Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  The entertainments became more glamorous and more intimate. In the postscript she wrote to Muriel on the typed letter about her sister’s engagement, Margaret added,

  By the way after Polling day Robert and I are dining and dancing at the Berkeley … My new white frock is simply lovely and I’ve every intention of wearing it on that night in spite of the fact that it was mean’t [sic] for the Divisional Ball. Hope you won’t mind my going out then. On Saturday I’m going down to Eastbourne for the weekend. Robert is coming to join me on the Sunday staying overnight and he will drive me back on the Monday. Needless to say I’m looking forward to it tremendously.62

  This was perhaps as near as Margaret ever came to enjoying a naughty weekend.

  It is notable that no one surviving from Conservative politics in Dartford at that time has any memory of any connection between Margaret and Dr Robert Henderson. True to her intense dislike of other people knowing about her private life, she mentioned him to no one in Dartford, although she is remembered visiting the Southern Hospital with him to speak to the staff there.63 Yet their relationship deepened, and was to continue almost until she left Dartford for good.

  In her election address for the general election of 23 February 1950, Margaret Roberts spoke in her own distinctive voice. The ‘first task’ of a new Conservative government, she said, would be ‘setting the finances of the nation in order’, and she grounded her thoughts in the commonsense terms of the practical woman. Of nationalization, she wrote, ‘To the housewife it conjures up a picture of a grate full of dust, ash and clinker that won’t burn.’ She praised the ‘small shopkeepers’ – ‘I believe firmly that such men and women are part of the strength and backbone of England’ – reaffirmed her support for Imperial Preference and declared that ‘A separate house for every family is our aim.’ And she made a promise about herself, which, more than most politicians’ promises, was to prove true: if elected, ‘I should carry out my task to the utmost of my ability, allowing myself no rest until the duties which fell to my lot were complete.’64

  In a newspaper article the previous week, Margaret was even more explicit in offering her own vision of Britain and the crisis it faced under socialism. She set out four main themes – ‘Britain amongst the Nations’, ‘Britain’s Economic Independence’, ‘Nationalisation or Private Enterprise’ and ‘Frustration or Freedom’. She argued that Britain’s reputation in the world had fallen low under Labour from its great height in 1945, that it had failed to join in resisting Communism and that ‘The world needs her.’ Discussing the American Lend–Lease programme which kept the nation afloat during the war, Margaret compared the United States with a friendly neighbour helping the man next door who had fallen on hard times and now dismayed by his failure to recover. Socialist profligacy was the problem. Far from paying off his debt, the neighbour ‘is having to sell one or two pieces of his wife’s gold jewellery to pay the grocer’s bill’. This, referring to the sale of gold reserves to buy food, was what might be called a pre-echo of Harold Macmillan’s famous attack on Mrs Thatcher over privatization for ‘selling the family silver’. Margaret then challenged the voters: ‘Are YOU going to let this proud island race, who at one time would never accept charity, drift on from crisis to crisis … ? Or do you believe in sound finance … ?’ Quoting ‘a young unknown engineer from one of the Dominions’,* who had written to her asking what had happened to the sturdy British love of freedom, she made her own passionate plea: ‘It was not a Government that built up the skill and craft of this country – the woollen goods, the beautiful china, and the precision engineering, which have made their way into the markets of the world. It was private individuals who patiently persevered, building up their businesses bit by bit.’ The British spirit had to be rediscovered: ‘Do you want it to perish for a soul-less Socialist system, or to live to recreate a glorious Britain? YOU WILL DECIDE.’65 In the whole of her career, Margaret Thatcher was to diverge very little from the substance and the tone of this article. It is, perhaps, the first clear text of Thatcherism. As with Thatcherism when fully formed, the emotional force behind the piece is not a doctrine about economic liberty – strong though that is – but a romantic belief in the greatness, and a sad lament at the decline, of her country.

