The Iron Lady Read online

  This utilitarian attitude to literature was reinforced by her education. At school she specialised in science, went on to read chemistry at Oxford, and then took up law. From Oxford onwards she devoted most of her spare time to politics. As a result she never had much time to enlarge on her youthful reading. What she read and learned in her first eighteen years, under her father’s influence, remained the bedrock of her literary education. In this sense it is literally true that she learned ‘almost everything’ from her father. She always insisted that the most important lesson he taught her was to follow her own convictions. ‘Never do things just because other people do them,’ he told her when she wanted to go dancing.11 ‘Make up your own mind what you are going to do and persuade people to go your way.’12 ‘Never go with the crowd,’ she paraphrased his advice in 1982. ‘Never, never, never.’13 The paradox, of course, is that she went on, with no sense of contradiction, to pride herself on taking all her ideas from him. ‘He brought me up to believe all the things I do believe and they are the values on which I fought the election.’ 14

  It is a curious thing for a strong-minded woman to proclaim in this way her debt to her father, as if she was no more than his echo. In fact she exaggerated the extent of her fidelity to Alfred’s teaching – presumably to divert attention from the important respects in which she had abandoned it. Once she had got away from Grantham and embarked upon her own career she quickly adopted a style of life and political values a world away from his spartan ethic. Symbolically, she abandoned her parents’ church and gravitated to the Church of England. She gave her own children an upbringing as different as possible from the puritanical austerity she always claimed had been so good for her. Mark and Carol were not made to go to church, she told Patricia Murray, ‘because I’d had so much insistence myself ’.15 ‘There was not a lot of fun and sparkle in my life,’ she told an audience of children in 1980. ‘I tried to give my children a little bit more.’16 An alternative interpretation is that Mark and Carol were smothered in material comforts in guilty compensation for their mother’s absence, for most of their childhood, in pursuit of her political career.

  Yet clearly much that Alfred taught his daughter did go into the forging of her creed. The political personality that Margaret Thatcher became was moulded by her upbringing. Essentially she took three things from her father’s example. First, it was Alfred who instilled in her the habit of hard work, as something both virtuous in itself and the route to self-advancement. Second, it was the example of Alfred’s tireless community activity which bred in his daughter a powerful impulse towards public service. The third, and perhaps most important, legacy which Alfred gave his daughter was an exceptionally powerful moral sense. More than anything else in her political make-up, it was her fierce confidence that she knew right from wrong – even if what was right was not always immediately attainable – which marked Margaret Thatcher out from contemporary politicians. She believed absolutely in her own integrity and habitually disparaged the motives of those who disagreed with her. This rare moral certainty and unreflective self-righteousness was her greatest political strength in the muddy world of political expediency and compromise; it was also in the end her greatest weakness.

  The most extraordinary thing about Mrs Thatcher’s mythologisation of her father is that it was entirely retrospective. Having once escaped from Alfred at the age of eighteen she saw very little of him for the remainder of his life. In 1951 she took her fiancé to meet his prospective in-laws. Alfred Roberts and Denis Thatcher had nothing in common. Once they were married, Margaret and Denis went back to Grantham very rarely. When Beatie died in 1960, Alf remarried – a local farmer’s widow called Cissie Hubbard, with grown-up children. ‘I suppose that’s a good thing,’ Margaret witheringly confided. ‘She’s a nice homely little woman.’17 He lived until February 1970. He was proud of his daughter being a Member of Parliament, and was said to have been listening to her on a radio discussion programme just before he died. But he did not live quite long enough to see her in the Cabinet – though, curiously, she believed he did.18 Perhaps she was thinking of the Shadow Cabinet; but her mistake suggests that he did not share very closely in her triumphs. He had only a graduation photograph of her in his house: nothing more recent, and no pictures of his grandchildren.19 Mark and Carol were sixteen when Alfred died, yet appear to have little memory of him. The impression is inescapable that Margaret was very much less devoted to her wonderful father while he was alive than she became to his sanctified image after he was dead.

