Iron Lady: The Thatcher Years

By Andrew John and Stephen Blake

Allowing you to uncover the woman behind the 'Iron Lady' image, 'Iron Lady: The Thatcher Years' takes a thorough at the life and times of Britain's longest-serving twentieth-century prime minister. As both the first woman to become leader of a European country and the first British premier to achieve re-election for three consecutive terms, Margaret Thatcher's has left behind a long and hugely important legacy. Reflecting on her life and character, from her early days growing up as the daughter of a Lincolnshire grocer, to her years as one of the most powerful and controversial of leaders, through to her iconographic status as an international statesman and thinker, this study is accompanied by a selection of quotes by and about this formidable woman.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael O'Mara
• Release date: Jan 4, 2012
• ISBN: 9781843179139

Book preview

LIFE BEFORE LEADERSHIP:

Margaret’s Road to Power

1975

In 1925 John Logie Baird transmitted the first television broadcast from his laboratory; Al Capone took over the bootlegging racket in Chicago; Ben-Hur, costing a record-breaking $3.95 million to make, was released; the worst tornado in American history hit Illinois and Indiana. And, on 13 October, Margaret Hilda Roberts was born in Grantham, Lincolnshire, second daughter of Alfred and Beatrice Roberts.

Margaret’s father was a grocer who owned a corner shop on the Great North Road. Alfred had started out from a very poor background, and he brought his daughters up in the puritanical mould, with few luxuries and with the emphasis very much laid on hard work and parsimony. Most accounts of Margaret’s early days leave one with the image of a home run strictly in accordance with Victorian values, and of familial duties performed without question and with a great sense of obligation:

Margaret’s mother, Beatrice Stephenson, was born at 10 South Parade in Grantham (it’s now number 55). She could hardly have thought that her ‘Number 10’ was a precursor to the Number 10, which would be occupied by her daughter from 1979 to 1990.

Alfred and Beatie – as he called Beatrice – had saved enough money to marry by 1917, and two years later they had taken out a mortgage on the North Parade premises that were to be his famous grocer’s shop, which was bought as a going concern.

Alfred was also to become a town councillor in Grantham, although his political affiliations were somewhat woolly: he has been described as a closet Conservative and a ‘moderate’ Labourite, as well as a Gladstonian Liberal. The way Margaret remembers it, you didn’t fight local council elections as a party member back then. It just wasn’t the done thing. Alfred stood as an independent – but, as his daughter acknowledged in later years, at heart he was a conservative:

Alfred, just as his daughter would in 1979, achieved a political first: he became the town’s youngest alderman in 1943. He also became the mayor of Grantham in 1945.

Alfred was a fundamentalist when it came to religion. His religion was entirely Bible-based – and this, along with the religious nature of his wife, was to have a considerable influence on the future Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. He did not approve of popular protest, being a great believer in upholding authority, as evidenced by his attitude towards the Jarrow marchers in 1936, when, as Margaret Thatcher was to say in 1975, ‘He did not think that what they were doing was right.’ In the matter of collectivism, as in others, Margaret was to turn out to be very much her father’s daughter.

The Roberts family were Methodists, and Margaret was brought up with a very strong sense of duty: duty to one’s spiritual side, and duty to provide for oneself and for one’s family. Her upbringing contributed significantly to the development of her political philosophies, which emphasized the independence of the individual and the role of private charity, and which were opposed to socialism in all its many manifestations. Her family’s brand of Methodism helped to instil the notion that what a person did voluntarily with his money was his own affair, and that giving in this way was morally superior to any welfare system financed by the taxpayer. This notion was expressed in its most extreme – and controversial – form in the autumn of 1987, when Margaret pronounced that there was ‘no such thing as society’:

Though this proved to be a highly inflammatory comment, providing a great deal of ammunition for her opponents, it was a indication of her deep belief in the role of the individual, which would become such a defining feature of Thatcherism.

In later years Margaret Thatcher famously – or perhaps infamously – appeared to discount her mother’s role when asked about her early family life. ‘I owe almost everything to my father,’ she once said. Even her Who’s Who entry described her simply as the ‘d. of Alfred Roberts, Grantham, Lincs’, omitting all mention of Beatrice. In November 1985, she was quizzed by Dr Miriam Stoppard on a Yorkshire Television programme, Woman to Woman. She seemed to want to sidestep any discussion of her mother, wishing instead to concentrate on her father. ‘Oh, Mummy backed up Daddy in everything,’ she told her interviewer. Dr Stoppard persisted in her questioning, but, for all her efforts, extracted only grudging comments. For instance, when she asked Mrs Thatcher about familial discussions on current affairs, all she would say was, ‘Mummy didn’t get involved in the arguments. She had probably gone out to the kitchen to get the supper ready.’

However, years later, she did indirectly acknowledge that she owes something to her mother’s housewifely skills. In her memoir, The Path to Power, she talks a little more about Beatrice, saying that she had learned from her ‘what it meant to cope with a household so that everything worked like clockwork’. And, as she pointed out in 1979:

A first taste of politics

It could be argued that Margaret Thatcher’s first taste of politics came when she helped at a local council election – although how significant an event she regarded it at the tender age of ten is difficult to say. She very much enjoyed it, though, as she revealed on BBC Radio Four’s Desert Island Discs on 1 February 1978:

The young Margaret Roberts attended Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School, where she was an exemplary, if reasonably quiet, pupil. She was one of the leading stars of the school’s debating team, however – an early indication of the great public speaker she would turn out to be. Her first tentative foray into public life, albeit on a small scale, was made when she became head girl during her last term in the summer of 1943.

REPORT ON MARGARET ROBERTS BY THE ICI PERSONNEL DEPARTMENT

It was not long after her head-girlship that she finally found herself embroiled in politics proper. She undertook a degree course reading chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford, in October 1943 where, in addition to working hard at her degree, she became active in the Conservative Party. By June 1945 – at the age of nineteen – she was to be found addressing an election rally in Sleaford in Lincolnshire, in support of one Squadron Leader Worth and his Conservative candidacy. Nine months later, she addressed the conference of the Federation of Conservative Students at the Waldorf Hotel in London, during which she seconded a motion calling for more working-class Conservative candidates. And, less than three years after that, in January 1949, Margaret herself was elected prospective parliamentary candidate to fight for the Labour-held seat of Dartford in Kent. A month later, when she was officially adopted as a candidate, she laid into the Labour government for its economic record.

1974

Her career as a heavyweight speechmaker had begun. Speeches came thick and fast. Within weeks she was castigating Labour again, this time for their public-spending plans, when she spoke to the annual general meeting of Dartford Conservatives, before whose women’s group the following month she called for a reduction in income tax.

Sloganeering was as creative then as it is now, and when Margaret Roberts was confirmed as the Conservative candidate, she went with the memorable slogan ‘Vote right to keep what’s left’. She was, however, unsuccessful in convincing the Labour-voting Dartford electorate that she was the right person for the job of being their Member of Parliament.

Was it that she was a woman? Was it that she was the youngest woman ever to contest the seat? Or was it merely that she was a Conservative? Perhaps the last of these was the main reason for her defeat, but certainly in those times the other two factors may well have played a consolidating part in her downfall. Whatever the reasons for her lack of success, she was readopted as candidate and in October 1951 she contested the seat once again – but again was unsuccessful.

At this