  With such powerful beliefs, and a precocious confidence in her powers of expressing them, Margaret Roberts fought the campaign with gusto. And she was happy to put herself and her background centre-stage. She had heard, she told a public meeting on 7 February, that some people thought ‘she came from a moneyed family; that was not so. She had to work for her living as a food chemist and had been in the habit of leaving Dartford on the 7.15am train and returning at 7pm to do her political work.’66 Nor did she think her extreme youth a problem: ‘William Pitt was Prime Minister of England [sic] when he was 24. Mr Anthony Eden went into Parliament at my age and has represented the same division ever since.’67 Believing that the candidate should be immediately identifiable by the way she looked, she invested in a hat from Bourne and Hollingsworth with a black and white ribbon, to which she added a ‘bit of blue inside the bow’ and alternated two suits.68 She threw herself into the campaign, speaking outside factory gates to the all-male workers in defiance of trade union officials, and addressing huge public meetings night after night – ‘heckling suited me a treat’. She went everywhere in the constituency except for pubs, believing that it ‘wouldn’t do’ for a woman.69* The campaign went extremely well, but Margaret gave it almost more than she had. Speaking more than forty years later, she said, ‘I have never felt so tired in any election since.’70 The result declared, late at night on 23 February 1950, was:

  Norman Dodds (Labour) 38,128

  Miss M. H. Roberts (Conservative) 24,490

  A. H. Giles (Liberal) 5,011

  Labour majority 13,638

  Margaret had knocked 6,000 off Dodds’s majority, doing much better than the average Tory candidate, without, of course, coming near to beating him. Nationally, Labour clung on to power by an overall majority of six, which made a second election quite soon highly probable. The party was still 2.6 per cent ahead of the Conservatives in its share of the popular vote, but it lost seats disproportionately because there was a strong swing of 6 per cent to the Tories in London and the Home Counties, compared to a national one of only 2.4 per cent. This was known as ‘the revolt of the suburbs’, a phrase which well expresses Margaret’s own attitude. Margaret allowed her supporters no time for rest. ‘You sign on for next time tomorrow morning,’ she told them in her speech after the count at Dartford Grammar School.71 A few days later, Dartford Conservative Association held a party to celebrate the first anniversary of Margaret’s adoption and presented her with a 16-foot scroll containing the names of 991 active supporters. ‘Dartford’, she assured them, ‘will certainly have first refusal of my services as a candidate in the next election.’72 They did not refuse. In fact, however, Margaret did secretly consider an alternative. South Hammersmith Conservatives, fighting a Labour seat with a smaller majority than that at Dartford, approached her. She confided this to Muriel and explained that ‘their 2,000 adverse majority is even more solid than Dartford’s 13,000. I don’t feel it would be worth changing under those circumstances.’73 Her devotion to Dartford was qualified by the strength of her ambition.

  With her second candidacy assured, Margaret immediately set about making complementary arrangements for her life. She began driving lessons, began looking for a flat in London and – the flat being part of the career plan – began reading for the Bar. Her first point of contact in the law was David Renton,* the Conservative MP for Huntingdonshire, to whom she was introduced through his family connection with Dartford. He remembered her visiting him in his chambers in March 1950: ‘In sailed a good-looking woman, twenty-four, mouse-coloured hair, plainly dressed, with no jewellery. She took everything in.’74 She asked his advice and he recommended his own Lincoln’s Inn, and offered to sponsor her. Even Margaret quailed slightly under the am
ount of labour involved in reading for the Bar. ‘My goodness there’s a lot of work to be done and it will come terribly expensive,’ she wrote to Muriel some time in the summer,75 but she enrolled and, in August, was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn. Always impressed by tradition, she was delighted with the receipts she received: ‘magnificent-looking things done on beautiful paper and perfectly printed’.76 Following the rule that, to qualify, students should eat dinners in their chosen Inn of Court, Margaret had her first in October. She wrote to Muriel, curiously nervous, ‘Tonight I am dining at Lincoln’s Inn for the first time … It’s hard doing anything new for the first time.’77

