I was also appalled by the way in which men fathered a child and then absconded, leaving the single mother – and the taxpayer – to foot the bill for their irresponsibility and condemning the child to a lower standard of living. I thought it scandalous that only one in three children entitled to receive maintenance actually benefited from regular payments. So – against considerable opposition from Tony Newton, the Social Security Secretary, and from the Lord Chancellor’s department – I insisted that a new Child Support Agency be set up, and that maintenance be based not just on the cost of bringing up a child but on that child’s right to share in its parents’ rising living standards. This was the background to the Child Support Act 1991.
I have a very clear memory of how her interest in a possible child support policy was aroused. I was answering Social Security Questions in the Commons, as departmental teams of ministers have to do monthly, fairly soon after I had joined the Department in July 1989. One of my questions was on the subject of child support in the event of a mother being abandoned by the father of her child. I answered that a group of officials from the Department were currently in Australia looking at the arrangements there which required absent fathers to pay maintenance. I added that we would be looking with interest at their findings, as we were concerned about the plight of mothers and children in this situation. The Evening Standard reported my answer that evening, and No. 10 came straight on the phone to the Department. I was immediately summoned to be dressed down by Tony Newton, the Secretary of State. How dare I make policy at the despatch box? What did I think I was doing? Why would the Prime Minister be interested in anything I said, as the most junior minister in the Department? And so on and so on. Tony Newton was the most mild-mannered and kindly man imaginable, but he was clearly terribly rattled. I weakly pointed out that I had been following the official departmental brief in my answer, but by this time he was beyond listening.
What followed was truly dramatic. He in his turn was summoned to No. 10 and told that Mrs T. wanted to pursue the policy. He was as knowledgeable as any official about all aspects of social security policy, and he could see that a morass of difficulties could attend the implementation of such a scheme. Moreover, the Lord Chancellor, Lord Mackay, had principled objections to maintenance arrangements being made outside a court of law. When Mrs Thatcher writes of opposition from Tony Newton and the Lord Chancellor she understates their views, but the legislation went ahead. History has proved that maybe they had a point.
While she appeared to be reluctant to accept that there were still real injustices for women in the workplace, in the City and in the professions, in which government might have intervened, she had no scruples about using her own gender to the utmost, for personal publicity as an MP and to give the best possible presentation of her case as party leader. She was not a vain woman, but she had at least two major makeovers during her career in order to look her best at all times. She considered it part of the job, but I believe she also enjoyed it.
Michael Jopling, her first Chief Whip when she became Prime Minister, writes,
I first met Margaret Thatcher soon after my election to the Commons in 1964. During the years of opposition until the Heath victory in 1970, I did not come to know her very well. But I recall being surprised and disappointed that such a good-looking woman dressed in a way that did not do her justice. I do not mean miniskirts, which many younger women wore; but the 1960s were a time of snappy dressing generally. When she did become Prime Minister her dress sense became much smarter and more elegant. Although the statue of her in the Members’ Lobby at Westminster is meant to be in her later years, the poorly sculptured suit reflects the earlier days.
Soon after she became Leader of the Conservative Party, she met Gordon Reece, a television producer, and with his advice set about changing her image. He advised her on the best outfits to wear for television appearances, and to abandon her hats (although she insisted on continuing to wear her pearls, a gift from Denis after the birth of the twins). He advised her of the importance of the tabloid press, popular radio programmes and women’s magazines. And so it was that she underwent a makeover at the hands of Woman’s Own. The magazine’s editor, Jane Reed, describes how Mrs Thatcher gave a whole afternoon to the exercise, which took place in her house, where she made tea for everyone in ‘her impeccably tidy kitchen’. At one stage she had to be photographed in a wonderful, long evening dress – so long, in fact, that she had to stand on a pile of telephone directories in order for the shot to be taken. She loved the whole thing and, true to type, took it all very seriously.