  Educating Margaret

  The key to Margaret Roberts’ escape from Grantham was education. Her formal schooling began a few weeks before her fifth birthday, on 3 September 1930, at Huntingtower Road County Elementary School, reputed to be the best council school in Grantham. According to her own account she could already read by the time she went there, and she quickly moved up a year. She was already formidably diligent and competitive. At the age of nine she won a poetry recital competition at the local music festival When the head congratulated her, saying she was lucky, she denied it indignantly: ‘I wasn’t lucky. I deserved it.’20 She would always believe that if she worked hard she would deserve to win. The following year, when still only ten, she won a scholarship to the fee-paying girls’ grammar school, Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School (known as KGGS), where her sister Muriel had already gone before her.

  In fact Alfred paid Margaret’s fees too, since the scholarship was means-tested; it was nevertheless a useful insurance, and a considerable achievement.

  Her reports give a clear picture of her character. At Christmas 1936 she was said to have ‘worked steadily and well throughout the term. She has definite ability, and her cheeriness makes her a very pleasant member of her form. Her behaviour is excellent.’ The following July she won praise for ‘neat and careful work’. The next year she was ‘a very helpful member of her form’ and ‘achieved a high standard in every subject’. In her fifth year (the summer of 1941) she sat her School Certificate: she passed well in all subjects, but her methodical approach naturally directed her towards specialising in the sciences.

  An interest in chemistry was not something she derived from her father, nor was it the most obvious subject for a girl precociously consumed by current affairs; later, when she had set her sights on a political career, she regretted having been sidetracked into science. At the age of sixteen, however, chemistry was her best subject. It suited the practical bent of her mind, and – most important at that age – she liked her teacher. It was a sensible subject, leading to good employment prospects.

  Margaret was not quite fourteen when the war began, nearly twenty when it ended; it overshadowed her entire adolescence and was overwhelmingly the formative influence on her political development and specifically her approach to international relations. She came to political awareness in the mid-1930s at just the moment when international crises – in Abyssinia, the Rhineland, Spain and Czechoslovakia – began to dominate the news. Her first political memory was the so-called ‘Peace Ballot’ organised by the League of Nations Union in 1934.At a time when most Methodists inclined towards pacifism, Alfred appears to have been exceptionally aware of the threatening European situation, convinced of the need for rearmament to resist Nazism, and also – more unusually – concerned about the plight of the Jews. In 1938 the Roberts family briefly gave sanctuary to a seventeen-year-old Austrian girl – the penfriend of Margaret’s sister Muriel – sent to England by her parents to escape the Anschluss. She did not stay long – Alfred persuaded other Rotary families to take her in turn – but she brought the reality of what was happening in Central Europe home to North Parade.

  The war itself was a formative influence for Margaret Thatcher’s whole generation, yet it affected her in a crucially different way from her male contemporaries. She was not only just too young to fight: she was the wrong sex. She could have joined one of the women’s services when she left school, which would have got her into uniform and clo
ser to the action; but still she could never have gained that first-hand experience of combat which left such a deep and lasting impression on practically all the young men who became her rivals and colleagues in the years ahead. Mrs Thatcher’s experience on the home front – listening to Churchill in the blackout, following the campaigns with little flags on maps – taught her different lessons.

  Unlike those who served during or after the war in France, Germany, the Mediterranean or the Far East, Mrs Thatcher never set foot out of England before her honeymoon in 1952, when she was twenty-six. Seen from Grantham, the peoples of the Continent were either odious enemies to be defeated, or useless allies who had to be saved from the consequences of their own feebleness by the British and Americans. By contrast the Americans were cousins, partners, friends: powerful and generous, the saviours of democracy, champions of freedom, prosperity and progress. Nor was this a merely abstract admiration: from 1942 onwards there was a large presence of American airmen stationed at bases around Grantham. Though they excited considerable interest among the local girls, there is no record that any of them tried to take up with Margaret Roberts. She never had much time for that sort of thing. But she saw the Americans around the town, noted the spending power they brought to the local economy, and could hear them flying out each day to bomb Germany.

