The Iron Lady

by John Campbell

  Marriage to Denis

  Margaret Roberts’ first parliamentary campaign must have done wonders for her self-confidence. She knew now that she was on her way.With her course firmly set, she could begin to equip herself professionally for the career that lay within her grasp. Testing pie-fillings was no preparation for the House of Commons. As soon as the 1950 election was out of the way she applied to the Inns of Court to start reading for the Bar. She gave up her digs in Dartford and rented a flat in Pimlico. Instead of commuting daily to Hammersmith and returning to Dartford every evening to canvass, she could now devote her evenings to the law, visiting the constituency only when required. She did not really believe that one more push would win it. Yet she was still more visible than most candidates in hopeless seats.

  Living in London also enabled her to see more of Denis Thatcher, who drove down to Atlas Preservatives each day from Chelsea. Since their first meeting on the night of her adoption, their relationship had developed slowly. Margaret had little time for social life in the eleven months up to the election; moreover, they were commuting every day in opposite directions. It was ‘certainly not’, she later insisted, love at first sight.8

  Margaret and Denis were not an obviously well-matched couple: they had very few interests or enthusiasms in common. Yet at the time they met each was exactly what the other was looking for. Denis was thirty-three in February 1949. He had been deeply hurt by the failure of his first marriage. He wanted to marry again before he got too old, but was wary of making another mistake. What he liked about Margaret Roberts, on top of her looks, her energy and her youthful optimism, was her formidable practicality. She was not a girl who was going to make a mess of her life, or complicate his with feminine demands. Dedicated to her own career, she would leave him space to get on with his. She too was ready to get married, on her own terms. Hitherto she had never had much time for boyfriends. She had male friends – indeed, she preferred the company of men to women – but they were political associates with whom she talked and argued, rather than kissed. She always preferred men older than herself.

  Though she had made a great impact in Dartford as a single woman, Alfred Bossom – leader of the Kent Conservatives and something of a mentor at this time – advised her that to advance her career she really should be married. Moreover, in sheer practical terms, marriage would enable her to give up her unrewarding job and concentrate fully on law and politics.

  At the same time her practicality disguised a romantic side to her nature. At the height of her political power Mrs Thatcher was notoriously susceptible to a certain sort of raffish charm and displayed a surprising weakness for matinee-idol looks. Denis did not have these exactly, but he was tall (which she liked), upright and bespectacled (like her father, though Denis was more owlish). He had fought in the war and retained a military manner, at once slangy, blunt and self-deprecating. As managing director of his family firm he was comfortably off, drove a fast car and had his own flat in Chelsea. In the still grey and rationed world of 1950 he had, as she writes in her memoirs, ‘a certain style and dash… and, being ten years older, he simply knew more of the world than I did’.9 But she would not have fallen for a playboy. It was his work that took Denis round the world, and she admired that. She was a great believer in business, and export business in particular. Atlas Preservatives was just the sort of company on which British economic recovery depended. Beneath his bluff manner, Denis was a serious businessman of old-fashioned views and a moral code as rigorous as her own. He was much more relaxed about politics than she was, but he shared her principles and embodied them in practice. It was not an accident that politics brought them together.

  Thus they complemented one another perfectly. While each answered the other’s need for security and support, each also appreciated the other’s self-sufficiency. Both were dedicated to their own careers, which neither ever curtailed for the other – not Margaret when their children were young, nor Denis when she became a Cabinet Minister.

  Only once, around 1964, did Margaret’s growing political prominence strain Denis’s tolerance near to breaking point. For the most part he accepted, in a way remarkable for a man of conservative views born in 1915, the equality – and ultimately far more than equality – of his wife’s career with his own. In this he was indeed ‘an exceptional man’.10 Needing a husband, Margaret chose shrewdly and exceedingly well. Marriage to Denis was the rock of her career.

