Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  But there was a downside. A Prime Minister sometimes needs to play the national figurehead, transcending partisan differences and appealing to people in every corner of the land. As Mrs Thatcher said on the steps of Number 10, the occupant has to speak ‘to all the British people – howsoever they voted’. But this was the one role she could never bring herself to play. In February 1975 the Daily Express’s cartoonist Michael Cummings had drawn her as ‘St Joan Margaret de Finchley, Saviour of the Middle Classes, Scourge of the Lower Orders and the Left’. The image was perfectly chosen: the holy warrior riding into battle. There were ‘our people’, and then there were the enemy. Socialism was not just wrong: it was ‘immoral’, ‘poisonous’, the ‘political organisation of hatred’. Life was struggle; generosity was appeasement; consensus was surrender. As a result, wrote Ludovic Kennedy in the Spectator, Mrs Thatcher was ‘too partisan, too narrow in her outlook to heal the schisms in the country’. She might speak for the middle classes, but ‘she can never speak for the country as a whole’. Even her allies talked of her deafness, her utter inability to understand the anxieties of others. Mount, for instance, thought that over time she ‘became blind to the fears and interests of the untalented, the unlucky and the mildly slothful’. But the signs had always been there. She had never offered much for the unlucky.56

  From an early stage, Mrs Thatcher’s bullish patriotism, need for enemies and enthusiasm for battle were central to her image, as in this Kal cartoon for The Economist (20 June 1981).

  As St Joan went from ‘underdog to top dog’, the watching Matthew Parris felt increasingly uneasy. Once a loyal backroom boy, now a Tory MP, he was well aware that their opponents were ‘neither evil nor, any longer, particularly formidable’. He still thought Mrs Thatcher’s policies were right, but recognized that they were ‘hurting many people, most of them small people’. So why could she not express regret? Why could she not admit that some people were poor or unemployed because of inheritance, illness or sheer bad luck? Why was she so crowing, so combative in victory? Why could she not be more gracious? But when Parris raised all this with her Parliamentary Private Secretary, Ian Gow, the latter just laughed. ‘As the Lady would put it,’ Gow explained, ‘if you’re crocodile hunting and after a hell of a struggle you finally drive your croc into the shallow where he’s floundering in the mud, do you help him back into the deep? No. Hah! You stick the knife in.’57

  Mrs Thatcher spent her first hours in Downing Street as she planned to go on. Instead of going up to see her new flat, she remained cloistered in the study, poring over the briefs prepared by her civil servants and sifting through names for her first administration. Having slept for only two hours the night before, she ought to have been exhausted. But she kept working till eleven, running on pure adrenaline. Because she stayed so late, the girls on the switchboard had to stay late, too, phoning around to organize her appointments for the next day. Before she went home to Chelsea, she made a point of going in to thank them personally.58

  In the next few days, as she and her ministers got down to business, messages of congratulation poured in. There were more than 13,000 letters in the first ten days, reflecting her novelty value as the first woman to hold the highest office in the land. They came from rich and poor alike: from the Sun’s editor, Larry Lamb; from Lulu, Barbara Cartland and Petula Clark; from the Davis Cup tennis team; from fellow politicians and from ordinary voters. There was a telegram from Peter Sellers, who was delighted by her ‘marvellous victory’. There was a letter from the anti-permissiveness campaigner Mary Whitehouse, who had been thrilled to hear ‘the marvellous words of St Francis’ and already sensed a nationwide ‘lifting of the spirit’. Another came from Friedrich Hayek, who thanked her for the ‘best present on my eightieth birthday anyone could have given me’. And there was a message from Milton Friedman, who hoped that Britain could lead the world to a ‘rebirth of freedom’. Mrs Thatcher’s reply perfectly captured her style. ‘The battle has now begun,’ she wrote. ‘We must win by implementing the things in which we believe.’59

