an old mother, being married to someone who is ‘a public figure’ – but did not envisage the idea that her daughter would not marry at all.26†

  Back in Parliament, Mrs Thatcher’s Bill wended a tortuous way through committee. The Bill would have been better framed as legislation for the protection of the public, including the press, rather than a question of press privileges alone. It was duly amended to do this, and became the Public Bod
ies (Admission to Meetings) Bill after overcoming a filibuster in committee by the Bill’s Labour opponents. She was able to make this change, however, only with a grant of government time, which put her more than ever at its mercy. The Bill was duly weakened the longer it was debated. Mrs Thatcher failed to get it applied to all committees with delegated powers, and a House of Lords amendment took all police authorities out of it. Keith Joseph complimented her on her ‘cogent, charming, lucid and composed manner’ but also said that the measure was ‘not ideally suited for a first venture into legislation’.27 The Bill became law at the end of October. It probably did not make a vast difference to the conduct of council business, but it founded Margaret Thatcher’s parliamentary reputation, and gave her and officials the first of the hundreds of bruising encounters which were later to become famous. On the BBC’s Any Questions? that November, Mrs Thatcher gave two answers born, perhaps, from her recent experience. On the abuse of politics, she said, ‘I loathe this modern tendency to try to find a form of words that takes the meaning out of anything that you may say.’ When asked about what form her eccentricity might take if she had any, she showed some self-awareness: ‘I think the form would take extreme bad temper, sacking everyone through inefficiency and doing everything myself. And it would probably be done a great deal better and a great deal quicker, but I should be miserable as a result.’28

  ‘I see according to the Press that Margaret was one of the only three women MPs who voted in favour of “birching”,’ Alfred Roberts wrote to Muriel in April 1961, ‘but don’t suppose voting against the Government will help her much in the party.’29 Mrs Thatcher had taken part in the standing committee debates on the Criminal Justice Bill. In February, maintaining the view she had put forward as a Finchley candidate, she spoke in support of an amendment from a fellow backbencher, Sir Thomas Moore, which would have restored the corporal punishment for young offenders which Labour had abolished in 1948. She argued that ‘the true purpose of punishment’ should be ‘the protection of the community’ and that this protection was now inadequate because the purpose had been ignored by ‘our desire for the humanitarian reform of offenders’. She did not believe that rehabilitation always worked: ‘Some cases which come before the courts concern persons who are so hardened, vicious and amoral that a much more curative element is needed in the sentence.’ This was true of ‘the new young type of criminal, who uses violence not for the purpose of robbery, but for the sake of violence, and who takes a pleasure in inflicting violence’. ‘I do not agree’, said Mrs Thatcher, ‘that crime is a symptom of mental disease,’ and she went on to argue that, by saying that it was, ‘we encourage in him [the criminal] a feeling of self-justification’ which meant that ‘we may completely blot out all feeling of guilt or shame.’ She did not like corporal punishment, she said, but it was ‘the only alternative readily available to beat the crime wave in the coming years’.30

  Alfred Roberts was almost certainly wrong in thinking that his daughter’s stand would do her harm in the party. Corporal punishment, at that time, was a touchstone issue among Conservatives, and those in favour of it were popular with the rank and file. In her speech, indeed, Mrs Thatcher was conscious of the opposite problem from that which her father feared, and was at pains to ward it off: ‘I do not in any way seek either publicity or promotion by way of rebellion, but I do not think that can stop one from holding sincere views in this matter when I consider that it is necessary.’31 This slightly odd formulation (what are the occasions when she would not have considered it necessary to hold sincere views?) was uttered at a time when party feeling was running quite strongly against the government on this issue. In the vote to which her father’s letter refers, Mrs Thatcher was one of sixty-nine rebels, and at the Conservative Women’s Conference in the same month, the liberal Home Secretary R. A. Butler was given a hard time about it. It is quite possible, indeed, since the whips sought always to balance opinion, that her promotion to ministerial rank was hastened by this signal that she stood slightly on the right of the party and was prepared to say so. This was the only occasion in her entire parliamentary career when Margaret Thatcher voted against the line of her own party.

  The Alfred Roberts who had written to Muriel on the subject was a changed man. In the summer of the previous year, the health of his wife Beatrice had started to give more anxiety. In August 1960, he thanked Muriel for having had them both to stay: ‘we are glad to have been able to come down to you and Margaret for the holiday … for time is getting on with us now.’ ‘I hope Margaret will be able to relax for a few days now,’ he added.32 The following month, he wrote and described his wife’s poor nights, noting too that Mark was just off to boarding school aged seven, and that Margaret had just had central heating installed.33 At the end of the month, he told his elder daughter that ‘Mummy is having another rest in bed today’ but that the doctor ‘says she’s getting better and nothing to worry about’.34 By the time of his next surviving letter, written on 16 December that year, Beatrice had died.

