Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (30 page)

Beatrice Roberts died in Grantham on 7 December 1960. The family sent out a printed card thanking people for their condolences, in the names of Alfred, Muriel and Margaret. The day before, the
Liverpool Daily Post
published a chirpy piece by Margaret about how to combine family and political work. The woman in politics, she wrote, ‘must have a complete fascination for the subject’, something which, like being musical or mathematical, is innate, not learnt; ‘charm is not enough!’ she declared, a woman must also have ‘courage and conviction, for without these qualities the
others are hollow and useless’. At half-term, she added, the children always come to Westminster ‘and their greatest joy is to climb Big Ben’.
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The article reads strangely in the (unmentioned) context of her mother’s final illness.

Margaret and Denis invited the widowed Alfred Roberts to come and stay for his first Christmas on his own. From Dormers, he wrote to Muriel ‘so that you may know that I am getting on all right’. ‘Of course I miss Mummy,’ he went on, ‘and more so as every one is busy on their different jobs and engagements.’ At Dormers, ‘it seems lonely for a large part of the day.’
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On 3 January 1961, still staying with Margaret, Alfred wrote to Muriel to announce his arrival at her house in a week’s time. The twins were having friends to tea, he said, ‘so I shall come up to my room to escape the din.’ That night, he was going to the cinema in Bromley with Denis and Margaret – ‘it is one of the very few nights they have free.’ Margaret’s version of the stay, written to Muriel after Christmas, betrayed growing impatience: ‘Re Pop
*
– he is
determined
to stay with us both as long as possible. He told Abi
^†
that he dreads the thought of going home. At the moment it is most difficult here as Mark and Carol are sleeping together and both disturb one another a great deal. Added to that Pop tends to wake them both when he goes to the toilet about 5–5.30 a.m. He is eating the most enormous meals and doing absolutely nothing.’ With the return of Parliament, Margaret felt that she must move her father on: ‘I shall
have
to shunt Pop off on Saturday 14th Jan … Will this be all right with you?’ And she recommended that her sister set a clear time for their father’s eventual return to Grantham, ‘Otherwise he will just hang on and on and not take any hints.’
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After he returned from Essex to Grantham, the widowed Alfred Roberts wrote a series of bleak letters to his elder daughter. Not for the first time, he felt sorry for himself, and a little neglected by his younger daughter. ‘I am trying to get myself adjusted to the new circumstances which isn’t easy, but things are improving,’ he wrote on 21 February. ‘If I can get through the next four or five weeks I shall have got over the worst part … I don’t suppose, by the look of things, I shall get any letter from Margaret again this week.’ In fact, he was mistaken, but not much comforted, for he wrote again on 1 March, ‘Have had a short letter from Margaret, but no enquiries as to how I am getting on … She seems frantically busy of course.’ He
also mentioned that he had made a new will: ‘You and Margaret are Executor and Trustees and also the estate will be divided between you. Any little gratuities to anyone else you will decide.’ On 24 March he describes learning how to iron his own shirts and says, ‘at the moment I am not feeling quite so lonely.’ And on 19 April he wrote to thank Muriel for a birthday present: ‘It is good of you to remember me like this. Unfortunately Margaret forgot but expect her mind was all on the Budget that day.’ Transferring some of his sense of neglect to others he adds, ‘I hope Margaret will remember to arrange for the boys [Muriel’s sons] to visit the House of Commons – it will be just too bad if she doesn’t do anything about it for it would be such an outing for them.’ Perhaps Muriel reminded Margaret about their father’s birthday, for a week or so later, Alfred informed her ‘Margaret wrote to apologise for forgetting my birthday and has asked me to let her know what to send.’
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It would be wrong to say that Mrs Thatcher was undutiful in her behaviour to her father. There were other occasions on which she had him to stay, solving the twins’ space problem – and perhaps her own irritation at his presence – by putting him in a local hotel; and in June she, Denis and Mark took him to the Test match.
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The fact that he noticed a week when no letter from her arrives shows that, in most weeks, she did write. In these months, no letters from Margaret to Alfred survive, but one or two slightly later ones do. These show the busy daughter relating, in friendly though not intimate terms, the latest doings of herself and her family. At the beginning of September 1961 she tells him that she has taken the children to Camber Sands on the Sussex coast and that they have been burgled at Dormers (‘I was disturbed [by the sound of their entry] but told myself not to be so silly and that I was imagining things’), losing their jars of sixpences, the twins’ birthday money and jodhpur boots.
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In midsummer of the following year, Margaret tells her father that she has just had a ‘most interesting morning’ presiding over an international symposium on the rehabilitation of the disabled, that she has a new agent in Finchley (‘he talks rather a lot’), and that she has been to Ascot races (a contrast with her visit to the Derby a dozen years earlier which she had concealed from Alfred). She proudly boasts that she has been with Denis to a Buckingham Palace cocktail party. ‘The Queen,’ she writes with a touch of unconscious self-application, ‘has a much stronger personality than most people realise and she is certainly
not
overshadowed by the Duke of Edinburgh.’
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But what the whole correspondence – father to elder daughter, Margaret to Muriel, younger daughter to father – suggests is a woman so busy and so keen to get on that her family roots do not interest her very much and her family problems do not engage her imagination. Carol confirmed this,
recalling that there was no sense of a Roberts clan, or of a strong influence of her grandfather in her childhood. Her mother ‘did not yo-yo up and down to Grantham’.
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In April 1962, after his birthday, Alfred Roberts wrote to Muriel as in the previous year to thank her for her presents. He mentions that he is going to stay with Margaret the following week, but says to Muriel: ‘It is your affection that helps me to stand up against the awful loneliness that sometimes hits me.’
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It seems unlikely that he wrote a letter of comparable warmth to Margaret at this time, or received one from her. Quite soon, Alfred Roberts married Cissie Hubbard, the widow of a local farmer, and his loneliness therefore ceased to be a problem for his daughters.