  We are dealing with simplistic stereotypes here. But there can be no doubt that Mrs Thatcher’s instinctive and lifelong belief in the Atlantic alliance as the first principle of British foreign policy, and her equally instinctive contempt for the continental Europeans, both derived from her particular experience of the Second World War – an experience unique among British politicians of the post-war era. It is impossible to overemphasise the significance of this gulf of perception. It was not just her sex which made Mrs Thatcher different: the most important consequence of her sex was her lack of military experience.

  Though she did not sit her Higher School Certificate until 1943, she had already received offers from both Nottingham (‘our local university’) and Bedford College, London, before the end of 1942. However, she was determined, with Alfred’s support, to try for Oxford. (‘I regarded it as being quite simply the best, and if I was serious about getting on in life that is what I should always strive for…I was never tempted to opt for Nottingham.’)21 So she sat a scholarship exam in December 1942. She narrowly missed the prize (she was, as she points out in her memoirs, only seventeen); but she was offered a place at Somerville College, Oxford, for October 1944. The lost year was important since, under wartime regulations, unless she went up in 1943 she would only be allowed to take a two-year degree before being called up for National Service. Still, it was a considerable achievement to have won a place.

  With a university place secured, but a year to fill before she could expect to take it up, the natural thing for a patriotic eighteen-year-old in the middle of the war might have been to do as many of her contemporaries had already done and join one of the women’s services; or, if that would have committed her for too long a period, at least find some other form of war work while she waited to go to Oxford. It is a little odd that she chose instead to go back to school for another year.

  The autumn term began in August, three weeks early to allow an October break for potato picking. Just three weeks into the term, however, there came a telephone call from Somerville: a vacancy had arisen – another girl had presumably decided that she had more compelling priorities – so Miss Roberts was offered the chance to take up her place immediately. She therefore left KGGS in the middle of the term, left home and Grantham and went up to Oxford in October 1943, with the opportunity, after all, to enjoy a full three years.

  Oxford

  Going to Oxford was the great opportunity which changed Margaret Roberts’ life, opened doors to her and set her on the way to a political career. Yet Oxford was not for her, as it was for so many others, a golden period of youthful experiment and self-discovery. In the four years she eventually spent there she made no lasting friendships, underwent no intellectual awakening. She did not light up the university in any way: none of her contemporaries saw her as anything remarkable, still less picked her as a future Prime Minister. Yet she was already more than half-determined to go into politics and used her time at Oxford quite deliberately to make connections which would be useful to her in years to come. The fact that no one noticed her was largely a function of her sex: Oxford in the 1940s was still a predominantly male society. The Union, in particular, was barred to women, who were obliged to confine their political activity to the less glamorous back rooms of the Conservative Association and the Labour Club. But even within the Conservative Association Margaret Roberts seemed no more than diligent. The most remarkable thing about her Oxford career, in fact, was how little the experience seemed to change her.

  Admittedly, Oxford in wartime was a shadow of its normal self. There were more women than usual and fewer young men; rather than giving the women more opportunity to shine, however, the men’s absence seemed to drain the place of much of its energy. Margaret was given rooms in college, but was slow to make friends. ‘Yes, I was homesick,’ she admitted to Patricia Murray.‘I think there would be something very wrong with your home life if you weren’t just a little.’22 She gradually filled her rooms with familiar pictures and bits of furniture brought from home.

  Her principal antidote to loneliness was work; but in some ways this only increased it. Chemistry is an unsociable course of study, involving long hours alone in the laboratory: years later she recalled that science was ‘impersonal’, compared with arts subjects which gave more opportunity for discussion and debate.23 She was probably already beginning to regret having chosen chemistry; but she stuck at it conscientiously and she was more than competent at it, combining as she did a clear mind with an infinite capacity for taking pains. In her third year she devoted more of her time to politics and less to work. Had she dedicated herself single-mindedly to getting a first she might – by sheer application – have succeeded. As it was she won a university essay prize, shared with another Somerville girl. But she was not so single-minded. Moreover she was ill during her final exams. In the circumstances she did well to take a solid second. It was good enough to allow her to come back for a fourth year to do a B.Sc.