  The relationship with Robert Henderson continued, although it began to show some signs of difficulty. ‘I go out with him most weekends and one night during the week,’ she told Muriel in March. ‘But whether it will ever come to anything I very much doubt for he thinks the difference between our ages very great.’78 He, for his part, was somewhat circumspect about introducing Margaret to his friends: she described him as having ‘reverted to form in seeing little of me while he has visitors’.79 In May 1950, she complained, ‘Robert I have scarcely seen recently.’80 He mattered as much to her as before, though. She arranged for him to meet Willie Cullen, something she would not have done if she had not expected the relationship to last, and she reported happily: ‘I gather they got on like a house on fire …’ She was worried about Robert’s health: ‘he has a very bad duodenum and if he eats anything which disagrees with him he feels wretched for days.’81 In June, he was operated on: ‘I might be allowed to go in for ten minutes … They are removing part of the tummy and duodenum and severing the jugular vein. It is a bigger job than Robert thought. He was feeling a little depressed when I went down to see him last night.’82 The operation went well, but required a long convalescence. He went to stay for some of the time with his sister in Aberdeen. When he returned ‘looking a lot better and feeling very fit’, she resumed her Sunday-night visits to him at the Southern Hospital ‘as usual’.83 It is unlikely that these visits ever involved Margaret staying overnight. There is no evidence that their relationship was ever physically consummated.

  Knowing Robert meant, among other things, finding out more about the medical and nursing professions and how they had been affected by the introduction of the National Health Service by the Labour government in 1948. As well as her weekly visits to the Southern Hospital for Sunday dinner with Robert, Margaret also met more nurses and doctors. In the mid-summer of 1950, she went to the West Hill Hospital Nurses Reunion, an event which provoked something near an outburst to Muriel: ‘It was quite a nice afternoon but my goodness how I should hate the sort of life they lead. The various members (lay-members) of the Hospital Management Committee were strutting about and I looked at some of them and thought “Our New Masters”.’ Although never opposed to the principle of care free at the point of use to all patients which the NHS enshrined, Margaret believed strongly that the way it was introduced worked against the freedom of individual hospitals and submitted doctors and nurses to unnecessary and overcentralized control, some of it exercised through the new management committees. With the coming of the NHS, Robert gradually surrendered some of the mastery of the huge Southern Hospital that he had possessed. Margaret watched this happening, and did not like it.

  Since Robert lived in Dartford, it might be thought odd that his girlfriend was looking so hard to leave the place and find a flat in London. But in fact his presence in her life did have something to do with Margaret’s attempts to move. With her fierce dislike of people knowing her inner thoughts and her private life, she had grown to resent her landlords, the Woollcotts. They were a well-meaning couple but, with no children of their own, they seem to have lavished on Margaret an attention which she found oppressive. Discussing Muriel’s wedding pictures, and how a Dartford friend and helper, Mary Rohan, had offered to tint them, she adds, without punctuation: ‘The Woollcotts curse them are also most anxious to see them and I expect we shall hear the usual childish drip when they do.’ In the same letter, she reports a warning from Mary Rohan that the Woollcotts have been complaining about Margaret’s secretiveness, and expresses her annoyance: ‘You know how I hate everyone knowing my own affairs. Robert refuses to come in now, and as often as not I go to the end of the road and meet him at the traffic lights.’84 It seems both touching and absurd that a forty-eight-year-old man felt it better to meet his girlfriend at the traffic lights rather than brave her landlady. Margaret obviously longed for a more grown-up solution.

  But the search for a flat in town was hard. She found something promising, but, at 4 guineas a week, decided it was too expensive.85 Possibilities of flat-sharing were canvassed without result. There were also the Rent Acts to be considered, which made unfurnished flats more attractive because they were rent-controlled. For a short period in June, Margaret took a tiny flat in Westminster Palace Gardens to look about her in London. She enjoyed the experience: ‘I have loved the short stay in the London flat. It isn’t nearly so strenuous as travelling up from Dartford daily and its [sic] nice not to be questioned by an enquiring landlord and landlady.’ From it, she sallied forth to be the youth speaker offering a vote of thanks to Winston Churchill at a party rally at the Albert Hall on 7 June 1950, the only time she was to meet the great wartime Prime Minister: ‘The Winston meeting went off quite well. I was absolutely terrified of the enormous audience but got through all right. Everyone was very flattering about it.’ There is no record or memory of the private words that she and Churchill exchanged or of what she said in her vote of thanks. She also went to the Royal Tournament with Denis Thatcher, who was still, despite Robert, somewhere in the background, inviting her out for the odd treat and dinner.86

