One friend who witnessed her bad temper with letters she considered to have been badly drafted was her Parliamentary Private Secretary, Clive Bossom.
She used to get in a terrible tiz, crossing out paragraphs and writing things like ‘Rot!’, ‘Bad Grammar’ or ‘Double Dutch’ in the margins. Once or twice I saw her tear up letters. Needless to say, this did not make her loved by the civil servants who wrote them. I remember one angry mandarin complaining to me, ‘That bloody woman. Her job is to sign letters, not to read them’.33
Even if she sometimes upset her officials, her mastery of her brief impressed them. Another tongue-in-cheek complaint to Bossom was, ‘This Minister seems to know the Beveridge Report*** by heart’.34
She showed that she had a heart for matters more human than the small print of Beveridge, by trying to change the law in order to give more help to widows. She attempted to persuade her minister, and on one occasion the prime minister, to relax the earnings rule for widowed mothers: ‘I thought that if a woman who had lost her husband, but still had children to support, decided to try to earn a little more through going out to work, she should not lose pension for doing so. Perhaps as a woman I had a clearer view of what problems widows faced.’35
Margaret Thatcher was frustrated in her efforts to relax the earnings rule by one of the time-honoured arguments of the civil service. Her officials repeatedly claimed there would be ‘repercussions’ in other parts of the benefit system if the rules were changed. She came to hate the Whitehall word ‘repercussions’, as it compelled her to defend the indefensible in adjournment debates and Parliamentary Questions on the earnings rule. When she was out of office, following the general election of 1964, she was amazed when the incoming Labour government decided to ignore the so-called repercussions and to change the earnings rule in the way she had been arguing. ‘The moral was clear to me: bureaucratic logic is no substitute for ministerial judgment’, she commented.36 It was a lesson she took to heart. It stood her in good stead in her frequent clashes with the civil service after she became prime minister.
During her stint at MPNI, the judgement of her minister on the abilities of Margaret Thatcher steadily improved. John Boyd-Carpenter, who had initially treated his new junior colleague with condescension on the grounds that ‘To the male eye, she always looked as though she had spent the morning with the coiffeur and the afternoon with the couturier’, soon revised his opinion upwards. He came to feel that she showed ‘such spirit, competence and courage as a newly appointed Parliamentary Secretary … that I came to the conclusion that she would go very high in public life’.37
She in turn came to respect him for being ‘a real Tory’, with deep roots in a private hinterland that ranged from a passion for vegetable gardening to serving as a church warden for forty years. She learned much from her minister, not least from his mastery of the House of Commons. One anecdote of her apprenticeship, which she told at John Boyd-Carpenter’s memorial service in 1998, involved him cooling her down on the front bench during a parliamentary confrontation by whispering, ‘Margaret, I know that you are enjoying yourself, but do remember our object is to get the Bill through!’38
Her best moment of enjoyment in the House came after the ‘Night of the Long Knives’. This was Fleet Street’s headline for a badly mishandled reshuffle in which Macmillan sacked seven cabinet ministers including his Chancellor, Selwyn Lloyd, on 13 July 1962. The Tory back-benchers were shocked and sullen over this bloodletting. The Labour Party was jubilant.
In the middle of this debacle, Margaret Thatcher seized her moment. It could have been one of discomfort, for she had suddenly been deprived of a minister by the promotion of John Boyd-Carpenter to the cabinet. In the chaos of the cull of ministers below the cabinet (where the reshuffle was wider and even more botched), no successor to him was chosen for several days. This left an awkward vacuum.
The Monday after the Night of the Long Knives, 16 July, Parliamentary Questions to the non-existent Minister for Pensions and National Insurance were first business in the House of Commons. So, Margaret Thatcher had to fulfil the unusual task of answering fourteen questions single-handed. She rose to the challenge with gusto. At the peak of Labour knockabout on the issue of when Macmillan would be drawing his own pension, the Parliamentary Secretary demurely promised to pass on the opposition’s comments to ‘my new chief’. Then she added sotto voce after a well-timed pause, ‘when I have one’.39
Laughter in the House. She had even learned how to make a joke.
