Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  It would be wrong to say that Mrs Thatcher was undutiful in her behaviour to her father. There were other occasions on which she had him to stay, solving the twins’ space problem – and perhaps her own irritation at his presence – by putting him in a local hotel; and in June she, Denis and Mark took him to the Test match.39 The fact that he noticed a week when no letter from her arrives shows that, in most weeks, she did write. In these months, no letters from Margaret to Alfred survive, but one or two slightly later ones do. These show the busy daughter relating, in friendly though not intimate terms, the latest doings of herself and her family. At the beginning of September 1961 she tells him that she has taken the children to Camber Sands on the Sussex coast and that they have been burgled at Dormers (‘I was disturbed [by the sound of their entry] but told myself not to be so silly and that I was imagining things’), losing their jars of sixpences, the twins’ birthday money and jodhpur boots.40 In midsummer of the following year, Margaret tells her father that she has just had a ‘most interesting morning’ presiding over an international symposium on the rehabilitation of the disabled, that she has a new agent in Finchley (‘he talks rather a lot’), and that she has been to Ascot races (a contrast with her visit to the Derby a dozen years earlier which she had concealed from Alfred). She proudly boasts that she has been with Denis to a Buckingham Palace cocktail party. ‘The Queen,’ she writes with a touch of unconscious self-application, ‘has a much stronger personality than most people realise and she is certainly not overshadowed by the Duke of Edinburgh.’41 But what the whole correspondence – father to elder daughter, Margaret to Muriel, younger daughter to father – suggests is a woman so busy and so keen to get on that her family roots do not interest her very much and her family problems do not engage her imagination. Carol confirmed this, recalling that there was no sense of a Roberts clan, or of a strong influence of her grandfather in her childhood. Her mother ‘did not yo-yo up and down to Grantham’.42 In April 1962, after his birthday, Alfred Roberts wrote to Muriel as in the previous year to thank her for her presents. He mentions that he is going to stay with Margaret the following week, but says to Muriel: ‘It is your affection that helps me to stand up against the awful loneliness that sometimes hits me.’43 It seems unlikely that he wrote a letter of comparable warmth to Margaret at this time, or received one from her. Quite soon, Alfred Roberts married Cissie Hubbard, the widow of a local farmer, and his loneliness therefore ceased to be a problem for his daughters.

  Exactly a year earlier, Margaret had given a revealing interview to Godfrey Winn, one of the most famous feature journalists of the age, in the Daily Express. Winn took the Queen’s imminent birthday (21 April) as the cue for his interview, and wrote: ‘The woman opposite me on the sofa could not have been born and brought up in any other country except ours. With the Queen she shares not only a birthday year [in fact, she was born in the year before the Queen], but possesses the same flawless, cold-water, utterly English complexion.’44 He said that he registered Mrs Thatcher – although of course he knew her background – not as a Grantham grocer’s daughter but ‘as someone from an upper-middle-class background whose husband enjoyed taking her with him to shoot in Scotland’. It is reasonable to assume that Mrs Thatcher had desired this effect (though Denis did not shoot), and had deliberately moved herself a long way from the mahogany counter in North Parade. This context, perhaps, helps to explain her remarkably frank comment to Winn about the mother who had died only a few months earlier: ‘I loved my mother dearly but after I was 15 we had nothing more to say to each other. It wasn’t her fault. She was weighed down by the home, always being in the home.’ There can be no doubt of her desire to escape some of her background, particularly that part which, had she stayed in Grantham, would have circumscribed her because of her sex. To her father, even as she forgot to send him a birthday present, she paid tribute. ‘He made me read widely,’ she told Winn, ‘and for that I owe him everything.’45

  On 9 October 1961, Margaret Thatcher was offered her first government post by the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan. With C. M. Woodhouse, who took up a post at Aviation, she was the first of the new intake to be promoted. In his diary’s only mention of the future prime minister, Macmillan wrote: ‘Mrs Thatcher, a clever young woman MP, and Monty Woodhouse are the newcomers.’46 Mrs Thatcher was also the youngest woman ever to have been made a minister, and the first with a young family at the time of appointment. Her job was parliamentary under-secretary at the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance. Her salary was £3,250 a year. As had become usual in these important junctures of her life, Denis was away – on an export tour of Africa – when the offer was made. She told the papers that she had not dared cable him with the news before it was made public, so he learnt about it after everyone else.47

