The Path to Power m-2

by Margaret Thatcher

  Later in the day, John Grant happened to be sitting next to the Chairman of the Dartford Conservative Association, John Miller. The Association was in search of a candidate. I learned afterwards that the conversation went something like this: ‘I understand that you’re still looking for a candidate at Dartford?’ (In fact, Conservative Central Office was becoming exasperated at Dartford’s failure to pick someone to fight the seat in an election that had to take place in 1950 and might be called before then.)

  ‘That’s right. Any suggestions?’

  ‘Well, there’s a young woman, Margaret Roberts, that you might look at. She’s very good.’

  ‘Oh, but Dartford is a real industrial stronghold. I don’t think a woman would do at all.’

  ‘Well, you know best of course. But why not just look at her?’

  And they did. I was invited to have lunch with John Miller and his wife, Phee, and the Dartford Women’s Chairman, Mrs Fletcher, on the Saturday on Llandudno Pier. Presumably, and in spite of any reservations about the suitability of a woman candidate for their seat, they liked what they saw. I certainly got on well with them. The Millers were to become close friends and I quickly developed a healthy respect for the dignified Mrs Fletcher. After lunch we walked back along the pier to the Conference Hall in good time for a place to hear Winston Churchill give the Party Leader’s speech. It was the first we had seen of him that week, because in those days the Leader did not attend the Conference itself, appearing only at a final rally on the Saturday. Foreign affairs naturally dominated his speech — it was the time of the Berlin blockade and the Western airlift — and his message was sombre, telling us that only American nuclear weapons stood between Europe and communist tyranny and warning of ‘what seems a remorselessly approaching third world war’.

  I did not hear from Dartford until December, when I was asked to attend an interview at Palace Chambers, Bridge Street — then housing Conservative Central Office — not far from Parliament itself. With a large number of other hopefuls I turned up on the evening of Thursday 30 December for my first Selection Committee. Very few outside the political arena know just how nerve-racking such occasions are. The interviewee who is not nervous and tense is very likely to perform badly: for, as any chemist will tell you, the adrenaline needs to flow if one is to perform at one’s best. I was lucky in that at Dartford there were some friendly faces around the table, and it has to be said that on such occasions there are advantages as well as disadvantages to being a young woman making her way in the political world.

  I found myself short-listed, and was asked to go to Dartford itself for a further interview. Finally, I was invited to the Bull Hotel in Dartford on Monday 31 January 1949 to address the Association’s Executive Committee of about fifty people. As one of five would-be candidates, I had to give a fifteen-minute speech and answer questions for a further ten minutes.

  It was the questions which were more likely to cause me trouble. There was a good deal of suspicion of women candidates, particularly in what was regarded as a tough industrial seat like Dartford. This was quite definitely a man’s world into which not just angels feared to tread. There was, of course, little hope of winning it for the Conservatives, though this is never a point that the prospective candidate even in a Labour seat as safe as Ebbw Vale would be advised to make. The Labour majority was an all but unscalable 20,000. But perhaps this unspoken fact turned to my favour. Why not take the risk of adopting the young Margaret Roberts? There was not much to lose, and some good publicity for the Party to gain.

  The most reliable sign that a political occasion has gone well is that you have enjoyed it. I enjoyed that evening at Dartford, and the outcome justified my confidence. I was selected. Afterwards I stayed behind for drinks and something to eat with the officers of the Association. The candidate is not the only one to be overwhelmed by relief on these occasions. The selectors too can stop acting as critics and start to become friends. The happy if still slightly bewildered young candidate is deluged with advice, information and offers of help. Such friendly occasions provide at least part of the answer to that question put to all professional politicians: ‘Why on earth do you do it?’

  My next step was to be approved by the national Party. Usually Party approval precedes selection, but when I went to Central Office the day after to meet the Women’s Chairman, Miss Marjorie Maxse, I had no difficulties. A few weeks afterwards I was invited to dinner to meet the Party Chairman Lord Woolton, his deputy J.P.L. Thomas, Miss Maxse and the Area Agent, Miss Beryl Cook. Over the next few years Marjorie Maxse and Beryl Cook proved to be strong supporters and they gave me much useful advice.

  After selection comes adoption. The formal adoption meeting is the first opportunity a candidate has to impress him or herself on the rank and file of the Association. It is therefore a psychologically important occasion. It is also a chance to gain some good local publicity, for the press are invited too. Perhaps what meant most to me, however, was the presence of my father. For the first time he and I stood on the same platform to address a meeting. He recalled how his family had always been Liberal, but that now it was the Conservatives who stood for the old Liberalism. In my own speech I too took up a theme which was Gladstonian in content if not quite style (or length), urging that ‘the Government should do what any good housewife would do if money was short — look at their accounts and see what’s wrong’.

  After the adoption meeting at the end of February I was invited back by two leading lights of the Association, Mr and Mrs Soward, to a supper party they had arranged in my honour. Their house was at the Erith end of the constituency, not far from the factory of the Atlas Preservative Company, which made paint and chemicals, where Stanley Soward was a director. His boss, the Managing Director, had been at my adoption meeting and was one of the dinner guests: and so it was that I met Denis.

