Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (22 page)

In the extremely short term, however, Denis’s proposal presented Margaret with a problem. She did not want it known until the general election of 1951 was out of the way. Despite the universal popularity of marriage in those days, an engagement would not have been seen as an electoral advantage,
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since wedlock generally signalled an end to a woman’s career. Besides, an additional reason for secrecy lay in Denis’s divorce, then a far more controversial issue than today. As Alfred Roberts had said in his letter to Muriel, Denis’s marriage, contracted in wartime, had collapsed in his absence in the army through no fault of his own. The couple had married in 1942, but had quickly been separated by the demands of his military service. When he was demobbed in 1946, he found that his marriage was effectively over. His wife, also called Margaret (née Kempson), had taken up with a baronet called Sir Howard Hickman. She and Denis divorced in 1948. Interviewed about it by Denis’s daughter Carol in the 1990s, the first Mrs Thatcher blamed herself: ‘it was entirely my fault, and I regret it a lot … The war was a strange time … You grabbed happiness while you could.’
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Rather as Margaret probably had more romantic feelings about Robert
Henderson than she did about Denis, so Denis probably felt more passionately for the first Margaret (always known as Margot) than he did for the second. Asking Carol about her visit to Margot in old age, Denis inquired, ‘rather misty-eyed’, ‘Is she still incredibly beautiful?’
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He had fallen in love with the first Margaret suddenly, and so walked slowly, cautiously into a calmer, more longer-lasting love with the second. His hurt at the collapse of his first marriage caused him to avoid talking about it, a decision with which his second wife was naturally happy. ‘I never met her,’ she later recalled, ‘and we never used to mention it. It was a typical wartime marriage.’
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But it was not, of course, a matter indifferent to her. When Mrs Thatcher left 10 Downing Street in 1990, the Queen asked her if there was any honour she sought. She replied that she would like one for Denis (her own honours were to come in later years): she wanted him to become a baronet. Part of the motive for this was to ensure a hereditary honour for her son Mark, much of it was a simple act of gratitude to Denis, but it seems possible that the choice of a baronetcy may have been a form of polite revenge for the injury he had received long ago, or perhaps a backhanded acknowledgment of the way in which her husband had become free to marry her. Lady Hickman died in 1996. When this happened, Lady Thatcher confided to her long-standing assistant, Cynthia Crawford, ‘Crawfie, I shall always be only the second Mrs Thatcher.’
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She became, however, the first Lady Thatcher.

Anyway, for the course of the campaign for the general election of 25 October 1951, the engagement was concealed. Denis would appear in his Jaguar and help his secret fiancée canvass. On 15 October, he chaired Margaret’s public meeting at a primary school in Belvedere, declaring: ‘She has unlimited beauty, brains and charm, three qualities which we can do with in the House of Commons.’
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Patricia Luker, a young secretary who was appointed Margaret’s ‘follower’ for the campaign, and accompanied her every evening, remembered that Denis got very upset whenever Margaret was heckled and had to be restrained by her and others from intervening. She was impressed by Denis’s loyalty, but surprised that Margaret had accepted him: ‘I thought what a funny man for her to want to marry. He didn’t have an awful lot of conversation.’
¹³³
All the office was sworn to secrecy and the secret held, although at one point a man from the
Daily
Mirror
(Margaret attracted national newspaper interest as a woman, and the youngest parliamentary candidate) came into the Conservative office, having got wind of it. He was sent away without a story. The news was eventually put out to the press on the eve of poll, a decision which was not Margaret’s. In later years, she believed it had been done by Beryl Cook to attract some last-minute votes.
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This irritated her.

