The fact was that, in common with almost all her fellow Conservatives at the end of the war, Margaret had a fairly strong belief in the capacity of Whitehall men and ideas to run the country in a humane and orderly way. She admired the White Paper on Full Employment, closely and directly influenced by Keynes, which appeared in 1944, and she credited ‘Winston’, as she always in later life referred to Churchill,* with wisdom in creating the Ministry for Reconstruction and Development. Administrative thinkers like Oliver Franks† at the Ministry of Supply, who subsequently served her well in his inquiry into the Falklands War, commanded her confidence, as did Sir William Beveridge for his report on Social Security in 1942 and R. A. Butler for his Education Act of 1944.57 She liked the fact that the wartime economy was ‘an economy with a purpose’ which gave almost everyone a job.58 She said that she didn’t feel she was a ‘right-wing Tory’ at the time: ‘Fairness is a big streak in the British character,’ a streak which was satisfied by rationing.59 To the extent that her Toryism at this stage went beyond an instinctive loyalty to the non-unionized classes of society, its chief characteristics were a sense that collectivism threatened both freedom and economic success, and a romantic imperialism which saw the British Empire as ensuring civilized values, even in its process of decline. Indeed, these two things combined in her perception. She said that what she wanted was ‘a freer society, which produced a large part of the power that made Britain great’.60 She was also struck with the idea that Utopias were dangerous. Although a scientist, she recalled that she was always suspicious of those who tried to apply the scientific method to politics: ‘you get Utopian government.’61 In 1944, she saw the film of J. B. Priestley’s play They Came to a City, and derived from it the idea that ‘You can’t get a solution that ignores human nature.’62
The end of the war in Europe in May 1945 and the general election in July hardened politics up. Margaret took part in the campaign – mostly, since it was held on 5 July,* in Grantham rather than Oxford. In those days, the mainstay of election campaigns was the public meeting, and it fell to Margaret to act as the warm-up speaker for the Conservative candidate, Squadron Leader Worth, as he toured the villages surrounding Grantham night after night. She remembered these occasions quite self-critically: ‘I wasn’t terribly good at keeping going. My training had been scientific. Therefore I spoke in short sentences … machine-gun style,’63 but her readiness to do so showed precocious courage. She already had some experience of speaking, having talked that spring, for example, to the Grantham Rotary Ladies on ‘A Day in the Life of an Oxford Undergraduate’ and having put on a performance at OUCA of which she boasted to Muriel: ‘I gave my paper on Agricultural Policy which was a staggering success.’64 But as she was a woman and someone who, aged nineteen, was still not old enough to vote,† when she spoke she was bound to attract local attention.
One meeting, at Sleaford on 25 June 1945, was extensively reported by the Sleaford Gazette (‘Rousing Meeting at Mart’). Margaret, warming up for the candidate for his sixth meeting of the day, was described as ‘the very youthful Miss M. H. Roberts, daughter of Alderman A. Roberts of Grantham’. She struck out at once into world affairs, and how prosperity could not return to this Britain ‘until we had helped to put the other European countries onto a wholesome footing’, by re-establishing trade. She spoke of Germany: ‘Miss Roberts said that once in her lifetime, twice in many people’s time, and three times in the lives of some people, Germany had plunged the world into war. Germany must be disarmed and brought to justice. She did not mean that they should be deprived of everything, but just punishment must be meted out.’ The formulation about the frequency with which Germany had caused war is almost uncannily similar to that repeatedly used by Lady Thatcher in the 1990s, although sometimes the word ‘Germany’ was replaced with ‘Continental Europe’.
Much of her Sleaford speech was in praise of Winston Churchill – the country ‘must see that they do not lose the only remaining man who had the world’s confidence’ – and it was in this context that Margaret Roberts uttered an apparently surprising view about the Soviet Union: ‘The Socialists said that we did not want to make friends with Russia but Mr Churchill and Mr Eden had gone to Russia and had worked unsparingly for co-operation with Russia.’ She saw Britain as a great power that should play an equal part in discussions with America and the Soviet Union.