IN THE CONSTITUENCY
Like most new Members of Parliament, Margaret Thatcher took great pains to carry out her constituency duties. Every Friday afternoon she held a ‘surgery’ to which local residents came with their problems. Before the age of emails, the phrase ‘I’ll go and see my MP about it’ symbolised a well-used channel of communication between the elected and the electorate. Upholding this tradition, the Member for Finchley soon made an impact by both her availability and her ability in the service of her constituents. One of her party workers, Derek Owens, recalled:
My word, she worked hard for us. She was a real hands-on lady when she was doing case work. In her early days, I remember taking her to see how the other half lived in Lodge Lane, North Finchley, which is one of our poorest areas. When we got to a really run-down property with holes in the ceiling and no bathroom it turned out that she knew all about the problems of the old lady who lived there because she had visited her twice before. ‘Hello, Mrs Smith. How is your acne treatment going? Has it cleared up yet?’ was Margaret’s greeting. I was most impressed that she knew even the back streets of her constituency so well.40
On a more cerebral level of communication, Margaret Thatcher was approached at one of her surgeries in 1963 by a clever fifth-former from Christ’s College, Finchley. He was doing his A-level coursework on the British constitution, and wanted to ask his MP some detailed questions about whether the voting system should be reformed by introducing proportional representation. ‘You’re not a Liberal, are you?’ was Margaret Thatcher’s opening question to her young constituent. Fortunately for him, the answer was no, so the sixteen-year-old was given the full benefit of her views on this subject. ‘She obviously loved teaching’, recalled the boy. ‘She made a big impression on me by being wonderfully frank and vigorous in her arguments.’41
The impressed schoolboy was Jonathan Sacks, who in later life became the Chief Rabbi of Britain’s Orthodox Jews. As a teenager he formed a relationship with Margaret Thatcher, returning to her office to get more help with his weekly essays, and persuading her to speak at Christ’s College Debating Society. In the vote of thanks at the end of the evening, another pupil described her as ‘Queen Boadicea, equipped with Hansard and hatpin’.42 It was not a bad description of her fierce and forensic style as a debater.
Margaret Thatcher was regularly in Finchley, but never quite of Finchley. She chose neither to live in her constituency, nor to have any kind of pied à terre there. In her thirty-three years as Member for the borough she never spent a single night in it.
An interesting aspect of her electorate was its unusually high concentration of Jewish voters, who constituted about 20 per cent of the population. Margaret Thatcher felt a particular affection and affinity for this community. ‘She was an outsider herself; she had a true sense of religion, and she admired many Jewish values’, recalled Lord Sacks. ‘In particular, she liked the Jewish emphasis on accountability and responsibility, on entrepreneurial ambition mixed with compassion and on the priority Jews accord to giving back to their community.’43
What Jonathan Sacks spotted in the 1960s about Margaret Thatcher’s rapport with Jews seemed to be confirmed during her Downing Street years. She appointed more Jews as cabinet ministers than any previous prime minister in British history. Harold Macmillan was reported to have quipped that her government contained more Estonians than Etonians. If this was the Finchley factor it was much in the public interest, for the names of her Jewish m
inisters and No. 10 advisers give their own testimony to the Prime Minister’s sharp eye for talent.†††
Meanwhile, from the other side of the Middle East, it was a source of amusement that the biggest donor to the Finchley Conservative Association in the early 1960s was Prince Naif bin Abdulaziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia. He owned two houses in Totteridge Lane, the most expensive residential area of the constituency. In the 1964 general election, Margaret Thatcher canvassed Totteridge Lane and found the Prince in residence at Loxwood House. He was unfamiliar with the processes of democracy and the existence of women legislators. Nevertheless, he received the candidate with courtesy. After establishing in an interpreted conversation with her that his MP was both a Conservative and a monarchist, he sent a £1,000 cheque to her fighting fund.44
Margaret Thatcher’s diligence as a constituency MP did not diminish as she climbed to the highest rank in politics. As Prime Minister she carried out surgeries and public appearances in Finchley two or three times each month. It was geographically helpful that Chequers was only forty-five minutes away, but even so her assiduity to her constituents’ problems was outstanding. In return, Finchley provided her with a rock sold base in nine general elections.