  Outside her work, her most active commitment in her first two years was the John Wesley Society. This was a natural refuge for a shy provincial girl of Methodist upbringing, an opportunity to meet people like herself with similar habits and assumptions. She attended the Wesley Memorial Church on Sundays, and her social life revolved around the Methodist Study Group and tea parties run by the Students’ Fellowship. It would be easy to conclude that the reassuring familiarity of Methodism was simply a comfort blanket while she found her feet: ‘a sober but cheerful social life’, as she put it, ‘which I found the more valuable in my initially somewhat strange surroundings’.24 But she took it more seriously than that. The Wesley Society used to send its members out in pairs to preach in the surrounding villages – exactly as Alfred preached in the villages around Grantham. Margaret readily joined in this activity. Fifty years later, a Somerville contemporary and fellow Methodist clearly remembered a sermon she preached on the text ‘Seek ye first the Kingdom of God; and all these things shall be added unto you’, which was regarded by all who heard it as ‘outstanding’.25 No doubt it owed a lot to Alfred; but it should not be forgotten that when, much later, she was invited to expound her faith from a number of famous pulpits, she had done it before. She was a preacher before she was a politician.

  By far the most important thing she did in her first term was to join the Oxford Union Conservative Association (OUCA). There was no question of her joining any other party, or all the political clubs, as some new undergraduates did. She had no doubt of her allegiance; Winston Churchill was her hero and she already took her political commitment very seriously.

  To Janet Vaughan, Principal of Somerville and proud of the college’s left-wing rep
utation, Miss Roberts was an embarrassment, a cuckoo in her progressive nest.

  She fascinated me. I used to talk to her a great deal; she was an oddity. Why? She was a Conservative. She stood out. Somerville had always been a radical establishment and there weren’t many Conservatives about then. We used to argue about politics; she was so set in steel as a Conservative. She just had this one line… We used to entertain a good deal at weekends, but she didn’t get invited. She had nothing to contribute, you see.26

  It would be hard to overestimate the effect of this sort of snobbish condescension on the formation of Margaret Thatcher’s character. The discovery that all the trendy people were against her only confirmed her certainty that they were all wrong and reinforced her righteous sense of persecution. She encountered the same patronising attitude when she first became Leader of the Opposition in 1975. She had probably met it already at school, where she was used to being a loner who was not allowed to go to dances: it was precisely the attitude Alfred had tried to arm her against by urging her to follow her own – or his – convictions and ignore the crowd. But nowhere can it have been more brutal than at Oxford, where she went up naively expecting to find rational inquiry but met only arrogant superiority. This was her first encounter with the liberal establishment and she did not like it. It hardened her heart: one day she would get even.

  Miss Roberts made her first recorded political speech during the 1945 General Election. As soon as the term ended she went back to Grantham to work for the Conservative who was trying to regain the seat from Denis Kendall – an Independent who had won it at a by-election during the war. The new candidate was Squadron Leader Worth. The twin themes of his campaign were encapsulated in an advertisement in the Grantham Journal: ‘Worth stands for Agriculture and Churchill.’27 Margaret Roberts, still only nineteen, acted as warm-up speaker at meetings before the Squadron Leader arrived. At one such meeting on 25 June, the Sleaford Gazette reported, ‘the very youthful Miss M. H. Roberts, daughter of Alderman A. Roberts of Grantham’, did not talk about agriculture, but spoke with precocious confidence about the need to punish Germany, to cooperate with both the Soviet Union and the United States, and to ‘stand by the Empire’ – as well as the importance of confirming Churchill in power. Having lost Roosevelt, she urged, the world could not afford to lose Churchill too.28