  There is no mention of her mother’s death or illness in any of Mrs Thatcher’s correspondence (though what survives is certainly incomplete). In an undated letter written roughly in mid-September, she describes to Muriel the problems with the central heating and the hot water, Carol’s anxieties about her new school and the difficulty of managing while the family nanny was away. She says nothing about her parents. There is also no record of her seeing her mother after August 1960, though the fact cannot be established for certain since her engagement diaries for that period do not survive.* The only sign of strain, though there could easily have been other causes, such as the burden of parliamentary work, was that Mrs Thatcher fainted in the House of Commons on 24 November. Throughout her career, she was inclined to faint, because of low blood pressure. The Yorkshire Post, the only paper to have reported the incident, attributed her minor collapse to overwork.

  Beatrice Roberts died in Grantham on 7 December 1960. The family sent out a printed card thanking people for their condolences, in the names of Alfred, Muriel and Margaret. The day before, the Liverpool Daily Post published a chirpy piece by Margaret about how to combine family and political work. The woman in politics, she wrote, ‘must have a complete fascination for the subject’, something which, like being musical or mathematical, is innate, not learnt; ‘charm is not enough!’ she declared, a woman must also have ‘courage and conviction, for without these qualities the others are hollow and useless’. At half-term, she added, the children always come to Westminster ‘and their greatest joy is to climb Big Ben’.35 The article reads strangely in the (unmentioned) context of her mother’s final illness.

  Margaret and Denis invited the widowed Alfred Roberts to come and stay for his first Christmas on his own. From Dormers, he wrote to Muriel ‘so that you may know that I am getting on all right’. ‘Of course I miss Mummy,’ he went on, ‘and more so as every one is busy on their different jobs and engagements.’ At Dormers, ‘it seems lonely for a large part of the day.’36 On 3 January 1961, still staying with Margaret, Alfred wrote to Muriel to announce his arrival at her house in a week’s time. The twins were having friends to tea, he said, ‘so I shall come up to my room to escape the din.’ That night, he was going to the cinema in Bromley with Denis and Margaret – ‘it is one of the very few nights they have free.’ Margaret’s version of the stay, written to Muriel after Christmas, betrayed growing impatience: ‘Re Pop* – he is determined to stay with us both as long as possible. He told Abi† that he dreads the thought of going home. At the moment it is most difficult here as Mark and Carol are sleeping together and both disturb one another a great deal. Added to that Pop tends to wake them both when he goes to the toilet about 5–5.30 a.m. He is eating the most enormous meals and doing absolutely nothing.’ With the return of Parliament, Margaret felt that she must move her father on: ‘I shall have to shunt Pop off on Saturday 14th Jan … Will this be all right with you?’ And she recommended that her sister set a clear tim
e for their father’s eventual return to Grantham, ‘Otherwise he will just hang on and on and not take any hints.’37

  After he returned from Essex to Grantham, the widowed Alfred Roberts wrote a series of bleak letters to his elder daughter. Not for the first time, he felt sorry for himself, and a little neglected by his younger daughter. ‘I am trying to get myself adjusted to the new circumstances which isn’t easy, but things are improving,’ he wrote on 21 February. ‘If I can get through the next four or five weeks I shall have got over the worst part … I don’t suppose, by the look of things, I shall get any letter from Margaret again this week.’ In fact, he was mistaken, but not much comforted, for he wrote again on 1 March, ‘Have had a short letter from Margaret, but no enquiries as to how I am getting on … She seems frantically busy of course.’ He also mentioned that he had made a new will: ‘You and Margaret are Executor and Trustees and also the estate will be divided between you. Any little gratuities to anyone else you will decide.’ On 24 March he describes learning how to iron his own shirts and says, ‘at the moment I am not feeling quite so lonely.’ And on 19 April he wrote to thank Muriel for a birthday present: ‘It is good of you to remember me like this. Unfortunately Margaret forgot but expect her mind was all on the Budget that day.’ Transferring some of his sense of neglect to others he adds, ‘I hope Margaret will remember to arrange for the boys [Muriel’s sons] to visit the House of Commons – it will be just too bad if she doesn’t do anything about it for it would be such an outing for them.’ Perhaps Muriel reminded Margaret about their father’s birthday, for a week or so later, Alfred informed her ‘Margaret wrote to apologise for forgetting my birthday and has asked me to let her know what to send.’38