Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (3 page)

In the parliamentary arena spectators are often participants, never more so than in the public execution of Margaret Thatcher. I have made no attempt to tell this part of the story even-handedly. For all their good years of service to the state, Geoffrey Howe and Michael Heseltine will always to me be the villains of the piece for the parts they played in the downfall of a prime minister whose term of office should only have been ended by the votes of the electorate.

My angles of observation on Margaret Thatcher grew closer again during her unhappy years of enforced retirement and decline. In the immediate aftermath of her overthrow her agony was unbearable. I often saw this and felt for her at close quarters.

Although the pain dulled, it always troubled her. My penultimate chapters ‘The agony after the fall’ and ‘Snapshots of her retirement years’ are full of poignant glimpses of the wounded lioness caged into inactivity.

In spite of having had some unique insights on Margaret Thatcher, it will be clear from my narrative that politically I was an unimportant spear carrier on her back benches – although I hope an observant one. Many of my Westminster and Whitehall friends were much closer and more important figures in her
world. Over ninety of them have been generous with the time they gave me in their interviews for this book. So have many other witnesses to her years in power including some who have never talked about her to an author before. Heading this latter category I am particularly grateful to Mikhail Gorbachev for giving me his first ever account of his Chequers talks with Margaret Thatcher in 1984.
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Although this book covers virtually all the important milestones and episodes in Margaret Thatcher’s career, I end this prologue with two caveats.

First, I have written a biographical portrait rather than a definitive biography. I tell her story, but with the freedom to capture its light and shade with reflective criticisms at the end of every chapter.

Finally, I should say that at the end of my biographer’s journey, even more so than when I started it, I admired Margaret Thatcher enormously.

This is a portrait that attempts to combine both the applause and the appraisal.

1

The early years

THE BIRTHPLACE

In the beginning was the discipline: one of six characteristics ingrained in the life of Margaret Roberts the child that shaped the career of Margaret Thatcher the Prime Minister. The other five were a mixture of positives and negatives.

In the first category came her determination of character, forthrightness of expression and certainty of belief. The two negatives were less visible because she tried to cover them up. They were her personal insecurity and her lack of empathy towards those, particularly her mother, with whom she had sharp disagreements.

If this looks a strange and narrow list, lacking in the more natural features of childhood such as enjoyment, laughter, relaxation, family tactility and parental love, it is because Margaret’s upbringing was an unnaturally restricted one, shaped by straitened circumstances and strait-laced parents.

She was born on 13 October 1925, in an upstairs room above her father’s corner shop at No. 1 North Parade, Grantham in Lincolnshire. From the outside it looked a substantial three-storey building but the living accommodation was cramped and the facilities basic.

The shop took up most of the property. The family sitting room was on the first floor, and could only be accessed by a staircase behind the counter, which led to it through the main bedroom. Margaret and her older sister, Muriel, born 24 May 1921, each had their own small room at the top of the house. There was no running water or central heating. The most awkward missing amenity was the lack of a bathroom. The family took their baths in an unplumbed iron tub. It was in the same ground-floor room as the outside lavatory, located across the backyard of the shop. There was no garden or indoor toilet.

Even by the standards of the 1920s, the house in which Margaret grew up was Spartan. Yet the austerity was not caused by poverty. Her father, Alfred Roberts, owned two grocery stores in Grantham, and could easily have afforded to install what estate agents of the time called, ‘modern conveniences’. But for reasons of principle, he decided that his family should live frugally. He believed in saving, not spending, money. He told his daughter that he had kept this rule ever since his first job as a shop assistant. In those days, he earned fourteen shillings a week, of which twelve shillings paid for his board and lodging. After that, ‘For every one shilling saved there was one shilling to spend’.
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Her father’s financial priorities resulted in the purse strings being held so tight that he would not even pay for running water in the family home.

‘Alderman Roberts would become prosperous because he wouldn’t worry about things like plumbing,’ explained Marjorie Lee, one of Margaret’s classmates.
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Margaret herself did worry about them. In a revealing interview given after she had been Prime Minister for six years, she told Miriam Stoppard: ‘Home was really very small, and we had no mod cons, and I remember having a dream that the one thing I really wanted was to live in a nice house, you know, a house with more things than we had.’
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Uncertainty was another cause of Alfred Roberts’ reluctance to find the money for basic home improvements. ‘Grantham people were having a hard time in Margaret’s childhood,’ recalled her contemporary Malcolm Knapp, a local historian still living in the town. ‘We had 40 per cent unemployment here in 1930 and soup kitchens, visited by the Duke of Kent, no less, in 1933. Mr Roberts must often have worried whether his customers had the money in their pockets to pay for their groceries.’
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The austerity of the Depression years required a regime of relentless hard work for the family living above the shop.

