The Iron Lady
John Campbell
David Freeman
The Iron Lady, the definitive Margaret Thatcher biography, is available just in time for the movie starring Meryl Streep as one of the most infamous figures in postwar politics.
Whether you love her or hate her, Margaret Thatcher’s impact on twentieth-century history is undeniable. From her humble, small-town upbringing to her rise to power as the United Kingdom’s first female prime minister, to her dramatic fall from grace after more than three decades of service, celebrated biographer John Campbell delves into the story of this fascinating woman’s life as no one has before. The result of more than nine years of meticulous research, The Iron Lady is the only balanced, unvarnished portrait of Margaret Thatcher, one of the most vital and controversial political figures of our time.
Review
“Anyone who really wants to know what happened between 1979 and 1990 should read this book.”
(John Rentoul)
“Superbly researched… unlike so many others is neither hagiography nor hatchet-job, and probably gets closer to the truth than any… magnificently told.”
(Michael Dobbs)
“The best book yet written about Lady Thatcher.”
(Frank Johnson)
“An enormously useful achievement… every twist and turn of her political life is here.”
(Matthew Paris)
“I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, and indeed arguing with it, because it has reminded me why many of us would never have wanted her to give up.”
(William Hague)
John Campbell
THE IRON LADY
Margaret Thatcher, From Grocer’s Daughter to Prime Minister
Abridgement by David Freeman
For Robin and Paddy – two of Thatcher’s children
Acknowledgements
THIS book was originally published in two volumes totalling more than 1,200 pages.The present volume is drastically reduced to make it more accessible to the general reader. Inevitably much of the detail and some of the colour of the original have been sacrificed. But I hope that the integrity of the book has been preserved. I am immensely grateful to David Freeman of the University of California for carrying out the work of abridgement so skilfully. I could not have done it myself, but I think he has done a superb job. If there is now a somewhat greater emphasis on foreign relations and the major enduring themes of Lady Thatcher’s life and rather less on her early life and the small change of party politics, I think that is appropriate as her career moves into a longer historical perspective. It is now 30 years since she came to power and 19 since she fell. In that time the world has continued to evolve: some of the hopes raised by the ending of the Cold War have not been realised, while Islamist terrorism, climate change and now a global financial crisis pose new problems scarcely imagined in her day. Beyond a very brief contemporary conclusion to the last chapter, however, I have not attempted to rewrite the original book. Remarkably little new information has emerged which requires substantial reinterpretation or revision. Most of the assumptions and judgments I made in 2000 and 2003, I believe, still stand. They are themselves part of the record of the time. For two decades after her fall Margaret Thatcher continued to exercise a powerful grip on the imagination of the country and of her successors. But already a new generation is growing up who scarcely remember her. I hope that this book, in its shortened form, may serve as a useful introduction to them, as well as a reminder to those who lived through the high drama of what will always be the Thatcher years. Those whose appetite is whetted may wish to go back to the original volumes for more detail.
I incurred an immense number of debts during the nine years it took me to write this book: scores of interviews, dozens of more casual conversations, many valuable pointers from friends and colleagues, much help from librarians and archivists. But I made due acknowledgement for all this help in the original volumes, and I hope it will be understood if I do not repeat my thanks in detail here: most of the interviewees are credited in the notes. I do, however, need to thank again HarperCollins, for allowing me to use substantial quotation from Lady Thatcher’s memoirs and also from Carol Thatcher’s biography of her father; Macmillan for allowing me to quote from Woodrow Wyatt’s diaries; David Higham Associates for permission to quote from Barbara Castle’s diaries; and Brook Associates for allowing me to quote from interviews for their television series The Seventies and The Thatcher Factor. I confess that I have not sought specific permission for every quotation I have made from the many other memoirs and diaries of the period but I am grateful to all those authors who put their memories into the public realm. I am also grateful to the United States Government for allowing access to and quotation from the papers of Presidents Carter, Reagan and Bush under the Freedom of Information Act, and to the staff of the three presidential libraries who guided me to what I needed to see on a necessarily short visit to the States in 2001. Finally I should like to thank again my publishers – Dan Franklin at Jonathan Cape for the original volumes and now Alison Hennessey at Vintage for handling the abridgement; my agent Bruce Hunter; my children Robin and Paddy; and finally, for her love, faith and companionship over the past five years, Kirsty Hogarth. To all of them my debt is incalculable.
John Campbell
December 2008
1
Dutiful Daughter
Grantham born
A FORMER town clerk once described Grantham as ‘a narrow town, built on a narrow street and inhabited by narrow people’.1 It is a plain, no-frills sort of place, brick-built and low-lying: at first sight a typical East Midlands town, once dubbed by the Sun ‘the most boring town in Britain’.2 Yet Grantham was once more than this. Look closer and it is a palimpsest of English history. Incorporated in 1463, it was a medieval market town. Kings stopped there on their journeys north: Richard III signed Buckingham’s death warrant in the Angel Hotel. St Wulfram’s church boasts one of the tallest spires in England. England’s greatest scientist, Isaac Newton, was born seven miles south of the town in 1642 and educated at the grammar school.