  It was clear to me at once that Denis was an exceptional man. He knew at least as much about politics as I did and a good deal more about economics. His professional interest in paint and mine in plastics may seem an unromantic foundation for friendship, but it also enabled us right away to establish a joint interest in science. And as the evening wore on I discovered that his views were no-nonsense Conservatism.

  After the evening was over he drove me back to London so that I could catch the midnight train to Colchester. It was not a long drive at that time of night, but long enough to find that we had still more in common. Denis is an avid reader, especially of history, biography and detective novels. He seemed to have read every article in The Economist and The Banker, and we found that we both enjoyed music — Denis with his love of opera, and me with mine of choral music.

  From then on we met from time to time at constituency functions, and began to see more of each other outside the constituency. He had a certain style and dash. He had a penchant for fast cars and drove a Jaguar and, being ten years older, he simply knew more of the world than I did. At first our meetings revolved around political discussion. But as we saw more of each other, we started going to the occasional play and had dinner together. Like any couple, we had our favourite restaurants, small pasta places in Soho for normal dates, the wonderful White Tower in Fitzrovia, the Écu de France in Jermyn Street and The Ivy for special occasions. I was very flattered by Denis’s attentions, but I first began to suspect he might be serious when the Christmas after my first election campaign at Dartford I received from him a charming present of a crystal powder bowl with a silver top, which I still treasure.

  We might perhaps have got married sooner, but my passion for politics and his for rugby football — Saturdays were never available for a date — both got in the way. He more than made up for this, however, by being an immense help in the constituency — problems were solved in a trice and all the logistics taken care of. Indeed, the fact that he had proposed to me and that we had become engaged was one final inadvertent political service, because unbe known to me Beryl Cook leaked the news just before election day to give my
campaign a final boost.

  When Denis asked me to be his wife, I thought long and hard about it. I had so much set my heart on politics that I really hadn’t figured marriage in my plans. I suppose I pushed it to the back of my mind and simply assumed that it would occur of its own accord at some time in the future. I know that Denis too, because a wartime marriage had ended in divorce, only asked me to be his wife after much reflection. But the more I considered, the surer I was. There was only one possible answer. More than forty years later I know that my decision to say ‘yes’ was one of the best I ever made.

  I had in any case been thinking of leaving BX Plastics and Colchester for some time. It was my selection for Dartford that persuaded me I had to look for a new job in London. I had told the Selection Committee that I would fight Dartford with all the energy at my disposal, and I meant it. Nor was I temperamentally inclined to do otherwise. So I began to look for a London-based job which would give me about £500 a year — not a princely sum even in those days, but one which would allow me to live comfortably if modestly. I went for several interviews, but found that they were not keen to take on someone who was hoping to leave to take up a political career. I was certainly not going either to disguise my political ambitions or agree to drop them; so I just kept on looking. Finally, I was taken on by the laboratories of J. Lyons in Hammersmith as a food research chemist. There was a stronger theoretical side to my work there, which made it more satisfying than my position at BX had been.

  I moved into lodgings in the constituency. Indeed, Dartford became my home in every sense. The families I lived with fussed over me and could not have been kinder, their natural good nature undoubtedly supplemented by the fact that they were ardent Tories. The Millers also took me under their wing. After evening meetings I would regularly go back to their house to unwind over a cup of coffee. While I was still working and living in Colchester I would stay at their house at weekends. It was a cheerful household in which everyone seemed to be determined to enjoy themselves after the worst of the wartime stringencies were over. We regularly went out to political and non-political functions, and the ladies made an extra effort to wear something smart. John Miller’s father — a widower — lived with the family and was a great friend to me: whenever there was a party he would send me a pink carnation as a buttonhole.

  I also used to drive out to the neighbouring North Kent constituencies: the four Associations — Dartford, Bexley Heath (where Ted Heath was the candidate), Chislehurst (Pat Hornsby-Smith) and Gravesend (John Lowe) — worked closely together and had a joint President in Morris Wheeler. From time to time he would bring us all together at his large house, ‘Franks’, at Horton Kirby.

  Of the four constituencies, Dartford at that time was by far the least winnable, and therefore doubtless in the eyes of its neighbours — though not Dartford’s — the least important. But there is always good political sense in linking safe or at least winnable constituencies on the one hand with hopeless cases on the other. If an active organization can be built up in the latter there is a good chance of drawing away your opponents’ party workers from the political territory you need to hold. This was one of the services which Central Office expected of us to help Ted Heath in the winnable seat of Bexley.

  It was thus that I met Ted. He was already the candidate for Bexley, and Central Office asked me to speak in the constituency. By now Ted was an established figure. He had fought in the war, ending up as a Lieutenant-Colonel; his political experience went back to the late 1930s when he had supported an anti-Munich candidate in the Oxford by-election; and he had won the respect of Central Office and the four Associations. When we met I was struck by his crisp and logical approach — he always seemed to have a list of four aims, or five methods of attack. Though friendly with his constituency workers, he was always very much the man in charge, ‘the candidate’, or ‘the Member’, and this made him seem, even when at his most affable, somewhat aloof and alone.