‘You are always on duty,’
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recalled Margaret in a phrase that applies to politicians as well as shopkeepers. For even though Alfred Roberts employed three assistants at his two grocery stores, it was still very much a family business. He was the hands-on proprietor, usually behind the counter operating the bacon slicer. His wife and mother-in-law served the customers. His daughters were also expected to help out, particularly in the school holidays. Margaret’s earliest memories included weighing the sugar, which had been delivered in large wholesale sacks, into 1lb and 2lb bags.

When she was Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher liked to describe her father as ‘a specialist grocer’.
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The words were a gilding of the lily, perhaps derived from the same heightened filial pride that led Ted Heath to call his father ‘a master builder’.
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In fact both Prime Ministerial patriarchs were ordinary tradesmen. The Roberts’ store on North Parade was a basic corner shop selling sweets, cigarettes, bread, pet food, fruit and vegetables. It was also a sub-post office where local residents bought their stamps, collected their pensions and cashed their postal orders. Although Alfred Roberts had a reputation for stocking quality produce that was superior to its nearby rival, the Co-op, his establishment was a general store of a type that was commonplace across small-town provincial England in the 1930s. The tight budgets of its customers were typical too. But the characters of the family who ran the shop and moulded Margaret’s upbringing were far from typical.

FAMILY TENSIONS

Alfred Roberts was a shopkeeper, a lay preacher and a local politician. He had hidden depths of faith and wide reading. His greatest achievement was that he groomed his youngest daughter Margaret for stardom on a stage far greater than Grantham – even though he had no clear idea where that stage might be.

Born in 1892, Alfred was a handsome young man, 6 feet 2 inches tall, with a strong head of blond hair and piercing blue eyes. His weakness was that he was seriously short sighted, a problem that caused him to wear bi-focal spectacles from his early years.

When he volunteered for military service on the outbreak of war in 1914, he was rejected on grounds of defective eyesight. He made five further attempts to join the army. One of them succeeded but only for two days. After 48 hours in uniform in Lincoln barracks he was invalided out following an eye test. For the same reason he failed his medical each time he tried to enlist.
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Frustrated in his attempts to join the colours, Alfred did not follow his Northamptonshire father into shoemaking, but learned the retail trade at various establishments including the Oundle School tuck shop. At the age of twenty-one he was appointed assistant manager of Cliffords’ grocery store in Grantham. He was an omnivorous borrower of books from the town library. Its
librarian was so impressed by Alfred’s thirst for knowledge that he described him as ‘the best-read man in Grantham’.
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In May 1917, Alfred married Beatrice Ethel Stephenson, who he met at the Methodist church. Four years older than her bridegroom, she was Grantham born and bred; the daughter of a cloakroom attendant at the railway station and a factory worker. Photographs of her as a young woman make it easy to understand why Alfred felt attracted. For Beatie (as he called her) was something of a beauty. She had high cheekbones, shining dark hair tied back in a bun, sparkling blue eyes, sensual lips and a curvaceous if slightly overweight figure. The firmness of her features hint at firmness in her character.

Some Grantham contemporaries say that Beatie was far stronger than Alfred when it came to imposing parental discipline on the girls. A close friend of Muriel Roberts was Betty Morley who from her visits to the shop during their schooldays remembers Beatrice as ‘especially severe … she was not much fun at all’.
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Beatie’s severity as a mother was complemented by her practicality as a homemaker. She was house proud, almost obsessive about cleaning and tidiness. She had run a small dressmaking business before becoming engaged to Alfred. She was an accomplished seamstress, who made all her daughters’ clothes, including their school uniforms. She was also a good cook and a thrifty saver.

By 1919 the couple had saved enough money with the help of a mortgage to buy the shop at No. 1 North Parade. In the bedroom above the shop Muriel was born in 1921 and Margaret in 1925.

Margaret’s arrival in the world was marked by a notice in the births, marriages and deaths column of the
Grantham Journal
.
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No such announcement accompanied the birth of Muriel – perhaps a subtle indication that the status of the Roberts family had risen during the four years separating the two daughters.