Between the elections of 1950 and 1951, Margaret consistently grew in stature as a candidate and as a rising figure in the Conservative Party. As at Oxford, she made herself available for what others would not. Clive Bossom,
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the son of Margaret’s patron Sir Alfred and himself the Conservative candidate for Faversham in Kent at the time, remembered that she would always agree to weekend speaking engagements at places beyond her constituency, and that her speaking ability was high.
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W. F. Deedes,
^†
also a Kent candidate (at Ashford) in 1951, noted the impact Margaret always made at the Conservative Prospective Parliamentary Candidates’ Association meetings. ‘Once she opened her mouth the rest of us began to look rather second-rate,’ he said, and indeed her knowledge and eloquence were a source of some irritation to her fellow candidates.
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Through the association, she met present and future leading lights of the party, notably the Colditz hero Airey Neave,
^‡
whose support in the leadership battle in 1975 would ensure her victory. ‘David Maxwell Fyffe [sic]
^§
came to address us [at the association],’ she told Muriel. ‘As usual he was brilliant in his analysis of the situation – His bearing is superb.’
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Margaret started to become part of a Tory social network – at that time still dominated by the well-off, the ex-military and the landed Etonians – which, more than might have been expected, she enjoyed. At the beginning of each new parliamentary session in November, Alfred Bossom, who felt that ‘MPs’ wives had a raw deal,’ would give a huge party for the Tory clans at 5 Carlton Gardens, his grand London house, erecting a special tent with wooden walls running out from house to garden. Up from his castle in Kent came tapestries and even suits of armour for the occasion. The guests wore black tie and, after being briefed on the contents of the Queen’s Speech by the Prime Minister at dinner at No. 10, the Cabinet would go on to Bossom’s party, dressed in white tie. Although only a candidate rather than a Member of Parliament, Margaret received invitations
to this famous annual event, and was treated with kindness by Alfred Bossom. When he heard that she and Denis were to be married in London, he immediately offered his house for the reception.
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Margaret was very happy to make use of such connections, and frequently did so in search of better jobs. ‘When Parliament assembles again,’ she wrote to Muriel from her newly rented flat about her renewed search for the right employment, ‘I’ll take up all the offers of “Come and have dinner with me” that I’ve had from various members and see what I can do in that direction.’
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Between the two elections, the tone of politics changed. The Korean War, which began in June 1950, brought home the reality of the Communist threat and raised the spectre of a wider war. Communism was an issue on which Margaret knew where she stood. In a letter to Muriel unusual for the extent to which it discusses the content of politics, she described a meeting of the United Nations Association in Dartford at which she spoke with her Labour opponent, Dodds, and several others, including Lord and Lady Strabolgi: ‘Lord and Lady Strabolgi – Red as you make them – were the main speakers … The other three were very leftist. By the time they had finished you would have thought Communist countries a demi-paradise and that Britain must disarm. I gave them 10 minutes of what I thought about their views! As a result Dodds wouldn’t speak to me afterwards and Lord and Lady S. went off without speaking as well. Several people congratulated me, so I wasn’t bothered.’
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In a speech in Dartford two months later, she warned that the ‘Communist menace … might break out in other places’,
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and two months after that she declared: ‘If Germany were to become another Korea tonight, every one of us would shake in our shoes.’ ‘The only thing that allowed Britain time to negotiate’, she added, ‘was her atomic superiority.’
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And the subject was the theme of her New Year message in the
Dartford Chronicle
: ‘we must firstly
believe
in the Western way of life and serve it steadfastly. Secondly we must build up our fighting strength to be prepared to defend our ideals, for aggressive nations understand only the threat of force.’
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The idea of Britain as a strong nation alone and brave had religious echoes in Margaret’s mind, deriving from the biblical idea of the righteous remnant. At the Dartford Free Church Federal Council annual meeting, she chose the text from Genesis in which Abraham pleads with God to spare the righteous from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah – ‘Peradventure ten shall be found there.’ Margaret pointed out that ‘Had those ten righteous men been found they could have saved the cities from destruction,’ and that in the New Testament it was twelve righteous men – the Apostles – who saved the world. She then applied the text to our age. ‘In their own lifetime,’ the
Dartford Chronicle
reported her as saying, ‘it depended on the few men of the Battle of Britain
to save civilisation from immediate doom.’
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Throughout her career, the story of 1940 was the myth (by which is not meant untruth) which most dominated her imagination.