She realised that her voice needed improvement. She went to a voice coach from the National Theatre. As a result she managed to lower her voice, and gained approval for the result at a meeting with Sir Laurence Olivier.
Her hair was all-important to her, as it is to many women. She was much persuaded of the utility of heated rollers and took them on overseas trips with her, frequently offering to lend them to staff who were accompanying her. The hairdresser came to No. 10 at least three times a week, so that her hair would always look its best. She was very interested in fashion and would check what was being worn in Paris before visiting France. She strongly believed that to look immaculate at all times was an integral part of the job, and that it indicated that you were an organised and controlled person, important if you were a woman in an overwhelmingly male world. She also, quite clearly, enjoyed clothes, make-up and dressing well. It may even have been a relaxation for her, a kind of feminine hinterland into which she could allow herself to retreat, on the grounds that it was all part of the job.
She took advice from her great friend Mrs Cynthia Crawford, who organised her wardrobe so that the Prime Minister could change outfits quickly. Special occasions, like state visits or royal banquets, required outstanding but not overwhelming outfits, like the wonderful gown, designed and made by Aquascutum, which she once wore for the annual Lord Mayor’s Banquet in the Guildhall, a great City and government occasion. It was a fabulous gold and black fur-trimmed evening suit, against which her blonde coiffure looked dazzling under the Guildhall lights.
Her clothes aroused great interest, which endures in some circles to this day. The Times of 31 August 2012 announced a sale of some of Mrs Thatcher’s clothes with the headline: ‘The closet that ruled the Cabinet: your chance to be an Iron Lady’. Nicolas Martineau of Christie’s, who were organising the sale, said, ‘She was the ultimate power dresser. She was very aware of the power of television and the power it could have, and she dressed accordingly.’
Before the 1987 election she decided that she needed, again, to update her appearance. Her adviser, Margaret King of Aquascutum, told Brenda Maddox that ‘She was a delight to dress. She loved trying on clothes and would twirl around like a little girl. She loved materials and buttons and told me about her mother, Beatrice, who was a dressmaker.’ In the end she was the complete master of power dressing, and although she was mocked and lampooned for it, she set a style for a generation.
She also appeared on a BBC programme in November 1986, The Englishwoman’s Wardrobe. She was asked to discuss her clothes, and the viewer was treated to a sartorial history lesson during the course of the programme as she said things like, ‘This is very special, a silk dress, we take great care of this, it has to be dry-cleaned, I wore it all the way through the Falklands.’ She also confided that her underclothes came from Marks and Spencer.
I have a particular memory of this because some years later, I was asked if I would take part in a similar programme, but for radio. With deep misgivings I did so, although what possible interest my wardrobe of M&S and wellington boots could have aroused, history does not reveal.
Lady Warnock, a prominent academic responsible, among many other achievements during her distinguished career, for the Warnock Report, watched the Prime Minister on the BBC television programme, and found it ‘quite obscene. The clothes showed a woman packaged together in a way that’s not exactly vulgar, just “
low”…’ (Young, One of Us). This comment is uncharacteristically harsh from Lady Warnock. But many other women were fascinated to watch Margaret Thatcher discussing such feminine matters. Lady Warnock’s sharp criticism does illustrate one truth, however, and that is that a woman Prime Minister is criticised not just for her policies and demeanour, but also, simply, for being a woman.
More than twenty years after she left office, there are indications that, at last, commentators, including feminists, are beginning to understand that fundamental fact.
Take the comments of India Knight, a columnist for the Sunday Times, writing on 20 November 2011, ahead of the release in January 2012 of the film The Iron Lady.
Here is a horrible and profoundly discombobulating thought: what if Margaret Thatcher was really quite – cough, choke – impressive all along? What if she wasn’t in fact the one woman it was OK for feminists to hate (a problematic concept in itself)? What if she and her terrifyingly freakazoid, outsize balls of steel, to go with her terrifyingly outsized, freakazoid politics, were more worthy of our admiration than of our disgust and contempt? Believe me, this thought makes me feel iller than it makes you feel. But it is perhaps a thought worth entertaining…
Much of my generation hated her; some of us still believe that everything that is broken about Britain today is the direct consequence of something that she personally took the hammer to – the underclass that she created by not only destroying jobs but also by selling off social housing, for example.