  One newspaper said that ‘She was dressed like any other housewife up to town for the day. A cossack hat in coney fur covered most of her fair hair which is just going grey at the temples. She was wearing a green wool jersey dress and a fine two-row necklace of pearls gleamed at her throat.’48 When Mrs Thatcher saw the Prime Minister on appointment, however, she was, by her own account, smarter still. She wore ‘my best outfit, this time, sapphire blue’.49 And the party took full propaganda advantage of her arrival by putting her on the platform at the party conference in Brighton on the potentially unlucky Friday 13 October, her thirty-sixth birthday. She emerged, she recalled, ‘from a royal blue car and wearing a royal blue dress and hat’.50

  None of this sartorial excitement meant that her job was considered important, or that the party leadership had grand plans for Mrs Thatcher. Her very junior post was one of the few which were, in effect, reserved for women, partly because much of the work concerned pensions for widows. When Patricia Hornsby-Smith had resigned at the end of August, Mrs Thatcher was given strong hints that the job would soon be hers. In her memoirs, Mrs Thatcher records that Macmillan ‘characteristically’ advised her not to turn up to her new office before eleven o’clock the following morning, adding that she should then ‘look around and come away. I shouldn’t stay too long.’51 She does not pick up that his suggestion probably reflected his low opinion of the job he had offered her. Women MPs at that time always ended up with ‘the welfare thing’; ‘you took a woman in, but you gave her welfare,’ Mrs Thatcher recalled, ‘either a welfare or education or social services job.’52 The MPNI post did not interest many men, certainly not the men who aspired to run the Conservative Party. It was an unpolitical job, heavy on detail. Mrs Thatcher summed up its nature in an interview with ITN three days after her appointment: ‘… I think it offers scope both for the human side, which is helping people who are in need of help and also on the financial side and seeing that the scheme is sound.’ The job concerned the nuts and bolts of the welfare state. Few people thought this mattered much at the time. Despite her preference for a man’s job, especially an economic one, Margaret Thatcher gradually learnt that it did. It taught her how welfare worked, and did not work, and why government spent so much money.

  When Mrs Thatcher arrived at the Ministry’s office in John Adam Street for the first time, she found her minister, John Boyd-Carpenter,* waiting for her at the front door. Always susceptible to gestures of gallantry, she was impressed. So was Boyd-Carpenter by her. At first he had assumed that her appointment was what would now be called tokenism, or, as he put it, ‘just one of Macmillan’s gimmicks’, but ‘I soon found how wrong I had been to harbour such doubts. With her quick trained barrister’s brain she mastered quickly the intricacies of National Insurance. And despite the fact that to the male eye she always looked as if she had spent the morning with the coiffeur and the afternoon with the couturier, she worked long and productive hours in the ministry.’53 That same male eye had, in fact, spotted her talent from the very beginning, but had also been suspicious of it. On her arrival at the Ministry, she had also met the Permanent Secretary, Sir Eric Bowyer, a famously stern Glaswegian. Like Boyd-Carpenter, he immedia
tely granted to Mrs Thatcher a privilege he gave to no other junior minister, probably in deference to her sex. He called on her in her office rather than demanding that she come to him, and always maintained this habit. After they had met her, the two men conferred. What did Bowyer think of her, Boyd-Carpenter wondered? ‘She’s very able. She will go a long way,’ said the Permanent Secretary. The minister nodded grim agreement: ‘She’s trouble. What can we do to keep her busy?’54 Mrs Thatcher was invited to make a study of the role of women in the benefits and National Insurance system. Her paper on the subject has not survived. But, according to Michael Partridge, at that time the private secretary to Bowyer, it was an impressive piece of work which foreshadowed the equalizing of the employment, pension and taxation rights of women which Mrs Thatcher was to put into practice in the 1980s.55 It says something about the attitudes of the time that such a study was considered a dead-end thing to do.