And she dwelt on the theme which, at that time, most fired her imagination: ‘Miss Roberts was very fervent in her determination to stand by the Empire. It was the most important community of peoples the world has ever known. It was so bound with loyalty that it brought people half way across the world to help each other in times of stress. The Empire must never be liquidated.’65
There is something laughable, perhaps, about the thought of the nineteen-year-old alderman’s daughter laying down the law for the world in this way, but also something astonishing and impressive. It and other speeches made by Margaret during the campaign caused Liz Barrington, an old nursing friend of Muriel, to write to her a couple of weeks later:
I must say I was overjoyed to hear of her marvellous effort at election speaking. You have a very clever sister – and no wonder you thought it wiser to remain unheard when you went home! You – above all people!! I wonder where she will eventually end up? Maybe I shall be able to say, ‘Oh yes I have the pleasure of knowing that young lady’ in days to come … not forgetting her sister who will I am still certain find the footlights in some way or another. Don’t laugh, I mean it.*
Liz adds: ‘Like yourself I did not wish to vote Labour or Tory.’66 Was it this that Muriel chose to ‘remain unheard’ in the Roberts household?
Clement Attlee’s Labour Party was swept to office by a landslide. In Grantham, Denis Kendall, the flamboyant Independent, held his seat against the Tory challenge. Margaret attended the count in Sleaford and then went to the Picture House in Grantham to watch the results come through on the screen.67 They shocked her. Sixty years later, Margaret said that the loss of Winston Churchill was ‘really quite shattering’,68 but she also came to see in it the natural high point of the process of collectivism which, from 1979, she tried to reverse.69 At the time, however, it seemed to her against nature and it ended her experience, until then continuous in her entire political memory, of Tory dominance. As it was to do even more markedly in 1974, defeat galvanized her.
The Oxford to which she returned in October 1945 was changed in atmosphere – by the atom bombs and subsequent allied victory in the Far East, by the Labour election victory, and by the return or first arrival of undergraduates who had fought. Although Margaret had been quite close to the war in Grantham, which was bombed more than most places, she was rather unusual in that none of her immediate family served. Meeting men who had done so excited her. She had returned to what she called ‘a more mature Oxford’ which benefited from being ‘more cross-generational’.70 By this time an officer in OUCA, she joined its policy sub-committee with Stanley Moss, an undergraduate who returned injured from the war, and Michael Kinchin-Smith, who subsequently married Rachel Willink. Their report, produced that term, was ambitious in its scope. The first part, grandly entitled ‘The Basis of Conservatism’, was drafted by Moss; the second, ‘The Role of the Conservative Party Today’, was written by Margaret and by Kinchin-Smith,71 but the three put their signatures to the whole.
Moss’s section is windy and sometimes obscure, and none of the pamphlet is scintillating, in either manner or matter, but there are notes to be found of what later became the Thatcher tunes: ‘the individual is more important than the system,’ ‘Individual enterprise is the mainspring of all progress,’ ‘there is no empirical evidence at all for the existence … of the mystic community, state or nation that figures in all systems opposed to this principle, such as the Nazi.’ It is also oppositional in tone, much more so than would have been the case during the war. While saying that the party should eschew factionalism, it demands ‘strong and vocal’ criticism whereve
r the government exceeds its electoral mandate, and declares that threats to liberty should be opposed by ‘every possible weapon of resistance and without thought of compromise’. The toughest comments refer to the Conservative Party itself: ‘It is suggested that this general election marks a turning point in the political development of the country equivalent to the election of the Reform Parliament of 1831 and that a reorientation of conservatism within the framework of the 20th century state such as that carried out by Peel will be necessary if the party is to avoid annihilation.’ The party needs to be ‘much clearer than in the past as to what its basic principles are’; it needs ‘house-cleaning’; it should have a proper research department (which, thanks to R. A. Butler, it duly got). The section labelled ‘Policy’ begins:
Conservative policy has come to mean in the eyes of the public little more than a series of administrative solutions to particular problems, correlated in certain fields by a few unreasoning prejudices and the selfish interests of the monied classes. If this extremely damaging view is to be refuted it is essential that the relation between overall policy and the various solutions be shown and that the latter be demonstrably free from any suspicion of compromise between national and sectional interests. Where Labour and Conservative are in general agreement, it must be proved that the resultant policy is a conservative policy, derived from conservative and not socialist principles if these clash.72
Re-reading the pamphlet fifty years later for her memoirs, Lady Thatcher jibbed at a few passages, such as a section which appears to propose a redistribution of wealth, attributing them to the other authors, and particularly at a comically self-important passage on the nature of leadership: ‘In an organisation such as OUCA, relying on voluntary effort, perhaps the ideal is a position parallel to that of Roosevelt as President of the United States, following public opinion while at the same time moulding and keeping slightly ahead of it.’ That self-contradiction of leading and following at the same time, she declared, was not her style.73 But in general she accepted that these had been her thoughts at the time. They were scarcely revolutionary ideas, but they did represent a fiercer, more rebellious and more socially mobile Conservatism than had expressed itself in wartime. It was a Conservatism which could not assume its right to rule, and knew that it had to fight for its existence.