Exactly a year earlier, Margaret had given a revealing interview to Godfrey Winn, one of the most famous feature journalists of the age, in the
Daily Express
. Winn took the Queen’s imminent birthday (21 April) as the cue for his interview, and wrote: ‘The woman opposite me on the sofa could not have been born and brought up in any other country except ours. With the Queen she shares not only a birthday year [in fact, she was born in the year before the Queen], but possesses the same flawless, cold-water, utterly English complexion.’
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He said that he registered Mrs Thatcher – although of course he knew her background – not as a Grantham grocer’s daughter but ‘as someone from an upper-middle-class background whose husband enjoyed taking her with him to shoot in Scotland’. It is reasonable to assume that Mrs Thatcher had desired this effect (though Denis did not shoot), and had deliberately moved herself a long way from the mahogany counter in North Parade. This context, perhaps, helps to explain her remarkably frank comment to Winn about the mother who had died only a few months earlier: ‘I loved my mother dearly but after I was 15 we had nothing more to say to each other. It wasn’t her fault. She was weighed down by the home, always being in the home.’ There can be no doubt of her desire to escape some of her background, particularly that part which, had she stayed in Grantham, would have circumscribed her because of her sex. To her father, even as she forgot to send him a birthday present, she paid tribute. ‘He made me read widely,’ she told Winn, ‘and for that I owe him everything.’
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On 9 October 1961, Margaret Thatcher was offered her first government post by the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan. With C. M. Woodhouse, who took up a post at Aviation, she was the first of the new intake to be promoted. In his diary’s only mention of the future prime minister, Macmillan wrote: ‘Mrs Thatcher, a clever young woman MP, and Monty Woodhouse are the newcomers.’
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Mrs Thatcher was also the youngest woman ever to
have been made a minister, and the first with a young family at the time of appointment. Her job was parliamentary under-secretary at the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance. Her salary was £3,250 a year. As had become usual in these important junctures of her life, Denis was away – on an export tour of Africa – when the offer was made. She told the papers that she had not dared cable him with the news before it was made public, so he learnt about it after everyone else.
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One newspaper said that ‘She was dressed like any other housewife up to town for the day. A cossack hat in coney fur covered most of her fair hair which is just going grey at the temples. She was wearing a green wool jersey dress and a fine two-row necklace of pearls gleamed at her throat.’
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When Mrs Thatcher saw the Prime Minister on appointment, however, she was, by her own account, smarter still. She wore ‘my best outfit, this time, sapphire blue’.
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And the party took full propaganda advantage of her arrival by putting her on the platform at the party conference in Brighton on the potentially unlucky Friday 13 October, her thirty-sixth birthday. She emerged, she recalled, ‘from a royal blue car and wearing a royal blue dress and hat’.
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None of this sartorial excitement meant that her job was considered important, or that the party leadership had grand plans for Mrs Thatcher. Her very junior post was one of the few which were, in effect, reserved for women, partly because much of the work concerned pensions for widows. When Patricia Hornsby-Smith had resigned at the end of August, Mrs Thatcher was given strong hints that the job would soon be hers. In her memoirs, Mrs Thatcher records that Macmillan ‘characteristically’ advised her not to turn up to her new office before eleven o’clock the following morning, adding that she should then ‘look around and come away. I shouldn’t stay too long.’
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She does not pick up that his suggestion probably reflected his low opinion of the job he had offered her. Women MPs at that time always ended up with ‘the welfare thing’; ‘you took a woman in, but you gave her welfare,’ Mrs Thatcher recalled, ‘either a welfare or education or social services job.’
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The MPNI post did not interest many men, certainly not the men who aspired to run the Conservative Party. It was an unpolitical job, heavy on detail. Mrs Thatcher summed up its nature in an interview with ITN three days after her appointment: ‘… I think it offers scope both for the human side, which is helping people who are in need of help and also on the financial side and seeing that the scheme is sound.’ The job concerned the nuts and bolts of the welfare state. Few people thought this mattered much at the time. Despite her preference for a man’s job, especially an economic one, Margaret Thatcher gradually learnt that it did. It taught her how welfare worked, and did not work, and why government spent so much money.