  Mrs Thatcher’s day-to-day duties, however, concerned detail, not policy. The annual reports of the Ministry combine highly technical accounts of changes in the mechanisms of delivery of benefits with occasional specific anecdotes designed to show touches of humanity:

  A pensioner with a double amputation mentioned when attending an Artificial Limb and Appliance Centre that he was in difficulties about buying a pony for his firewood business; the Welfare Officer approached BLESMA (British Limbless Ex-Servicemen’s Association) and Queen Mary’s (Roehampton) Samaritan Fund, who together contributed a substantial sum for a dapple grey pony.56

  Mrs Thatcher’s first ministerial outing in the House of Commons finds her, among other things, arguing about what constitutes an injury in the course of employment (‘Let us take the case of a worker who is going home to lunch when he stops to watch a cricket match and is hit by a cricket ball’).57 In the following week, she clashed with Barbara Castle about whether the ‘guardian’s allowance’ could be used to subsidize voluntary organizations. And she defended – though, according to her memoirs, this was against her private view – the operation of the ‘earnings rule’ which capped the amount of money which widows could earn when receiving a state pension,58 displaying a virtuoso knowledge of the detail involved.

  Two reactions to the new young minister were noticeable on the part of Mrs Thatcher’s parliamentary opponents. The first was what would now be considered a sexist appreciation of her charms. Willie Ross, for example, later famous as an anti-monarchist, said during a debate in the Commons, ‘We appreciate the honourable Lady’s statistics, but we do not like her figures – in the plural.’59 She seems to have been happy to play up to this banter. In another debate, again on the subject of the cost of abolishing the earnings rule, Mrs Thatcher declared, perhaps by accident, ‘I have got a really red-hot figure.’ When several Members shouted, ‘Hear, hear,’ she came back: ‘I am very glad that I am not wearing a red dress today. To continue, I have a bang up-to-the-minute figure.’60 The other reaction was a respect for her debating abilities which shaded into exasperation at her lawyerly tendency to argue a case cleverly through the detail without apparent human feeling. Sydney Silverman, the leading opponent of capital punishment, said of her arguments over a group of women known as ‘ten shilling widows’, whose husbands had died before 1948: ‘The honourable Lady has made a case … It is rather an administrative, bureaucratic, actuarial case – some people would call it a third-class insurance company case – but it satisfies her and I am not complaining.’61 Another Labour MP, John Mendelson, summed up her way of presenting her case (against a Labour motion complaining that benefits had not kept up with inflation) in terms which set the pattern for attacks in the future: ‘My impression at the end of the honourable Lady’s speech was that all she had given us was a purely academic performance. It was remarkable that she was capable of making a long speech on the tragic position of many of our old people without making any reference whatsoever to her real experience of how they live.’62 The notion of Margaret Thatcher’s heartlessness was born.

  In reply to such attacks, Mrs Thatcher was generally polite, but never conceded any ground, sometimes fighting back fiercely. ‘The honourable Member will forgive me if occasionally I say “Nonsense” to him,’ she told a frequent adversary, Douglas Houghton. ‘I am sure he will take it in the right spirit. Nevertheless, I meant it.’63 On the famous Night of the Long Knives, 13 July 1962, when Harold Macmillan tried to restore direction to his government by replacing seven out of the twenty-one members of his Cabinet, Mrs Thatcher found herself at the despatch box with a sore throat and without a minister because Boyd-Carpenter had just been promoted. She was full of spirit, however, joking that she would refer hostile comments from the Opposition to her minister ‘when I have one’, and fiercely attacking Michael Foot,* later to be the least successful Labour leader whom she faced, in the debate on the increased rate of National Assistance, as social security was then known. Foot was a ‘master of the twist’, she said (the dance of that name was just then fashionable), and she sounded a warning, implicitly critical of the policies of the government of which she was a part, that ‘Government expenditure … over the last three years has been taking an increasing proportion of the gross national product. Honourable Members on this side of the House will not take too happily to that.’ Foot’s demands for more spending would make things far, far worse, she said: ‘If we were to take the advice of eminent economists, coupled with the advice of the honourable Member for Ebbw Vale [Foot], we should have a riot and we would have no Army to quell it.’64 Boyd-Carpenter noted that, as well as her capacity to extract ‘the crucial issue’ from ‘a huge file bristling with National Insurance technicalities’, Mrs Thatcher also showed something more important still. ‘I first noted the courage when on the floor of the House of Commons she not only stood up to Richard Crossman† but, for all his formidable intellectual qualities, scored off him again and again by the quick and adroit use of facts and figures.’65 Crossman himself respected her: ‘She is rather a pal of mine, I got on very well with her when she was at Pensions … She is tough, able and competent …’66