Beatrice Stephenson – Margaret Thatcher’s mother – was Grantham born and bred. She was born on 24 August 1888. Her father, Daniel Stephenson, is euphemistically described as a railwayman: he was actually for thirty-five years a cloakroom attendant.3 He married, in 1876, Phoebe Crust, described as a farmer’s daughter (which might mean anything) from the village of Fishtoft Fen, near Boston, who had found work in Grantham as a factory machinist. Beatrice, one of several children, lived at home in South Parade until she was twenty-eight, working as a seamstress. Her daughter says she had her own business; but whether she worked alone or employed other girls there is no record. In December 1916 Daniel died. Five months later, on 28 May 1917, Beatrice married an ambitious young shop assistant – four years younger than herself – whom she had met at chapel: Alfred Roberts.
He was not a Grantham man, but was born at Ringstead, near Oundle in Northamptonshire, on 18 April 1892, the eldest of seven children of Benjamin Roberts and Ellen Smith. The Roberts side of his family came originally from Wales – but had been settled in Northamptonshire as boot and shoe manufacturers for four generations. Alfred broke away from shoemaking. A bookish boy, he would have liked to train to be a teacher, but was forced to leave school at twelve to supplement the family income He spent the rest of his life reading determinedly to make up for the education he had missed. He went into the grocery trade and after a number of odd jobs over the next ten years came to Grantham in 1913 to take up a position as an assistant manager with Clifford’s on London Road. It was while working for Alderman Clifford that he met Beatrice Stephenson. They are said to have met in chapel; but she m
ay well have been a customer as well. However they met, Alfred soon began a lengthy courtship.
As a young man born in 1892 Alf was lucky to survive the Great War. He was tall, upright and good looking, but seriously short sighted. All his life he wore thick pebble glasses. He tried to enlist, but was rejected on the grounds of defective eyesight. Spared the fate of so many of his contemporaries, he was free to pursue his chosen trade. He worked hard and saved hard, and by 1917 he and Beatrice – he called her Beatie – had saved enough to marry. At first Alf moved in with Beatie and her mother, but within two years they were able, with a mortgage, to buy their own small shop at the other end of town in North Parade. Phoebe came to live with them over the shop. Their first child, christened Muriel, was born in May 1921. Their second, another daughter, did not come for another four years, by which time Beatrice was thirty-seven. Margaret Hilda Roberts – the choice of names has never been explained – was born over the shop on 13 October 1925.
The shop was a general store and also a post office. This is something which the iconography of Thatcherism tends to overlook; yet it subtly changes the picture of Alfred as the archetypal small businessman and champion of private enterprise. He was that; but as a sub-postmaster he was also an agent of central government, a sort of minor civil servant. The post office franchise was an important part of his business. The Post Office Savings Bank was the only bank most people knew; and old-age pensions had been paid through the post office since their introduction in 1908. The elderly of north Grantham collected their weekly ten shillings from North Parade. To this extent Alfred – even in the 1920s and much more so after 1945 – was an agent of the nascent welfare state; and Margaret was brought up with first-hand knowledge of its delivery system.
The post office was open from 8.00 a.m. to 7.00 p.m., Monday to Saturday, with Thursday early closing. During these hours either Alfred or Beatie was always in the shop – Alfred normally at his corner by the bacon slicer – but they also employed two or three assistants, plus another permanently in the post office. In the early years Grandmother Stephenson served in the shop too; and later, as they grew up, the girls helped out when they were not at school – not only serving, but weighing out the sugar, tea, biscuits and lentils in the back. From an early age young Margaret gained a close awareness of the market in its purest form.
Alfred’s move into politics was a natural extension of his business. In a place like Grantham most members of the town council were tradesmen of one sort or another, effectively representing the Chamber of Trade. It happened that in April 1927 the council was expanded from twelve members to eighteen. Alfred was one of six candidates put up by the Chamber of Trade to fill the additional vacancies. He represented St Wulfram’s for sixteen years until he was elected an alderman in 1943.
His overriding purpose in local politics was keeping the rates down. He very quickly became chairman of the Finance and Rating Committee, and retained that position for more than twenty years. He established a formidable reputation for guarding the ratepayers’ pennies as carefully as his own. One need seek no further for the origin of Mrs Thatcher’s visceral hostility to public spending. In 1936 he successfully opposed a proposal that the council should employ its own direct labour force to maintain the town’s newly built stock of public housing. ‘I do not believe’, he argued, ‘that there is an instance where jobs done by direct labour save money over jobs done by contract.’4 He faced his greatest embarrassment in 1937 when he was obliged to ask for a seven pence rate increase to fourteen shillings in the pound. Characteristically he blamed his colleagues for having approved excessive commitments; his job, he protested, was merely to find the money. ‘It is just brought to your notice now’, he told them, ‘what exactly you have been approving.’5
On top of his seat on the council and chairmanship of the Finance Committee, Alfred was active in many other areas of Grantham life. In 1943 he was elected the town’s youngest alderman and in 1945 – 6 served as mayor. He was a good mayor in a particularly testing year, presiding not only over victory celebrations and Remembrance Day parades but also the rebuilding necessitated by Grantham’s extensive bomb damage.