When Mrs Thatcher arrived at the Ministry’s office in John Adam Street for the first time, she found her minister, John Boyd-Carpenter,
*
waiting for her at the front door. Always susceptible to gestures of gallantry, she was impressed. So was Boyd-Carpenter by her. At first he had assumed that her appointment was what would now be called tokenism, or, as he put it, ‘just one of Macmillan’s gimmicks’, but ‘I soon found how wrong I had been to harbour such doubts. With her quick trained barrister’s brain she mastered quickly the intricacies of National Insurance. And despite the fact that to the male eye she always looked as if she had spent the morning with the coiffeur and the afternoon with the couturier, she worked long and productive hours in the ministry.’
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That same male eye had, in fact, spotted her talent from the very beginning, but had also been suspicious of it. On her arrival at the Ministry, she had also met the Permanent Secretary, Sir Eric Bowyer, a famously stern Glaswegian. Like Boyd-Carpenter, he immediately granted to Mrs Thatcher a privilege he gave to no other junior minister, probably in deference to her sex. He called on her in her office rather than demanding that she come to him, and always maintained this habit. After they had met her, the two men conferred. What did Bowyer think of her, Boyd-Carpenter wondered? ‘She’s very able. She will go a long way,’ said the Permanent Secretary. The minister nodded grim agreement: ‘She’s trouble. What can we do to keep her busy?’
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Mrs Thatcher was invited to make a study of the role of women in the benefits and National Insurance system. Her paper on the subject has not survived. But, according to Michael Partridge, at that time the private secretary to Bowyer, it was an impressive piece of work which foreshadowed the equalizing of the employment, pension and taxation rights of women which Mrs Thatcher was to put into practice in the 1980s.
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It says something about the attitudes of the time that such a study was considered a dead-end thing to do.

Mrs Thatcher’s day-to-day duties, however, concerned detail, not policy. The annual reports of the Ministry combine highly technical accounts of changes in the mechanisms of delivery of benefits with occasional specific anecdotes designed to show touches of humanity:

A pensioner with a double amputation mentioned when attending an Artificial Limb and Appliance Centre that he was in difficulties about buying a pony for his firewood business; the Welfare Officer approached BLESMA (British Limbless Ex-Servicemen’s Association) and Queen Mary’s
(Roehampton) Samaritan Fund, who together contributed a substantial sum for a dapple grey pony.
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