Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (28 page)

Harold Roberts was a kindly man, and close to Alfred, but he was also considerably less successful than his brother. He lived all his life in Raunds, the Northamptonshire village in which the seven Roberts children were brought up, and worked for a shoe-making company. His unannounced presence on Margaret’s great day was awkward, a scene reminiscent of Pip’s reunion, when adult, with his simple brother-in-law Joe Gargery, in Dickens’s
Great Expectations
. Being a conscientious woman, Mrs Thatcher looked after Harold that night, but being also an upwardly mobile one, she devoutly wished he wasn’t there.

In the House of Commons, Mrs Thatcher’s social origins do not seem to have been much held against her, even though the Conservative Party of that time was far more aristocratic, and probably more snobbish, than it is today. She had become, by marriage and, as it were, by adoption, part of the affluent middle class of suburban Kent (there was never any question of her living in Finchley). As such, she was one of many in the post-war Tory Party, and she did not, at this stage, make much of her Grantham grocer’s-shop roots. Her class was not conspicuous. Her sex, however, was more of an issue. It did not mean that she was obviously ill used. If anything, the problem was rather the opposite. The courtesy shown to women Members had the effect of cocooning them in a cosy irrelevance. One of only twelve women Conservative MPs, and considerably the most attractive of them, Mrs Thatcher found herself treated with a studied politesse which she liked, but which, she perfectly well understood, was intended to restrict the scope of her political career. To this day, the unwritten conventions of the House request that a Member who is a Queen’s Counsel is referred to as ‘learned’, that a former regular officer is ‘gallant’, and so on. When Mrs Thatcher entered the
House, they also indicated that a speech by a woman Member be described as ‘charming’, even when it clearly had not been. Margaret undoubtedly possessed and deployed charm, but the word did no justice to her abilities or to her ambition. She complained, in after years, that women MPs in the 1950s and 1960s were always shunted into what she rather vaguely referred to as ‘the welfare thing’.
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This was to be her fate for some time, but she was determined to escape it eventually, which helps to explain why she had studied tax law at the Bar and why her ultimate ambition was to be Chancellor of the Exchequer. In these early days, Mrs Thatcher was often called upon by newspapers or broadcasters looking for a ‘woman’ angle on political life. In her first appearance on BBC Radio’s
Any Questions?
, in January 1960, she had to answer questions about the working week for wives (‘it’s not the hours you put in, it’s what you put into the hours that counts’) and to give advice on looking for a husband (‘look for a husband who is kind. I think it is quite a rare virtue in men’).
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In the same month, a London paper asked her for tips on getting children to save (‘My six-year-old twins always managed to get the coins out of their money boxes or to break them open. So each now has a savings box which cannot possibly be opened by anybody but the banking authorities’).
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The new Member for Finchley was not part of any gang, or club, and never had any taste for trying to form a rival one with members of her own sex. Like most MPs at that time, Mrs Thatcher had no office of her own in Parliament. Unlike most, she did not find her way to the Smoking Room or other drinking haunts. Indeed, throughout the whole of her political career, she never once went into the Smoking Room unaccompanied, just as she never entered a pub alone.
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There was a Lady Members’ Room where she did a good deal of her work. Her secretary shared a room just off Westminster Hall with several others, and Mrs Thatcher therefore met their employers, notably her future deputy Willie Whitelaw,
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quite often.
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But she spent only functional time in that room, dictating letters. There were no telephones there, and if a call came through, ushers would summon the person called to answer the phone in a special booth. Nor was it a place for meetings. Financially, everything was on a shoestring: there was nothing remotely resembling the generous expenses which caused such a scandal in
2009. Members had to buy their own postage stamps and they paid their secretaries directly themselves. Mrs Thatcher paid Paddi Victor Smith 13 guineas per week, which was over the going rate, out of her annual salary of £1,250, in order to secure her exclusive services: ‘She was a fairly exacting boss. She paid quite well, and expected a good day’s work.’
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Sometimes she would take Paddi with her to the hairdresser and dictate to her while under the dryer.