FAMILY LIFE
Like many a hardworking young minister and Member of Parliament, Margaret Thatcher found that her family life suffered from her workload.
One sadness was that the gulf between Grantham and Westminster weakened her already fragile links with her parents. Beatrice Roberts died on 7 December 1960. For some years, the communication between mother and daughter had been almost non-existent. As Margaret put it in an unusually candid 1961 comment to Godfrey Winn of the Daily Express: ‘I loved my mother dearly, but after 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.’45
The widowed Alfred Roberts came to stay with Margaret and Denis for the first Christmas after his wife’s death. He was not an easy guest, outlasting his welcome. ‘Re Pop – he is determined to stay with us both as long as possible’, wrote Margaret to Muriel. ‘He dreads the thought of going home. At the moment, it is most difficult here.’ In the same letter, she told her elder sister; ‘I shall have to shunt Pop off on Saturday 14th Jan … Will this be all right with you?’ She advised Muriel to set a definite date for their father’s return to Grantham. ‘Otherwise he will just hang on and on and not take any hints.’46
For his part, Alfred Roberts gave signs of resentment that his younger daughter was too busy to answer his letters promptly. One year she forgot his birthday. She was not unduly neglectful of her father, but he became a low priority in her life. She was too preoccupied with her career to give him much of her attention.
The same complaint could have been levelled at her by any other member of her family. In 1960, the Evening News published an interview with Margaret Thatcher that read like a caricature, as she explained the compatibility of her daily routine with motherhood and marriage. ‘However busy I am, I always manage to phone the twins shortly before 6 pm’, she said, adding rather defensively on the subject of Denis: ‘You will be wondering what happens to my husband in the evenings when the House is in session and I am not at home. He is every bit as busy as I am, if not more so … it is rare for him to be at home for more than one evening a week.’47
This was true, but it was not quite the whole truth. Denis also worked hard. But his wife’s obsession with her duties was becoming more than he had bargained for. He stayed in the pub after leaving his office until closing time. He spent more and more evenings with his mother and sister Joy, who lived together in Notting Hill Gate. It was one of the sadnesses of Denis’s life that his wife never got on well with his mother. Mrs Thatcher senior was an exuberant, joke-cracking lady who loved having her son to dinner, and enjoyed entertaining her grandchildren amidst gales of laughter and funny stories. By contrast, the humourless Margaret never had a single meal in her mother-in-law’s house. It was an unexplained and unattractive example of her tendency to bear grudges over some earlier contretemps between the two Thatcher women.
A further erosion of harmony in the marriage was caused by Margaret’s enthusiasm for accepting weekend speaking engagements, not just in her own constituency but all over the country. As a junior minister, she exceeded the call of duty in her willingness to address audiences on a Saturday.
One weekend in the summer of 1963, she made a tour of old age pensioner associations in the West Country. The last stop on her travels was at The Walnut Tree Centre in Taunton. The local MP, Edward du Cann, recalled:
She went down extremely well with the pensioners, but when she came over to my house for tea afterwards, she did not go down so well with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Reggie Maudling. He was staying with us. He, like me, had spent the day watching a cricket match between our village and a team of City editors that included Fred Ellis, Patrick Sergeant and other great names from national newspapers. Reggie was quite a laid back character. So he found it difficult to relate to this eager beaver of a junior minister, who wanted to explain the details of how she had answered questions from OAPs about their pensions on a Saturday. He found her not at all relaxed or sociable. I remember him saying, ‘She’s far too over-keen’.’48
Her over-keenness to be away on official engagements had an impact at home. Denis gradually found that he preferred to go sailing on a yacht named Winnie with his rugby-club friends at weekends. The alternative was to come back to an empty house or to a wife overwhelmed with ministerial papers from her red boxes.