  But the most heartfelt exchange was one she began herself, on her first morning as Prime Minister. Amid the blizzard of meetings, she found time to write to Ronnie Millar, the man who had provided the prayer for her entrance to Number 10. An experienced West End playwright, educated at Charterhouse and Cambridge, he brought a touch of greasepaint to life at Number 10. ‘Humorous, camp, silk-dressing-gowned, slightly seedy’, in Charles Moore’s words, Millar treated her like a diva. ‘Come on, darling,’ he would say, ‘they want you to show you really feel it.’ Sometimes Mrs Thatcher found him a bit much, but he appealed to her love of the limelight, her flair for the dramatic. Now, like an Oscar-winning actress, she made sure to thank her scriptwriter, assuring him that she ‘could not have done it without you’. A few days later, Millar replied, clearly moved. It had been ‘an honour and a privilege’, he wrote, ‘to “be there on St Crispin’s Day” … The whole country walks with a lighter step today because of you. Do you sense it? I’m sure you must.’ There was, he added, more than enough work to be getting on with. ‘At least three Parliaments’ worth, I think, don’t you?’60

  Perhaps better than anybody, Millar understood how Margaret Thatcher saw her place in history. Only nine months earlier, he had taken her to see a new West End musical, which told the story of a young woman from a humble provincial background who finds herself catapulted to political stardom. Afterwards, she had sent him another note:

  My dear Ronnie,

  It was a strangely wondrous evening yesterday leaving so much to think about. I still find myself rather disturbed by it. But if they can do that without any ideals, then if we apply the same perfection and creativeness to our message, we should provide good historic material for an opera called Margaret in thirty years’ time!

  Love

  Margaret

  The fact that she could contemplate an opera about herself, even in jest, says a great deal about her sense of destiny. In her own mind she was always the star of the show. And in a sublime irony, which nobody could possibly have appreciated at the time, the musical she had seen that night was Evita.61

  3

  You’d Look Super in Slacks

  For seven years now I have been warning readers of Private Eye that English women are growing more masculine, their waists and wrists are thickening, their breasts are getting smaller, their voices harsher, their opinions sillier, their behaviour more aggressive and unstable.

  Auberon Waugh’s Private Eye diary, 7 October 1979

  My mother has gone to a woman’s workshop on assertiveness training. Men aren’t allowed. I asked my father what ‘assertiveness training’ is. He said, ‘God knows, but whatever it is, it’s bad news for me.’

  Sue Townsend, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾ (1982)

  In the village of Chedworth in Gloucestershire, one man watched Mrs Thatcher’s arrival in Downing Street with grim resignation. Formerly a pilot in the RAF, David Stayt worked as a planning officer in nearby Cheltenham. A man of distinctly firm opinions, he might have been expected to cheer the arrival of a new Conservative Prime Minister. But as the founder of the Campaign for the Feminine Woman, Mr Stayt knew that there could be no rest in the struggle against the ‘dangerous cancer and perversion’ of feminism. ‘The ideal woman’, he once said, ‘is one who naturally wants to submit, obey and please the male: to bear his children and to create the happy home.’ Yet here was one of the best-known women in the country – a wife and mother who had abandoned her domestic responsibilities to enter the workforce – walking into the most important office of all! There could have been no more powerful symbol of everything that was wrong with modern Britain.1

  A year later, the Daily Express sent a reporter to Mr Stayt’s ‘rambling stone mansion’. She found him on uncompromising form. Appropriately enough, he was joined by his Dutch-born wife, Yvonne; but it was Yvonne, ironically, who did most of the talking. ‘Funny term, “Women’s Lib”,’ she
mused. ‘What are we supposed to be liberated from? What’s wrong with being a homemaker?’ Yvonne was sick of people claiming that ‘fathers and mothers can do the same thing both inside and outside the home’, which was obviously nonsense. ‘A husband should be responsible and a wife submissive. Both our daughters want to marry after university and they want to marry a real man, someone who cares for them.’ But the real villains in all this, David said, were the government. As part of their ‘near-conspiracy to pervert men’s roles as providers’, they had altered the tax laws to push women, against their will, into the workforce. Disappointingly, however, the reporter never pressed him on the obvious question. Was Mrs Thatcher part of the conspiracy? Or was she one of the many women working against their will?2