I bore you with my politics only to try to convey the violent dislike in which she is still held by many people my age, more than twenty years after she left office… (‘A feminist icon (even to a leftie like me); The Times, 20 November 2011)
But here India Knight takes an unexpected turn. She continues,
In a world that is forever fretting about women and the work–life balance, it is unexpectedly refreshing to look up at the screen and see someone who just gets on with it, as we all have to do, whatever our jobs are. So now, on top of everything else, you find yourself sympathising with Thatcher over the question of children and work and her regrets at not having spent enough time with the former – regrets that, to be honest, we will all have when we’re eighty. Just like Maggie.
In The Iron Lady, the parallels between today and the 1980s are deliberate and striking: high unemployment, London roaring with demonstrations and street protests, the urgent need for economic reform. You can almost hear cinema audiences, come January and the film’s general release, muttering, ‘At least she had a plan; at least she got things done.’
She points out that in the film The Iron Lady,
History has been rewritten to make it look as if there were no other female MPs when Thatcher first took her seat, allowing for a marvellous shot of a blue dress and hat in a sea of grey suits, like a hydrangea surrounded by dull old bits of rock.
It hasn’t, however, been rewritten when it comes to the snobbery and prejudice that she encounters all along the way, from an early meeting with a braying, old-school Tory selection committee, all strangulated vowels and sniffy disdain, to her later dealings with the equally strangulated brayings and prejudices of her own Cabinet.
Could it be that at last feminist opinion is realising the scale of Margaret Thatcher’s achievement, merely in becoming Britain’s first woman Prime Minister? Can feminists, and other critics for that matter, begin to separate perfectly legitimate criticism of her policies from their personal criticism of her as a woman? And can feminist opinion makers at last accept that, unlike them, she did not simply rail against an unfair world, but against the odds, beat it, got there, did it?
I am given hope by an article by Caitlin Moran, one of today’s most prominent young feminist writers. In it, she describes the difficulty faced by all women in the public eye. Her comments also apply to much of the hostile comment endured by Margaret Thatcher throughout her career.
Currently, every time a woman in the public eye does something, she doesn’t do it just for, and as, herself. She does it on behalf of 3.3 billion other women, too. She is seen to represent her entire gender … in a way men just aren’t. (‘No more opinions about women’, The Times magazine, 15 September 2012)
Moran pleads that women should be judged for what they do as individuals, and not as representatives of their gender, because, as she writes in her incomparable style, ‘we don’t have time for another 100,000 years of women being held back by pinheads’.
Jill Knight puts the same thought another way.
Looking back, it seems surprising that Parliament took almost 100 years to go from having no women at all, to having the 143 we have today, in 2012, even though the few women who did make it throughout those years proved their competence – they were not just good, they did excellent work as chairmen, Whips, Privy Councillors, Peers, Speakers, Secretaries of State, and even as Prime Minister.
Virginia Bottomley sums up Margaret Thatcher’s achievement:
I shall always feel privileged to have worked for a woman who so profoundly altered Britain and our place in the world. Equally she transformed opportunities for women simply through her personal example, splendidly undertaking a hugely demanding role that no female had previously secured in this country.
And that is the point. Critics ask what Margaret Thatcher did for women. The answer, in brief, is that she proved a woman could become Prime Minister of Britain, and in so doing, she pushed the barriers forward for all women, not just in this country, but throughout the world.