In the following March, Margaret was an Oxford representative at the conference of the Federation of University Conservative and Unionist Associations (FUCUA was the unhappy acronym) at the Waldorf Hotel in London. Both she and Kinchin-Smith spoke in favour of a resolution, which she moved, ‘demanding that oft-repeated resolutions’ for more working-class officers and candidates ‘be implemented forthwith’.74 At a conference at Swinton College, the country house in Yorkshire reserved at that time for weekend gatherings for intelligent young Tories to discuss ideas, Margaret remembered getting into an argument with those of her fellows – more left-wing and better born – who wanted a redistribution of wealth. ‘ “How would this work” ’, she recalled asking sharply, ‘ “in relation to large country estates?” Answer came there none.’75 In October 1946, the same month in which she became president of OUCA, Margaret went for the first time as a representative to the party conference in Blackpool. By the standards of Tory conferences at that time, the mood from the floor was rebellious. The rank and file attacked the leadership for not putting forward clear Tory policies and beliefs. She was ‘entranced’, she wrote.76 This is perhaps the only recorded occasion when anyone has used that word about a Conservative conference, and yet it is probably an apt one in Margaret’s case. She identified with the feelings of the body of the Tory hall, and felt liberated and uplifted by them. Such identification would one day help make her leadership so secure for so long when more senior figures in the party hoped to undermine her. In 1946, those senior figures felt a little beleaguered. ‘I had the sense’, wrote Margaret, ‘that the Party leadership – with the notable exception of the Party Leader [Churchill] – had arrived at Blackpool prepared to reconcile itself and Conservatism to the permanence of socialism in Britain … This was decidedly not what the rank and file wanted to hear … My instincts were with the rank and file, though I had not yet fully digested the strong intellectual case against collectivism …’77
It should not be thought, however, that Margaret’s meritocratic, ‘rank and file’ political beliefs went so far as to exclude her from the Oxford Tory mainstream. Serious though the young Margaret Roberts was about everything, including her politics, no one should imagine that she had no interest in pleasure, elegance and the sphere of society into which she had not been born. However genuine her political convictions, she also saw OUCA as a form of social advancement, the opening of the door upon a more civilized world. She might, in the words of William Rees-Mogg, another Oxford (slightly younger) contemporary and a future editor of The Times, have been a ‘narrow-gauge’ Conservative,78 but she saw OUCA as widening her, and raising her up.