  Among the consequences of the feminist revolution that bothered David Stayt, one loomed particularly large: the terrible sight of women in trousers. ‘They really shouldn’t wear trousers,’ he told the Express. ‘I mean, they look so much nicer in skirts.’ This was not a new complaint. For at least a decade, as thousands of vulnerable young women fell into the arms of Britain’s trouser salesmen, Fleet Street’s letters pages had simmered with controversy. But despite a campaign by the feminist magazine Spare Rib, which produced a ‘GIRLS CAN wear trousers’ badge and offered advice on ‘how to organise an effective trousers protest’, the struggle was far from over. Indeed, at the turn of the 1980s plenty of people still shared Mr Stayt’s view that trousers were undermining family values. Even the Guardian, running a feature on the dazzling variety of trousers available in 1980 – jeans, dungarees, breeches, trouser suits, flying suits, ‘colonial-style long shorts’ – conceded that while ‘the trousered European female may no longer be regarded as a threat to the very fabric of civilisation … a little of the old subversive flavour lingers on’.

  Some commentators thought trousers were still so controversial that women would be safest to avoid them altogether. In his book Women, Dress for Success (1981), John T. Molloy, an ‘authority on career woman dressing’, claimed that the trouser suit was a ‘failure outfit. Testing showed it to be extremely ineffective when dealing with men … If you have to deal with men, even as subordinates, you’re putting on trouble. I advise against wearing them.’ And some older women, in particular, were appalled to see their younger sisters dressing like men. ‘I’ve never seen a woman who looked good in trousers because they’ve got the wrong-shaped behind,’ Barbara Cartland declared in 1983. ‘If women looked at themselves behind then they wouldn’t wear trousers.’ All this, she said sadly, was merely part of a bigger story. For thanks to the advent of a ‘new breed of sexually strident amazons, wearing ugly, ill-fitting clothes, men’s hats and dinner suits’, many men were taking their pleasures with other men instead. In other words, it was feminism that was driving the newfound acceptance of homosexuality. Sometimes, Dame Barbara would wag her finger at her young female secretary: ‘It’s all your fault!’3

  Perhaps the most dramatic of all trouser-themed confrontations took place less than a year before Margaret Thatcher came to office. The battleground was Maiden Erlegh School, a large comprehensive on the outskirts of Reading. The headmaster, James Dunkley, had long been an opponent of trousers, insisting that ‘lady members of staff should wear dresses’. In June 1978, however, nine teachers turned up wearing trousers and had to be corralled in a classroom, presumably for the safety of their impressionable charges. Soon four more teachers joined them, prompting mediation attempts from both the National Union of Teachers and the local council. As the union saw it, women teachers should wear what they liked. ‘Trousers’, explained a union official, Ray Fox, ‘are a perfectly respectable form of dress and are probably more suitable for schools than mini-skirts.’ What was more, ‘some of the women look very smart in them’. That, of course, implied that some didn’t. Fortunately he was too polite to name names.4

  For the press, the Battle of Maiden Erlegh was a gift. The Express thought that the headmaster had shown ‘no more strategic sense than Edward Heath’, and warned that the women, ‘like the miners, are invincible and the best policy is one of surrender on as favourable terms as can be got’. The ‘right to wear trousers’, it declared, was ‘good, just and proper’. But the Express urged Britain’s women to accept, ‘for everybody’s sakes, that ladies measuring more than 38in round the hips should show restraint’. This did not go down well. A few days later, a group of office workers from Andover signed a letter steaming with outrage. ‘Yes, some women do look dreadful in trousers,’ they conceded, ‘but so do many men, especially those with paunches.’ It was time, they suggested, that men with waists of more than 33 inches stopped wearing trousers. A reader from Sidmouth in Devon agreed that men, not women, should seek alternative forms of clothing, gleefully picturing ‘all those plump, pompous executives and beery labourers being forced to wear kilts’. But some readers maintained that women’s trousers were just wrong. ‘I am heartily sick of all those women who insist on kicking up a fuss,’ wrote Irene Smith of Leicester. ‘If half the women in trousers could see themselves they would think twice about wearing them.’5

  In the end, it was the headmaster who blinked first, conceding that the women could wear trousers after all. ‘Principles are always worth fighting for,’ said their leader, Norma Bird, ‘but we are very pleased it is at an end. We will carry on as normal – and wear trousers.’ But although Maiden Erlegh had fallen, the war continued. Every few months some new trouser controversy appeared in the newspapers. In August 1981, for example, a Derbyshire woman complained to the Guardian that her daughter’s headmaster ‘considers trousers detrimental to her education’. Amazingly, the primary school in question did not even have a uniform, but the headmaster had nevertheless banned women teachers and dinner ladies, as well as the girls, from wearing trousers. This time, perhaps because the school was so small, the forces of reaction won the day.6