Hard work, as always, was Mrs Thatcher’s sovereign remedy for every difficulty, and, by chance, the opportunity for a serious tranche of it arose almost at once. In the ballot, drawn by lot, for Private Members’ Bills, always held at the beginning of the parliamentary session, she came second. These Bills were (and are) devices allowing legislation to be introduced from the back benches, and represented an opportunity for Members to make a name for themselves. Her place in the ballot ensured that her Bill would receive the requisite parliamentary time. It also meant that her maiden speech in the House, unlike almost all the others, would be substantive and legislative. From the very beginning, she was serious.

Mrs Thatcher herself records that she had some difficulty over her choice of subject for the Bill, and then over the Bill itself.
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As she was as new a Member as it was possible to be, she was at first attracted to a Bill which was already sitting on the stocks about appeals in contempt-of-court cases. But after doing some initial drafting work on it she was warned off it by the Attorney-General as being too complicated for a Private Member’s Bill (it is not the case, as she asserts in her memoirs, that she refused the whips’ invitation to take on the Bill on the grounds that it was too dry). Next she considered a Bill which would restrict the rights of the union closed shop, a subject already dear to her heart. From this, though, she was also dissuaded by the authorities, who said that it would be impossible to legislate in the middle of the complicated court case on the subject then in progress. Eventually, Mrs Thatcher picked on something completely different. She chose the question of the admission of the press to the meetings of local government.

This issue was not plucked out of the air. It had become the subject of political controversy over the past year when several Labour councils had voted to exclude the press from some of their proceedings. In Liverpool, because a local paper had produced a blackleg edition during a print strike, the council used the device of ‘resolving itself into committee’. By doing this, it could evade the existing 1908 law insisting that the press be admitted to meetings of the full council, and vote the journalists of the strike-breaking newspaper out of the chamber. In Nottingham, near enough
to Grantham to come to Mrs Thatcher’s personal attention, she witnessed a comparable example of what she described as ‘socialist connivance with trade union power’.
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The Conservative manifesto for the 1959 election had declared, ‘We mean to make quite sure that the press have proper facilities for reporting the proceedings of local authorities.’ It was in her zeal to fulfil this pledge that Margaret took it up as the subject of her Bill.

Her inner motive in choosing this subject has provoked controversy. According to one biographer, John Campbell, the explanation must be psychological, almost Freudian. He thinks the Bill was an attack on Margaret’s father, most likely ‘a … reaction against Alfred himself and the repression of her childhood’. Although there is no surviving evidence about Alfred’s reaction to the Bill, Campbell thinks that ‘most probably’ Alfred Roberts would have regarded it ‘as a clumsy interference with the right of local authorities to conduct their own affairs’.
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Campbell also sees the Bill as presaging her anger, when prime minister, against the independence of local government: ‘like the ratecapping legislation of the 1980s, her 1960 Bill was a general measure directed at all councils in order to control the abuses of the few.’ ‘There is’, he complains, ‘no recognition whatsoever of the positive value of local government.’

This analysis is not convincing. In bringing forward her Bill, Mrs Thatcher was not introducing a new principle of interference in local affairs, or trying to restrict the powers of councils to do their business, but strengthening the existing law of 1908 whose effectiveness had been weakened by the Local Government Act of 1933. As for her father and his influence, it seems unlikely that a measure of this sort, clearly directed against abuse, rather than against the principles of local government, should have upset him.
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The ‘first purpose’ of the Bill, she said in her maiden speech, was to make sure that the public knew how their money was being spent, a principle with which Alfred Roberts would not have quarrelled. It is more probable that Mrs Thatcher found the subject matter approachable because she was the alderman’s daughter, and therefore had good, if second-hand, knowledge of how local government worked. Besides, the people she intended to attack with her Bill were chiefly the sort who had deprived Alfred Roberts of his alderman’s robes.