From an early age it was clear that Margaret was much closer to her father than to her mother. On the maternal side there are indications that the younger daughter had many battles with Beatie. ‘I used to feel, just occasionally, that she rather despised her mother and adored her father,’ recalled Margaret Goodrich, a schoolgirl contemporary of the future Prime Minister.
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This negative impression was reinforced by Muriel in a comment she made to her sister’s official biographer, Charles Moore: ‘Mother didn’t exist in Margaret’s mind.’
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The daughter–mother
froideur
seems to have prevailed long after Margaret left Grantham for Oxford, marriage and politics. In a number of interviews
during her public career Mrs Thatcher seems to have had difficulty in finding the words or the tone to say anything favourable about Beatie aside from praising her domestic skills. ‘She was very much the Martha
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rather than the Mary’ was one revealing filial description.
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Another came in 1961, eighteen years before becoming Prime Minister when, as a new Member of Parliament, Mrs Thatcher was asked about her mother by Godfrey Winn of the
Daily Express
. She answered, ‘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’.
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The implication from such comments is that Margaret did not think much of her mother. However, there are suggestions that the real trouble was not indifference but a clash of temperaments between these two strong-willed women. Beatie was not a submissive housewife confined to her cooking and her dressmaking. Some Grantham contemporaries refer to her as ‘a right old battleaxe’ who clearly had a mind and a voice of her own.
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It would hardly be surprising that disagreements took place between such a mother and her opinionated daughter.

Two other family members lived in the home above the shop at North Parade. One was Margaret’s elder sister Muriel, who chose to stay in the shadows of the media attention that can engulf the close relatives of a prime minister. She died in 2004, rarely giving interviews throughout her life. Four years older than her famous sibling, Muriel was an easygoing character with less drive but more likeability. One of her closest friends and later golfing partner, Betty Morley, remembers Muriel as ‘a pleasant and bright girl, but not nearly as serious or studious as Margaret. The four years between them meant they were not particularly close as sisters. But they got on during their childhood, particularly when they were both resisting their mother’s pressures for discipline and strictness’.
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That discipline was in the genes. Some of it came from the fifth member of the household, Beatrice’s mother, Phoebe Stephenson. She was a formidable old lady who wore long black dresses buttoned down to her ankles. She was much given to repeating clichés such as ‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness’ and ‘if a
thing’s worth doing it’s worth doing well’. Margaret described her grandmother as ‘very, very Victorian and very, very strict’.
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FUN (OR LACK OF IT)

Thanks to this strictness there was precious little fun in the childhood of Margaret Roberts. ‘For us, it was rather a sin to enjoy yourself by entertainment,’ she said. ‘Life was not to enjoy yourself. Life was to work and do things.’
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In this prohibitive atmosphere, many innocent pastimes and pleasures were banned. Children’s parties, dancing, cycling, card games, board games (even Snakes and Ladders), walks in the countryside and visits to the theatre were off limits. On Sundays the rules were even stricter. Reading a newspaper, having tea with friends, and even sewing or knitting was forbidden on the Lord’s Day. Some of these restrictions were relaxed after the death of Grandmother Phoebe Stephenson in 1934. Until then the family rarely travelled outside Grantham. Margaret’s longest journey as a child was a fifty-two-mile bus ride to the seaside town of Skegness where she, Muriel and Beatrice had a bucket and spade holiday in a self-catering flat while Alfred stayed at home minding the store.

At Skegness, Margaret saw her first live show of variety music and light-comedy sketches. ‘We would never have gone to the variety while Grandmother Stephenson, who lived with us until I was ten, was still alive,’ she recalled.
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Another prohibition, also lifted after Grandmother’s death, forbade having a wireless set in the house. In the autumn of 1935, to Margaret’s great excitement, a radio was installed in the sitting room above the shop at North Parade. But there were rules about which broadcasts the girls could listen to. Talks and news bulletins were permitted. Musical entertainment programmes were not. In a rare interview given by Muriel Cullen (née Roberts) to author Ernle Money in 1975, she explained that she and her ten-year-old sister Margaret had to wait until their parents went out before they could tune in to dance bands and light orchestras.
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Alfred Roberts was too intelligent to be a wholehearted supporter of such narrow restrictions. He gradually relaxed them once the hard line puritanism of his wife and mother-in-law began to crumble after Phoebe’s death. Away from his public and preaching duties he sometimes displayed a light-hearted side to his nature.

‘Alfred had a sense of humour and could let his hair down,’ recalled a family friend, Betty Morley. ‘I remember how he and my father went to an amusement park after playing bowls. Alfred really enjoyed himself. He even had a modest gamble at one or two of the fairground stalls.’
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