  He actually proposed in September 1951. He says he made up his mind while on holiday in France with a male friend. ‘During the tour I suddenly thought to myself “That’s the girl”… I think I was intelligent enough to see that this was a remarkable young woman.’11 She claims that she ‘thought long and hard about it. I had so much set my heart on politics that I hadn’t figured marriage in my plans.’12 Be that as it may, she accepted. But the 1951 General Election came first. Attlee went to the country again in October. Miss Roberts – for the last time under that name – threw herself back into electioneering. It can have done her no harm that Central Office leaked the news of her engagement the day before polling. But of course the seat was still impregnable. She took another thousand votes off Dodds’ majority. More important, the Tories were narrowly returned to power (on a minority of the national poll). Just seven weeks later Miss Roberts became the second Mrs Thatcher.

  The wedding, on 13 December, emphasised the bride’s new life in the Home Counties rather than her Midland roots. She was married in London, in the Wesleyan Chapel, City Road – ‘the Westminster Abbey of the Methodist Church’13 – but this was mainly because Denis, as a divorced man, could not remarry in an Anglican church. Alfred thought the ceremony ‘half-way to Rome’,14 and from now on Margaret increasingly identified herself with the Established Church. She did not even wear white, but a brilliant blue velvet dress with a matching hat decorated spectacularly with ostrich feathers, a replica of the dress worn by Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, in Gainsborough’s painting.

  Typically, the honeymoon combined holiday with work – a few days in Madeira sandwiched between business trips to Portugal and Paris. It was Margaret’s first experience of foreign travel, but she never had much time for holidays; she was almost certainly impatient to get back to start homemaking, passing her Bar exams and looking for another seat. On their return she moved into Denis’s flat in Swan Court, Flood Street, Chelsea, just off the King’s Road, and began life as Margaret Thatcher. With marriage accomplished, she told Miriam Stoppard many years later, ‘this was the biggest thing in one’s life now sorted out’.15

  Motherhood and law

  After the precocious triumphs of her two Dartford candidacies, Margaret Thatcher’s career was stalled for the next six years. Just when she had made such a spectacular beginning, marriage and then motherhood took her abruptly out of the political reckoning. In the long run, marriage set her up, both emotionally and financially: Denis’s money gave her the security and independence to dedicate her life to politics. But in the short run it set her back five years.

  Not that she became a housewife: far from it. But she was obliged to concentrate her energies on her secondary ambition – to become a lawyer – while putting her primary political goal temporarily on hold. She was forced – reluctantly – to sit out the 1955 General Election. Not until 1958 was she able to secure a winnable constituency from which to resume her march on Westminster. Frustrating though it was at the time, this enforced period of retrenchment did her no harm. In 1950 she was young, conspicuous and headstrong: had she got into Parliament at that age she would inevitably have attracted a lot of attention and probably identified herself irreparably as a naively vigorous right-winger. As it was, six years of marriage, motherhood and law both matured her and made her much less visible, enabling her to slip easily into a career path of rapid but inconspicuous promotion, without weakening her fundamental instincts and convictions. Those who make their move too soon in British politics seldom make it to the top.

  For the
first time in her life she had money. She could at last surround herself with all those enviable mod cons she did not have in Grantham or in any of her cheerless digs. In Swan Court she could afford to entertain and quickly turned herself into a formidable hostess. But of course she also worked. Along with the cooking and the housework, she now had time to pursue her legal studies. She attended courses at the Council for Legal Education, working towards her intermediate Bar exams in the summer of 1953. If he did not know it already, Denis discovered that he had married a workaholic who would stay up long after he had gone to bed, or get up early, to finish whatever she had to do.