  An even more flagrant example came in the spring of 1983, when Golders Green Crematorium in north London sacked a memorial counsellor, the 40-year-old Jeanne Turnock, who had ignored her boss’s warnings not to wear trousers. As Mrs Turnock told an industrial tribunal, she had started wearing the offending garment, described as a ‘lady’s business trouser suit’, during a cold snap. The crematorium’s managing director – a man, obviously – explained that he regarded trousers on women as akin to ‘mini-skirts, see-through blouses, plunging necklines, teeshirts with slogans and men wearing sweaters or earrings’. ‘We are dealing with elderly people recently bereaved’, he said sternly, ‘and a large number may find some offence in a lady in trousers coming to deal with them.’ The tribunal unanimously agreed with him.7

  As Britain’s first woman Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher could hardly have been a more striking symbol of social change. When her car pulled up outside Number 10 that May morning, the spectacle of the lone woman in her trim blue suit, surrounded by men – policemen, photographers, her husband – brought home her novelty. But, perhaps with one eye on her constituents in Golders Green, she drew the line at appearing in trousers. ‘Do you wear slacks?’ asked the News of the World’s Rosalie Shann in April 1980. ‘Only if I have to go and inspect a submarine, or something,’ Mrs Thatcher said, laughing. What about jeans? ‘No, I will just wear a tweed skirt and top.’ Why not? ‘I haven’t got the figure for it.’ ‘I think you’d look super in slacks,’ Shann said encouragingly. But Mrs Thatcher muttered something about not knowing ‘if my colleagues will like it’, and they moved on.8

  As the first woman to lead a major political party, Mrs Thatcher gave a lot of thought to her appearance. She had always enjoyed fashion, and took immense care to get things right. She knew that as a woman she would face unsparing scrutiny: it was all right for Ted Heath to put on weight, for Harold Wilson to look puffy and shabby, for Jim Callaghan to make his grand entrance at Number 10 with his tie tucked into his trousers, but she could not have one hair out of place. When The Times’s Brian Connell was granted a long interview to
mark Mrs Thatcher’s first year as Prime Minister, he began by describing her as ‘trim and comely’, before lavishing praise on her ‘meticulously coiffed hair’ and ‘fine-boned features’. Oddly, no journalist had ever noticed Harold Wilson’s fine-boned features, but there were different standards for women. ‘Nobody complains about the cut of Mr Callaghan’s trousers. Nobody tears him to pieces if he sounds like a pompous policeman. Yet who would want a dowdy female fatty for Prime Minister?’ asked the Sun in 1979. ‘After all, if a person can’t control her weight, doesn’t it occur to everybody that she may not be able to control other, more important things?’9

  Mrs Thatcher was not the only woman who felt immense pressure to control her weight. In an age saturated with images of athletic beauty, from fashion magazines to pop videos, dieting had become big business. According to a survey in 1980, three out of ten women had been on a diet in the previous twelve months, compared with just one in ten men. Diet books were proven money-spinners, with Audrey Eyton’s million-selling The F-Plan in the vanguard. At the newsagents, readers could choose not only from Slimming, Successful Slimming, Slimmer and What Diet, but Health, Health Now and Healthy Living, as well as Work Out, New Health and Fitness. Health spas, exercise bikes, early-morning jogs and lurid sportswear were becoming familiar features of the national landscape. ‘In summer,’ said the Financial Times, ‘the British look as if they have just completed a jogging circuit and in winter, with their anoraks, as if they had just finished skiing.’ No wonder, then, that when Chris Brasher launched the London Marathon in March 1981 it proved a smashing success, attracting some 6,700 runners. The winner of the women’s race was the 43-year-old Joyce Smith, a veteran cross-country runner. In good Thatcherite style, she described herself as an ordinary ‘housewife and mother’. Another of the first female finishers, one Mrs Barry, told the BBC that she had four children. ‘Women use children as an excuse,’ she said firmly. ‘If they really wanted to, they could easily find ten minutes a day to train.’10