EPILOGUE
SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI
The end of Margaret Thatcher’s career, when it came in November 1990, seemed very sudden. In fact, the storm clouds had been gathering since at least the tenth anniversary of her becoming Prime Minister, in 1989. There had been a lunch at the Savoy to mark the occasion, and I remember the whole parliamentary party streaming back along the sunny Embankment to get back to the Commons for the start of business at 2.30. Some were saying at that time that it might be wise for her to step down at the height of her popularity, and it is true that within the constituency and the country she had become a very controversial figure. Many felt that she had slain her dragons and that it would be better to have a less confrontational figure in charge of the party. There was undoubtedly plotting inside and outside Parliament, although I was too humbly placed to be aware of just how much.
There was much tut-tutting when Sir Anthony Meyer, the gentlemanly but eccentric MP for Clwyd North West, announced in the autumn of 1989 that he would stand against her in the annual leadership election. Most of us felt this was ridiculous, but of course he was a stalking horse, and a forerunner of events to come.
Michael Heseltine was on the back benches when I arrived in the House in 1987; he had resigned eighteen months earlier over the Westland debacle. He made occasional appearances, strolling through the lobbies with his blond mane visible above the general scrum. There were those said to be ‘in his camp’, like Julian Critchley, Michael Mates and Keith Hampson, but apart from the odd rude reference to ‘she who must be obeyed’ from the naughty Critchley, much of what went on was well below the surface.
The challenge, when it came in the autumn of 1990, electrified the party and the country. Some colleagues, like Emma Nicholson, immediately declared for Heseltine. Edwina Currie equivocated. During the period leading up to the first vote, the Conservative women MPs had arranged a dinner to discuss policies for women. It was cancelled because loyalists like Jill Knight would not sit at the same table with Emma and Edwina.
Margaret Thatcher’s team included Peter Morrison, her PPS, and John Moore who had left the Cabinet only a year earlier. On the night before the first vote, they were in the Tea Room, not their usual habitat. I asked if they needed any help in garnering support for Mrs Thatcher. ‘Oh, no thanks,’ they chorused in unison. ‘We have everything under control.’ It did not feel at all like that to me. I knew no one who had been canvassed for their support, and to this day I b
elieve she was let down by her so-called campaign team. When the result came, it had to be broken to her while she was at an international gathering with President Mitterand at Versailles, in the full glare of worldwide media attention.
Janet Fookes had helped officiate at the fateful count. She writes,
I was also fated to see her downfall in a very particular way, as I was asked by the then Chairman of the 1922 Committee, Cranley Onslow, to help with counting the votes in the leadership election in November 1990, where she just missed securing the majority she needed to avoid a second vote. I had been surprised and a little nervous at being invited to take part in the procedure and when I had to retrieve a few ballot papers that had fallen to the floor, I felt more keenly than ever the awesome responsibility in ensuring that the count was conducted impeccably, ending as it did the remarkable career of our first British woman Prime Minister.
The next day, 21 November 1989, we as junior ministers were consulted by our boss, Tony Newton, on whether we thought Margaret Thatcher should stand down or, as she had put it, fight on. My own view was that she had been irremediably damaged by the vote and the loss of authority that resulted from it. All members of the government were consulted in that way, and the results fed back to her in individual meetings during the evening with Cabinet ministers at No. 10. Afterwards, she wrote in The Downing Street Years, ‘I had lost the Cabinet’s support. I could not even muster a credible campaign team. It was the end.’
Frank Field also went to No. 10 that night.
In my final meeting with Mrs T. as Prime Minister, the chemistry between us changed from my earlier audiences with her, asking her to act, to a meeting with a lady, already shrunken and looking anxiously into my eyes as she asked why I had come. ‘It is to tell you that you are finished,’ was my reply. ‘It is so unfair,’ was her retort. ‘I am not discussing fairness, Prime Minister, I am discussing your options.’ ‘It is so unfair,’ came her reply, quickly building into a refrain. ‘You cannot now go out on a top note. The only option available is a high note.’ ‘It is so unfair,’ she echoed. ‘You need to plan your exit tonight. If you are still Prime Minister when you go into tomorrow’s censure debate, your side will tear you apart.’
The Real Iron Lady Page 19