  Almost certainly Margaret Thatcher wanted to have children – she would have regarded it as part of her duty, one of those social expectations she was programmed to observe – even though she must have known it would make finding a seat more difficult. She was confident of her own ability to handle the competing demands on her time; but local Conservative Associations were a different matter. Whatever her calculations, they were knocked sideways in August 1953 when she surprised herself and her doctors by producing twins. This was a wonderful piece of Thatcherite efficiency – two babies for the price of one, a boy and a girl, in a single economy pack, an object lesson in productivity. She had been expecting a single child in late September, but her labour pains started six weeks early. She went into Queen Charlotte’s Hospital on Thursday 13 August, was X-rayed next day and found to be carrying twins; they were delivered by Caesarean section on Saturday the 15th, weighing 4lbs each, and were christened Mark and Carol.

  Giving birth to twins with the minimum disruption of her career became part of the Thatcher legend. She did not enjoy her pregnancy, which made her feel uncharacteristically unwell, so getting two children for the labour of one suited her admirably. ‘As she now had one of each sex’, Carol has written, ‘that was the end of it as far as she was concerned – she needn’t repeat the process.’16 She could get on with what was more important to her. There and then, in her hospital bed, she committed herself to taking her final Bar exams in December. She had passed her intermediates in May and, twins or no twins, she was not going to postpone her finals. In fact their arrival six weeks early gave her more time.

  On coming out of hospital she first hired an Australian nurse for six weeks while she found a permanent nanny, called Barbara, who stayed for five years. To give themselves more space, she and Denis rented the adjoining flat, knocking through a connecting door: this arrangement, with Denis and Margaret in one flat and Barbara and the twins next door, ensured undisturbed nights and maximum peace and quiet in the daytime for Margaret to work. She duly passed her final exams, was called to the Bar and joined her first chambers in January 1954.

  While she was practising at the Bar, in Mark and Carol’s pre-school years, she told Patricia Murray, ‘I was never very far away – my chambers were only about twenty minutes from home, so I knew I could be back very quickly if I were needed.’17 That was true – though perhaps optimistic – so long as the family was living in Chelsea. ‘I was there with them quite a lot during the early stages,’ she claimed in 1979.18 But in 1957, when the twins were four, the hitherto very low rent on their two flats in Swan Court was steeply increased as a result of the Conservative Government’s abolition of rent controls – an act which the Thatchers in principle approved. Rather than pay the new commercial rent they moved out of London to a large suburban house in Lock’s Bottom, Farnborough, in Kent. This gave Denis a much shorter daily drive to Erith. But it meant Margaret commuting every day. She could not now be home in twenty minutes. Then, when she got into Parliament in 1959, she was not at home in the evenings either.The nannies had to cope – first Barbara, later another, much older, known as Abby. ‘They kept the children in order and I always telephoned from the House shortly before six each evening to see that all was well.’19

  Mark and Carol were not exactly spoiled, but they were certainly indulged. They did not lack for clothes or expensive toys: their childhood was very different from the constricted existence Margaret had endured in Grantham. They had family holidays – traditional English seaside holidays, first at Bognor, then on the Isle of Wight where they rented the same house for six years running from 1959. But Carol notes bleakly: ‘Family holidays didn’t appeal to Denis or Margaret.’20 More adventurously they also went skiing as a family every Christmas from 1962 – quite an unusual thing to do in the early sixties. Carol describes her mother as ‘a cautious skier’ who worked hard on perfecting her technique but eschewed speed: ‘she had no intention of returning with a leg in plaster’.21

  ‘When I look back’, Carol goes on, ‘I have no doubt that my mother’s political ambitions – and the single-mindedness with which she pursued them – eclipsed our family and social life.’ She does not blame Margaret. ‘No woman gets to the top by going on family picnics and cooking roast beef and Yorkshire pudding for Sunday lunch with friends.’22 As a working woman bringing a second full-time income into an already prosperous home (and then spending a good deal of it on child care and private school fees) Mrs Thatcher was blazing a trail which became commonplace in her daughter’s generation. Moreover she was not just working for her own fulfilment, or for money: she had a mission, and ultimately she achieved it. Plenty of prominent men – political leaders, businessmen and artists – have followed their calling at the expense of their families. History will not blame Margaret Thatcher for having done the same. But she deceived herself if she believed her family did not suffer for her single-mindedness.