One of the chief embodiments of the world to which she aspired was Edward Boyle.* Neither handsome nor self-confident, Boyle was nevertheless a very appealing figure to Margaret. An Etonian at Christ Church who had already inherited a baronetcy, he was a man of intellectual refinement and gentle good manners who immediately captured her respect in a way that no one else managed until, years later, she met another kindly baronet, Keith Joseph. Boyle was generally seen as a future Conservative prime minister by his fellow undergraduates and was ‘brilliant in a way you couldn’t quite fathom’.79 He was also vague, known for shaving and then forgetting to wash the white remains of shaving soap off his face.80 Boyle, who was to become minister of education under Harold Macmillan, later moved to the extreme left of the Conservative Party, but in the 1940s was closer in politics to Margaret. His influence over her was anyway not so much ideological as moral. She considered that he had ‘a great mind. He never had a mean or trifling thought.’81 And, as so often in her feelings about people, this admiration for his mind and character was linked with an attraction towards his physical surroundings. She vividly remembered, from Oxford times, Boyle’s mother’s ‘fabulous flat in Portman Square’ with its ‘treasures’, some of them Chinese: ‘To me it was a different world. I’d never been in a flat like it.’ She also remembered in the 1960s, when she and Denis were renting a cottage in Kent, visiting Edward Boyle at his family’s house, Ockham in Sussex, and being given ‘the best wine’. Boyle fell on hard times towards the end of his life: ‘Edward wouldn’t have known about money: it was just there.’82 She did not share his form of unworldliness, but she loved him for it, and for his lack of snobbery towards her.*
There was no one else quite like Boyle in OUCA, but to those of the upper class who were friendly towards her she felt a particular affection. The Earl of Dalkeith,† another Christ Church man later to become a Conservative MP and, after that, Duke of Buccleuch, was one such. When he was an officer of OUCA in 1947, he called together the better off among the OUCA committee and said, ‘Look here, we’ve got somebody here who’s our hardest worker. She pedals off to Morris Cowley [the motor works] when Edward Boyle couldn’t even cross the road. She’s going to be prime minister one day, but she hasn’t got any money, so let’s get up a Special Fund for her.’83 Dalkeith asked for £25 each, but could not remember, nearly sixty years later, whether it was raised or what, precisely, it was for.‡ He recalled that Margaret was ‘completely unchippy; so nice’. History does not record Margaret’s attitude to the gift, but she described Johnny Dalkeith as ‘rather a marvellous person’.84
It is clear from Margaret’s letters to Muriel what pleasure she derived from her OUCA friendships and what prestige she believed she had acquired by her OUCA work. Writing to her on OUCA paper in October 1946, she thanks Muriel for the twenty-first-birthday present she sent her and asks if she can borrow her pearls and her black dinner frock because she has to go to two OUCA dinners in quick succession. She also explains that she has written to thank Mrs Nidds, a Grantham neigh
bour, for her present: ‘The reason it was such a large package was that there was an OUCA card in, and I thought she might like it for show.’85 In May of the following year, when Muriel’s birthday is approaching, she writes to tell her sister that she has found her ‘sheer silk stockings – fully fashioned … (not black market)’ plus ‘a bottle of “Great Expectations”, the one created specially for Valerie Hobson’.* She also mentions that she went to Cambridge for a Conservative (Balfour Club) dinner, after which ‘at about midnight – we unmoored a punt and went on the river. (I did not wear my black velvet frock thank goodness.)’86
In January 1947, Margaret wrote to Muriel explaining that she was attending an OUCA dinner for L. S. Amery, the leading Churchillian, and another for Lord Woolton, the Chairman of the Conservative Party: ‘This in addition to the annual dinner’.87 ‘My black velvet frock looks positively opulent! The skirt is cut on the cross so it hangs beautifully.’ The rush of dinners leads her to ask Muriel for the loan of her black and gold evening dress. It is clear, too, that OUCA produces more informal pleasures. ‘Neil and Roger’, she writes, ‘have been round to tea etc. several times. Two evenings we have been out “on the razzle” and have had the most hilarious time.’
‘Roger’ was Roger Gray, from the Queen’s College, a handsome war veteran who had just become president of the Oxford Union and, as such, was probably the best-known undergraduate in the university. Margaret mentions that, because of his ‘arduous duties’, she will probably see less of him this term. ‘Neil’ was Neil Findlay, from Worcester College, unpolitical, but a great friend and wartime comrade of Roger Gray and, like him, fond of parties and drinking.†
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