  To understand how Mrs Thatcher saw her job and, indeed, how the entire welfare state was constructed, one must study three famous pieces of reform, begun in the Second World War, which dominated political thinking at the time and were accepted to a remarkable degree by the main parties. These were R. A. Butler’s Education Act of 1944, which developed the split system of grammar school and secondary modern; the 1944 White Paper on Employment Policy, heavily influenced by Keynes, which for the first time made it the government’s responsibility to manage the economy in order to maintain ‘a high and stable level of employment’ (soon interpreted as full employment); and the report by the economist William Beveridge, produced for Churchill’s wartime coalition in November 1942, on Social and Allied Services. In the course of her career, Margaret Thatcher was to wrestle unhappily with the first and break almost completely – though she carried it everywhere with her in her handbag – with the second. With the third, however, she never parted company. Beveridge contained what she regarded as a sensible, though in some respects flawed, blueprint for the welfare state. Much less radical in this area than most of her critics supposed, she tried, both as a junior minister and when she came to run the country, to apply Beveridge’s principles to the circumstances which then prevailed. When she became parliamentary secretary at MPNI, ‘The first step was to re-read the original Beveridge Report.’67

  Beveridge, who, like Keynes, was a Liberal in politics, sought to provide greater security for British citizens in all the changes and chances of their lives. The state needed to help, he believed, with systems of provision which guarded against ‘the interruption or destruction of earning power’. There should be special provision at times of birth, marriage and death. The great increase in longevity meant that there had to be proper pensions for all. His scheme was, he said, ‘first and foremost, a plan for insurance – of giving in return for contributions benefits up to subsistence
level, as of right and without means test, so that individuals may build freely upon it’. The main vehicle was National Insurance, paid through the worker’s weekly ‘stamp’ from his own wages and the employer’s contribution. Its benefits were paid out without regard to means. Recognizing that there would be times when people had run out of cover or not been able to contribute to National Insurance, Beveridge also devised National Assistance to answer this need. It was, naturally, means-tested. In addition, he argued that his plan could not work without the avoidance of mass unemployment (hence the drive for the 1944 White Paper), and without reasonable ‘free’ health care. ‘Medical treatment covering all requirements’, Beveridge wrote, ‘will be provided for all citizens by a national health service organised under the health departments.’ Out of this airy phrase, and meriting only a five-page ‘assumption’ in a 300-page report, one of the most important, difficult and expensive projects of any government ever – the National Health Service – was born.

  In planning as he did, Beveridge had a strong, innocent belief in the benign power of the state, but it was certainly not his intention to take away from individuals the incentive to look after themselves and their families, nor from private companies the ability to provide insurance. ‘The State in organising security’, he wrote in his report, ‘should not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility; in establishing a national minimum, it should leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than that minimum for himself and his family.’ One of his main reasons for not means-testing National Insurance was to avoid appearing to penalize thrift. ‘Management of one’s income’, he said, ‘is an essential element of a citizen’s freedom’ and it was ‘wrong in principle’ for the state to take the burden off insurance: ‘The insured person should not feel that income from idleness, however caused, can come from a bottomless purse.’ Therefore, when someone did have to be given National Assistance, the ‘provision of an income should be associated with treatment designed to bring the interruption of earnings to an end as soon as possible’.