The most celebrated episode in Alfred’s political career was its ending. By 1950 Labour had won a majority on Grantham council for the first time; they naturally installed one of their own councillors as chairman of the Finance Committee. Two years later they used their majority, quite legitimately, to elect their own aldermen, thereby displacing Roberts from the council after twenty-seven years. His removal was widely deplored as an act of petty ingratitude to an outstanding servant of the local community. Thirty-three years later his daughter famously shed tears when she recalled his deposition in a television interview.
At the heart of all Alfred’s community activity was his religion. As a devout Methodist, he made no distinction between commercial, political and religious values. Simultaneously shopkeeper, local politician and lay preacher, he conducted his business on ethical principles and preached business principles in politics. In all three spheres he prided himself on hard work, high standards and integrity. He was indeed a proud man, with a powerful sense of his own worth – tempered by proper Christian humility.
Alfred Roberts’ Methodism was a religion of personal salvation. His preaching was fundamentalist, Bible-based, concerned with the individual’s responsibility to God for his own behaviour. Unlike the nonconformist tradition which played such a large part in the foundation of the British labour movement, it was not a social gospel, but an uncompromisingly individualistic moral code which underpinned an individualist approach to politics and commerce. A man’s duty was to keep his own soul clean, mind his own business, and care for his own family. At best it was a philosophy which instilled a further obligation to look after neighbours in need and thence, by extension, to wider community service and private charity. At the same time, however, it carried a strong undercurrent of self-righteousness and moral superiority.
Relative Values
Margaret’s childhood was dominated by her parents’ faith. Sundays – the only day in the week the shop was closed – were almost wholly taken up with church attendance. Sunday school at ten was followed by morning service at eleven. There was just time to get home for lunch before afternoon Sunday School at 2.30 at which Margaret, from the age of about twelve, played the piano for the younger ones; then it was back again for evening service at six. During the week, too, the family’s social life was almost entirely church-based. Beatie attended a sewing circle on Tuesdays, often taking Margaret with her; Muriel and Margaret attended the Methodist Guild on Fridays. Life at home was austere, teetotal, governed by strict rules, particularly while Beatie’s mother was still alive. Grandmother Stephenson, Margaret told one of her first biographers, was ‘very, very Victorian and very, very strict’.6 The greatest sin of all was wasting time. Every minute of the day was to be filled with useful occupation. Never was a childhood lesson more thoroughly taken to heart.
Alf Roberts was not poor.As a successful shopkeeper he belonged by the 1930s to the middle middle class; he could scarcely have devoted so much of his time to politics had his business not been securely profitable. At a time when quite ordinary middle-class families up and down the country were discovering the liberation of vacuum cleaners, washing machines and even cars, he could certainly have afforded his family the luxury of a few modern conveniences; at the very least hot water. They did in fact have a maid before the war, and later a cleaning lady two days a week. It was for religious and temperamental reasons – puritanism and parsimony – not economic necessity, that Alfred kept his family in such austerity. The flashes of rebellion that illuminate Mrs Thatcher’s recollections fifty years later betray a sense that she felt the parsimony, like the churchgoing, was taken too far. Ironically Alf and Beatie did move to a larger house with more home comforts soon after Margaret left to go to Oxford.
The family did get a wireless set after Grandmother Stephenson died in 1935 (when M
argaret was ten). This was such an event that she remembers running all the way back from school that day. The wireless was the one form of popular entertainment that was allowed. Margaret unquestionably longed for a bit more glamour than her parents’ principles allowed. The highlight of her whole childhood was a visit to London, without her parents, when she was twelve. She was sent to stay with friends – a Wesleyan minister and his wife – in Hampstead. ‘I stayed for a whole week’, she recalled, ‘and was given a life of enjoyment and entertainment that I had never seen.’ As well as all the usual sights – the Tower of London, the Changing of the Guard, the Houses of Parliament and the zoo – ‘we were actually taken to the theatre’. The show was the musical The Desert Song at the Catford Theatre. ‘We saw the crowds and the bright lights and I was so excited and thrilled by it that I’ve never forgotten that week.’7
What she did do during her childhood was to read precociously. This was undoubtedy the medium of her father’s most direct and lasting influence. Alfred was a voracious autodidact, reputed to be ‘the best-read man in Grantham’ (though one has to wonder when he found the time).8 ‘Each week my father would take two books out of the library – a “serious” book for himself (and me) and a novel for my mother.’9 From an early age Margaret shared her father’s – rather than her mother’s – taste. Reading was a means of self-improvement and advancement in the world; perhaps because he had no son, Alfred encouraged his younger daughter to read influential books of the moment, like John Strachey’s The Coming Struggle for Power, and discussed them with her. He was a member of the library committee, so he got first pick of these topical books. Of course she read some classic fiction too; but she confessed that her favourite Dickens novel was A Tale of Two Cities, because it was about politics.10
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