  Pat Hornsby-Smith, his next-door neighbour at Chislehurst, could not have been a greater contrast. She was a fiery, vivacious redhead and perhaps the star woman politician of the time. She had brought the Tory Conference to its feet with a rousing right-wing speech in 1946, and was always ready to lend a hand to other young colleagues: she spoke all around the country. She and I became great friends, and had long political talks at her informal supper parties.

  Well before the 1950 election we were all conscious of a Conservative revival. This was less the result of fundamental rethinking within the Conservative Party than of a strong reaction both among Conservatives and in the country at large against the socialism of the Attlee Government. Aneurin Bevan’s description in July 1948 of Conservatives as ‘lower than vermin’ gave young Tories like me a great opportunity to demonstrate their allegiance in the long English tradition of ironic self-deprecation. We went around wearing ‘vermin’ badges — a little blue rat. A whole hierarchy was established, so that those who recruited ten new party members wore badges identifying them as ‘vile vermin’; if you recruited twenty you were ‘very vile vermin’. There was a Chief Rat, who lived somewhere in Twickenham.

  Of Clement Attlee, however, I was an admirer. He was a serious man and a patriot. Quite contrary to the general tendency of politicians in the 1990s, he was all substance and no show. His was a genuinely radical and reforming government. The 1945 Labour manifesto was in fact a very left-wing document. That is clearer now than it was then. Straight after the war much of the talk of planning and state control echoed wartime rhetoric, and so its full implications were not grasped. In fact, it was a root and branch assault on business, capitalism and the market. It took as its essential intellectual assumption that ‘it is doubtful whether we have ever, except in war, used the whole of our productive capacity. This must be corrected.’ The state was regarded as uniquely competent to judge where resources should and should not be employed in the national interest. It was not solely or even primarily on social grounds that nationalization, controls and planning were advanced, but on economic grounds. Harmful monopolies were seen as occurring only in the private sector. So nationalization of iron and steel was justified on the argument that ‘only if public ownership replaces private monopoly can the industry become efficient’. Most radical of all, perhaps, was the Labour Party’s attitude to land, where it was made clear that compulsory purchase by local authorities was only the beginning of a wider programme, for ‘Labour believes in land nationalization and will work towards it.’

  As regards the specific promises of the Labour manifesto, the Labour Government had been remarkably bold in giving them effect. No one could have questioned Labour’s record in implementing socialism. Rather, it was the economic consequences of socialism — devaluation and a return of inflation — which were the obvious targets for attack. Very heavy public spending had kept the standard rate of income tax almost at wartime levels — nine shillings in the pound. Far from being dismantled, wartime controls had if anything been extended — for example rationing was extended to bread in 1946 and even potatoes a year later. It was therefore possible to fight the 1950 election campaign on precisely the kind of issues which are most dangerous for a sitting government — and ones with which I personally felt most at ease — that is, a combination of high ideological themes with more down to earth ‘bread and butter’ matters.

  The 1950 Conservative manifesto was a cleverly crafted document which combined a devastating indictment of socialism in theory and in practice with a prudent list of specific pledges to reverse it. It stressed the effects of inflation, the evidence of economic mismanagement and waste and bureaucracy. I was particularly pleased with its robust statement on foreign affairs, which noted:

  Socialism abroad has been proved to be the weakest obstacle to communism and in many countries of Eastern Europe has gone down before it. We are not prepared to regard those ancient states and nations which have already fallen beneath the Soviet yoke as lost for ever.

  But Conservati
ves were careful not to promise an immediate end to rationing, large-scale reversal of nationalization, or anything too controversial on social security or the Health Service; and there was a positively cloying reference to the trade union ‘movement’, which was described as ‘essential to the proper working of our economy and of our industrial life’. All of us knew that the three areas on which we were likely to be most vulnerable were unemployment (where the voters remembered the high unemployment of the thirties, but not that it had risen under the second Labour Government and fallen under the National Government), the Welfare State (which many people thought we wanted to dismantle) and alleged ‘war-mongering’ (where there was a danger that the Labour Government’s robust line would make Churchill’s Cold War rhetoric seem extreme rather than prescient, as it was). I found myself dealing with all these questions at public meetings in the course of the 1950 and 1951 campaigns.

  The 1950 election campaign was the most exhausting few weeks I had ever spent. So much was new to me; and novelty always drains the stamina. Unlike today’s election campaigns, we had well-attended public meetings almost every night, and so I would have to prepare my speech some time during the day. I also wrote my letters to prospective constituents. Then, most afternoons, it was a matter of doorstep canvassing and, as a little light relief, blaring out the message by megaphone. I was well supported by my family: my father came to speak and my sister to help.

  Before the election Lady Williams (wife of Sir Herbert Williams, veteran tariff reformer and a Croydon MP for many years) told candidates that we should make a special effort to identify ourselves by the particular way we dressed when we were campaigning. I took this very seriously and spent my days in a tailored black suit and a hat which I bought in Bourne and Hollingsworth in Oxford Street specially for the occasion. And just to make sure I put a black and white ribbon around it with some blue inside the bow.