It was a political motive, the dislike of trade union power and its
municipal alliance with socialism, which galvanized Mrs Thatcher. When the Bill was debated in standing committee, Charles Pannell, Labour Mayor of Dartford when Margaret had been candidate there, now Member for Leeds West and her friendly parliamentary ‘pair’,
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put the classic socialist view about blacklegs: ‘To me with 40 years’ trade unionism behind me, the act of going to work when other men are on strike is one of the depths of sin.’
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Margaret profoundly believed the precise opposite, and from the first sought ways of breaking that aspect of union power.

There may also have been an element of political calculation concerning her own backyard. The greatest threat to Margaret Thatcher in Finchley at this time came from the Liberal Party. Even though they finished a little behind the Labour candidate in the general election of 1959, the Liberals greatly increased their vote in that election and provided the growing political energy against which she had to fight. Ever since the golf-club row of 1956, the Liberals in Finchley had been led by a pair of Jewish councillors elected in 1957. They eloquently argued that the borough was being governed by a secretive and self-serving collection of Tories, sometimes in unholy alliance with Labour; by 1958 there were seven Liberal councillors elected. Admission to council meetings was one of the issues at stake here since Liberals accused the Tories of deciding everything in ‘secret’ committee meetings from which the press were excluded and then presenting only faits accomplis to the full council. There was a good deal of truth in the Liberal attack, and the local Conservatives responded to it too dismissively. In January 1958, a Conservative councillor in Finchley had defected to the Liberals over this issue. It did no harm for Finchley’s new Member of Parliament to put herself on the side of openness, and thus head off Liberal attack. It also helped in her long campaign to recover Jewish support. Much later, she was rewarded by the defection of one of the leading Jewish Liberal councillors to the Tory ranks.
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If Mrs Thatcher expected plain sailing, however, she was quickly disabused. Although her Bill seemed to accord with Tory policy, the government did not really like it very much. As early as 11 November 1959, Mrs Thatcher received a letter from Sir Jocelyn Simon, the Solicitor-General, warning of trouble ahead from the local government lobby. He was well disposed to Mrs Thatcher, having been impressed by her contributions at
the Inns of Court Conservative Association, and her habit at its dinners of making sure that she sat close to the guest speaker – evidence, he considered, of a laudable ambition.
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Now he suggested, silkily: ‘All this makes it particularly important that you should work in as close touch with Henry Brooke [the Minister for Housing and Local Government] as possible and, I should advise, defer to his views throughout. No doubt he will be a little embarrassed at having one of his programme Bills taken up by a Private Member; but he is a very nice fellow and perfectly sound on this issue and, I am sure, will give you his help provided you play perfectly fair with him.’
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Simon added a point which would surely not have escaped the already publicity-conscious young MP: ‘I am sorry that you were disappointed in your earlier projects, but you have certainly in the end got a Bill which will, with all the difficulties, give you a wonderful parliamentary experience and will certainly endear you to the Press!’

The fact was that the government was in a bit of a muddle. On 9 December, Henry Brooke
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minuted the Cabinet Home Affairs Committee: ‘Mrs Thatcher’s Bill, coming at this moment, presents us with something of a problem. In our election manifesto we declared our intention of making quite sure that the press should have proper facilities for reporting the proceedings of local authorities. I drafted those words myself, and it is a pledge which we must honour.’ The trouble was that Mrs Thatcher’s Bill was ‘wrong’ to offer ‘such wide-ranging rights to the press’.
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There was a nervousness, though this was not spelt out, that law in this field might prove too heavy-handed, and stir up unnecessary conflict between local and central government. The government really preferred a code of conduct to legislation. The solution, agreed at the committee’s meeting two days later, was that ‘the appropriate course seemed to be to prepare and hand to Mrs Thatcher a Bill which the government could accept.’ There was a danger that she might introduce a measure ‘far from acceptable to the Government’, and therefore ‘she should be provided with a Bill only on the clear understanding that she would reject amendments which had not been agreed with the Government’.
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This, more or less, is what happened. Three days later, Brooke contacted Mrs Thatcher and promised to arrange the services of Parliamentary Counsel in the drafting of the Bill so long as it was ‘clearly understood between us that, if the Bill were presented on these lines, you would resist amendments to it which had not been agreed with me or my colleagues’.
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