Their children felt the weight of her workload too. She was often an absent mother. Even when she was with them at home, she could be completely obsessed by her job.
An example of her ability to cut herself off from the family life around her came one Saturday when Top of the Pops was blaring from the TV to the delight of Mark and Carol. When a particularly noisy number raised the decibel level, Carol asked her mother, sitting beside her on the sofa: ‘Is the television disturbing you, Mum?’
No reply. Carol repeated the question.
‘Pardon, dear? The TV?’ answered a surprised Margaret. ‘Oh, I didn’t realise it was on.’49
Carol was later to write: ‘When I look back, I have no doubt that my mother’s political ambitions – and the single-mindedness with which she pursued them – eclipsed our family and social life.’50
Denis was another side of the eclipse. He was away a great deal on overseas business trips and at weekend sporting events. The absences of their parents led to a certain dysfunctionality in the upbringing of the twins. But they were not the complaining types. Somehow the family stuck together, although a lot of the glue had to be provided by outsiders, particularly by a hardworking nanny called Abby.
In 1964, Denis nearly became unstuck when he went through a particularly bad patch of business worries. He had a form of nervous breakdown. In his account of this episode:
My doctor said that I was making myself ill working at that pace and if I carried on then I was endangering my health. And then he handed me an ultimatum. ‘There’s nothing wrong with you physically but if you don’t stop working so hard, you are going to be very ill indeed. You’ve simply got to take some time off.’ I got myself on a boat – it shook Margaret – and took myself off to South Africa.’51
His sabbatical may well have shaken his wife, but it avoided the breakdown of his health and the break-up of their marriage. How close did he come to these disasters? According to an old friend, unnamed but quoted in Carol Thatcher’s biography of her father:
He was terribly depressed and decided to go to South Africa to sort himself out. I knew he was unhappy because he discussed it with me. He had his mother and Joy, who doted on him, and a wife who was totally absorbed in her political career.52
Denis enjoyed an idyllic few months off in a country he loved. He saw old friends and relatives, and became absorbed in learning the art of photography. He found the long sea
voyages to and from the Cape particularly relaxing. Above all, he did a great deal of thinking about how to resolve the problems that had grown into his mid-life crisis.
The biggest strategic decision he took was to sell his business. The Atlas Preservative Company was profitable but under-capitalised. Denis decided to lift the load off his shareholders and make an approach to Castrol Oil. An agreed takeover was completed within six months. The deal put the equivalent of over a million pounds into his bank account. Denis went on running Atlas, but with the backing of a powerful parent company behind him. He also secured a seat on Castrol’s main board, with a package that included a company car, share options, plus a good salary and pension. From then on, the financial stability of the Thatcher family was assured.
Margaret steered her way through the rough passages that preceded this success with outward calm, although she must have had inner worries.
In the constituency, she was unsettled by the brash claims of her Liberal challenger John Pardoe who predicted victory for himself. This was hot air. The Finchley result in the general election of October 1964 was better than expected. Margaret Thatcher was re-elected with a majority of 8,802.
The national result was also better than expected for the Conservatives. Sir Alec Douglas-Home, the most mocked and satirised Prime Minister in history, made a startling comeback in the campaign and was only just pipped at the winning post. The new Labour government, after cliffhanging recounts in a handful of marginals, particularly Meriden, eventually had a majority of just four in the new House of Commons. But a defeat is a defeat, and its consequences sent Margaret Thatcher’s spirits plummeting.
Denis, who missed the whole of the election campaign, remained in South Africa until late December. She could not turn to him when she lost her ministerial post and perks. Nor was he around when she suffered the disappointment of being kept in place as an opposition spokesman at the same level for the same department. She deserved better than being asked to soldier on as shadow junior minister for Pensions and National Insurance. Her career appeared to have hit a roadblock.
Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality Page 14