  Life in the flatlet also sharpened Margaret’s views about wealth and politics. ‘The woman whose flat my flatlet is sublet from is Beauty Editor of Modern Woman. She lets off the upper storey. The other girl is or was secretary to Audrey Withers – editor of Vogue – I gather Audrey Withers is a terrifically strong socialist. It’s a funny world, isn’t it. I go down to Dartford 2 or 3 times a week.’87 The expression ‘It’s a funny old world’ would become one of Margaret Thatcher’s better-known quotations after she commented thus to her Cabinet on the day she resigned as prime minister.

  The search for a flat lasted into the following year. In February 1951, Margaret had been unsuccessfully negotiating with Morris Wheeler, a business bigwig in the Dartford Conservative Association. He owned several properties in London, but she had rejected his offer of a flat in Belgrave Road because it was in ‘appalling condition’, and he didn’t want her to have his flat in St George’s Square Mews ‘as even he realised that it wasn’t a very nice area’. ‘I think Daddy will be relieved,’ Margaret commented to Muriel, ‘– he was quite worried about its being in the heart of Pimlico!’ She looked further afield: ‘On Saturday I went to Dulwich at lunchtime. It is a terrible place – one is rather apt to think of it as being quite pukkha [sic] as there is a big public school there, but in fact the area outside there is bad.’88*

  In the end, Margaret settled for the supposed horrors of Pimlico and 101 St George’s Square Mews, moving in May 1951. She was joyful. Part of her pleasure came from the sense that she was at last living in the middle of things: ‘It was a great thrill to come to London. In Grantham it was like swimming in a very small pool: you keep bumping into the sides.’89 ‘I said goodbye to the Woollcotts who of course were very nice at the last moment,’ she wrote tartly to Muriel,90 and then described in several letters and enormous detail the decorative and domestic arrangements, exercising her will and energy upon all who came in contact with her. She went to an electrician ‘to have the iron fixed up with a flex and the electric ring mended. The electricians said they couldn’t possibly do the flex before Tuesday so I told them to give me the parts and I would do it. They looked somewhat stunned and tried to put me off by saying was I sure the iron was alright. I said firmly “Yes” and marched o
ut of the shop with the plugs. I told the driver [taxi? removal van?] and he said oh I’ll do it for you. He then discovered that they had given me a broken power plug so I marched very firmly back to the shop with it. I shan’t go there again.’91

  By this time, Muriel had given birth to her first child, Morton, and Margaret includes brief and brisk references to the baby in her correspondence – ‘Glad to hear junior is progressing all right’,92 ‘So glad to hear that you are home again and that the infant is making good progress. Hope the vomiting soon clears up’93 – but she quickly returns to the subject of her own home-making, lamenting the absence of a bath, explaining how she is putting down the old pink lino from home, complaining that the sideboard has woodworm (‘It only goes to show how careful one should be before buying’).94 Declaring that ‘I will have to come up and see you soon,’ Margaret does not suggest any desire to see the new-born baby, or her sister who had been quite ill after the birth, but rather that her reason for coming is ‘I am practically out of eggs and they are my main diet at the moment – scrambled eggs on toast!’95 In the same month, Margaret managed to pass her driving test, which her father had arranged for her to take in Grantham. Because she had two outstanding driving lessons paid for at the moment of passing, she went ahead and had them all the same,96 showing a virtually inhuman determination to get value for money. At Lyons, unlike at BX Plastics, she had to work on Saturday mornings. Even she, so clearly enjoying herself in London, felt a little overwhelmed by the amount of work she faced: ‘I have so much to do that I don’t know where to turn next.’97