Unable to maintain his party’s tiny majority in Parliament, and suffering from divisions between left and right which had provoked the future Prime Minister Harold Wilson
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and the left-wing orator Aneurin Bevan to resign from the government in protest over the imposition of charges for false teeth and spectacles, Clement Attlee called a general election for 25 October 1951. As earlier agreed, Margaret stood in Dartford for the second time. In the election campaign itself, the issue of Communism and the threat to peace was still running strongly. At her adoption meeting, Margaret told her audience, who first sat down together to listen to Winston Churchill’s party political broadcast on the radio, that the ‘most serious aspect of the situation was the Socialist insistence that the Conservatives were warmongers’. This charge was repeatedly levelled by the front page of the Labour-supporting
Daily Mirror
, which ran the headline ‘Whose finger on the trigger?’, suggesting that Churchill’s was more trigger-happy than Attlee’s. ‘If we can co-operate on matters of defence,’ Margaret went on, ‘through the Empire and the United States, and so to greater things, we can defend the world on a world basis.’
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These words contained the germ of her later developed belief that the ‘English-speaking peoples’ alone could ensure freedom and security. Her election address contained a similar call to arms: ‘Britain … must be strong, strong in arms, and strong in faith in her own way of life. The greatest hope for peace lies in friendship and co-operation with the United States of America.’

The woman who argued for strength was exhibiting it in her own patch. Although she remained as popular as ever in the constituency, it was clear that her power did not rest in her charm alone, but also in her steel. Early in what turned out to be the election year of 1951, Margaret discovered that her friend and association chairman John Miller had invited the socialist mayors of Dartford, Erith and Crayford to the association’s annual ball. She was beside herself, and described her reaction to Muriel:

I was absolutely furious – they all actively campaign against us and personally against me at election time, and it happens to be my Anniversary Ball. I flew to the phone and asked John who had invited them … John said he had invited them on the grounds that they were above politics. I was very cross indeed … I told him it was an insult to me and highly discourteous
not to have let me see the list before it went out. John told me that I was being very
awkward
, that he hadn’t been able to get me on the ’phone. I said there was such a thing as a 2½d stamp …
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Fraternizing with the enemy was something that Margaret never enjoyed. She recalls in her memoirs how much she and her fellow Tories took heart from Aneurin Bevan’s jibe that they were ‘lower than vermin’, forming a Vermin Club of those who won new recruits for the party.
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The campaign itself was hard fought and boisterous. In those days, election controversy was not permitted on BBC Radio, or on television (which few possessed), except in the controlled and stilted form of party political broadcasts. So elections were fought in the newspapers and, much more than today, in each constituency. Election meetings, in large places and small, were often packed. Margaret fought with all her vigour. One meeting, at Crayford town hall, shortly before polling day, got out of hand. While Margaret was speaking elsewhere, the warm-up was being given by Melford Stevenson KC, later to become famous as the most outspoken conservative judge on the bench. He seems to have warmed them up too thoroughly, for by the time Margaret arrived the chairman of the meeting told her that he had just sent for the police. ‘For God’s sake don’t do that,’ said Margaret. ‘Leave it to me.’
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She succeeded. The
Dartford Chronicle
recorded that ‘For the first nine minutes of her speech – during which time she dealt with Conservative policy with regard to peace – there was not one comment from the body of the hall …’
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This time, she had a straight fight with Dodds, with no Liberal candidate. The result was:

She had cut Dodds’s majority by a further 1,300. In the country as a whole, Labour actually got more votes than the Conservatives and more than in 1950, but the votes stacked up too heavily in safe Labour areas, allowing the Conservatives to gain more seats. The Tories also had a 4 per cent lead over Labour with women voters, a reward for their emphasis on the problems of consumption and rationing. Under Churchill, they returned to power for the first time since the war, with an overall majority of seventeen, but Margaret Roberts went off to get married.