  Seeking a winnable constituency

  Margaret Thatcher’s legal career was brief and undistinguished, but nevertheless an important stage in her political apprenticeship. Less than six years elapsed between her being called to the Bar in January 1954 and her entering the House of Commons in October 1959. For those six years, however, her commitment to the law was characteristically thorough and purposeful, and it achieved its purpose. She had recognised even before she went to Oxford that law would be a much better profession than chemistry from which to launch into politics, first as a means of gaining practical experience of legislation in action, and second as a profession whose short terms and flexible hours would allow her both to nurse a constituency – supposing she could find one – and feel that she could always get home in an emergency if required. So it proved.

  Women were still conspicuous by their rarity in the Inns of Court: the few exceptions tended to stick to ‘feminine’ specialisms like divorce and family law, rather than challenge hard masculine preserves like tax. Undoubtedly Mrs Thatcher did meet some prejudice at the Bar. Wherever she did encounter male chauvinism, her technique was simply to ignore it while giving it nothing to feed on. She worked at least as hard as any man. She arrived promptly in the morning, wasted no time on gossiping or long lunches, went home at 5.30 and usually took work with her. As a woman she was different because she did not mix socially with other barristers and pupils: she did not go to the pub at the end of the day. But she pulled her weight professionally: she relished showing the men that she expected no concessions. If anything, Patrick Jenkin remembers, her reputation with her peers was the more formidable because they knew that she had passed her exams while nursing twins, and that she went home every evening to look after her husband and children.23

  She was not a brilliant lawyer. In the two years she practised under her own name she impressed everyone who worked with her as highly competent, thorough and meticulous; but as soon as she got into Parliament she was happy to give it up. ‘You can do two things,’ she explained to Miriam Stoppard in 1985.‘You cannot do three things.’24 The law, like chemistry, was part of her apprenticeship: its discipline shaped her mental equipment, but she never joined the legal tribe. She retained an elevated, almost mystical, reverence for the rule of law as the foundation of English liberty. But she had seen enough of the profession from the inside not to be in awe of its pretensions. As Prime Minister she treated lawyers as just another professional consp
iracy to be brought to heel in the public interest; appeals to her professional solidarity fell on deaf ears. Her experience between 1953 and 1959 valuably inoculated her against the claims of legal protectionism.

  In 1957, when the twins were three, Mrs Thatcher began again actively seeking a winnable constituency. Despite her record at Dartford and glowing references from Central Office, she did not find it easy. Conservative Associations, frequently dominated by women, are notoriously reluctant, even today, to select women candidates; that they were reluctant in the mid-1950s to adopt a young mother of twins is scarcely surprising. In truth it is more remarkable that she did, at only the fourth attempt, manage to persuade a safe London constituency that she could handle the double burden.

  Before that she was shortlisted for two Kentish seats and one in Hertfordshire. The next safe seat where the sitting Member announced his intention to stand down was Finchley, a prosperous slice of north-west London which eventually turned out to be ideal for her. But here again she had a struggle initially against powerful prejudice. She was helped by the fact that the local Association was in bad shape. Despite a comfortable Conservative majority of nearly 13,000 in 1955, the Liberals had been making a big effort – specifically targeting the large Jewish vote – and had captured several council seats.

  Sir John Crowder announced that he was stepping down in March 1958. By 15 May Central Office had sent the Association the names of some eighty hopefuls to consider. In June this long list was reduced to twenty, including Margaret Thatcher. Then the seventeen members of the selection committee voted for a shortlist of three: Mrs Thatcher was on everyone’s list, coming top with seventeen votes. ‘It will be interesting’, the deputy area agent minuted, ‘to see whether the 100 per cent vote for Mrs Thatcher contained some people who were willing merely to include one woman in the list of four, but there is no doubt that she completely outshone everyone we interviewed.’25