Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (33 page)

In any event, Mrs Thatcher won. The result was:

Mrs Thatcher’s majority was nearly halved, and the Liberals did better than in most of the country and Labour worse. But it was no disaster. Pundits, in general, were surprised by how well the Tories fared in the national result. They lost office, but Harold Wilson formed the first Labour government for thirteen years with an overall majority of only four. Mrs Thatcher began her first experience of opposition.

Mrs Thatcher had never really known defeat before. True, she had lost both her contests in Dartford in 1950 and 1951, but these were known to have been unwinnable, and she personally had performed very well. The Labour victory of 1964, though narrow and expected, was her first experience of a definite setback in her career – the loss of a job, of power, of the capacity to get things done. She minded this very much, on behalf both of herself and of her country. ‘I hated opposition,’ she recalled. ‘I was not a natural attacker.’
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This remark reveals a startling lack of self-knowledge, since attacking was one of the things that she did best. But her dislike of opposition was genuine enough. She chafed at the lack of real responsibility. Her own standing in the Conservative Party was secure, but it was scarcely restorative to her spirits to be made the shadow spokesman for the ministry – pensions – which she had previously helped to run. In her analysis of the reasons for the Tory defeat which she developed gradually through the 1960s, she would find the germ of the views which came to full flower ten years later.

But her immediate anxieties were more personal than political. Denis suffered a nervous breakdown. For too long, he had worked too hard. Basil Tuck, his partner in Atlas, remembered that he would often have a drink with Denis in the Black Prince in Bexley at the end of a punishing day, and Denis would not leave to drive home till half-past nine.
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Now, approaching his fiftieth birthday, Denis had the nearest thing that a no-nonsense, unself-pitying man can get to a mid-life crisis:

I was working like nobody’s worked before … I was probably drinking a bit too much anyway. What worried me was my mother, my sister and my old aunt who had a fair block of shares in Atlas: none of them had any real money other than that which they could draw out of the company. I was a bit scraped on the deal [that is, he did not have a large enough block of shares himself] … It seemed to me that the whole depended on the life of one man.
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The doctor told him that he must rest completely, and in the autumn of 1964 Denis took a boat to South Africa and stayed there for more than two months. He returned much restored, and went straight off to ski in Lenzerheide in Switzerland, where the family joined him for Christmas and New Year. His time out convinced him that he must spread the load, and later in 1965 he sold his company to Castrol, who immediately employed him. Thus he obtained a capital sum, and a good job. In due course, a further takeover gave Denis a new and even better job, in Burmah Oil.

In later years, Denis would always deny that this crisis had anything to do with Margaret’s political career. It is true that he was always scrupulous in supporting her efforts and not interfering with the way she ran her life (he did not inquire about or try to run her personal finances, for example, which, since he was much shrewder with money than she, was probably a pity), but Carol Thatcher records that friends believed that Margaret’s absorption in her own career at this time left him feeling isolated.
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She believed that, as well as being ‘genuinely knackered’, ‘he didn’t like every aspect of being married to a politician.’
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He may even have contemplated divorce. Certainly he saw this as a moment of decision about how to lead his life: ‘I think he had to make up his mind. That was it.’
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In retrospect, it can be seen that the Thatchers were a winning combination. But at the time they more likely saw themselves as a middle-aged, middle-class couple who were working far too hard to enjoy themselves and might not be going anywhere very dramatic in their careers. In Carol’s judgment, Denis had not yet achieved a satisfactory role in relation to his wife’s career: ‘He came into his own later on.’
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The twins, who were by this time away at boarding school,
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knew of nothing amiss. They were used to Denis’s long absences on business trips. But Margaret, naturally, was upset, though communicating this indirectly. Denis remembered: ‘She was very worried. She didn’t show it, but I think she said it to one or two of her closer friends … I think she would say that was a period which she won’t like to live through again.’
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The episode goes unmentioned in her memoirs, but she herself later recalled:

Yes, an awful lot depended on him. His sister’s marriage broke down after the war, and he had to look after her and his mother as well as us. Eventually, everything came out all right, but for a time your world is upside down. Denis worried because if things matter to you, you don’t take them lightly.
It was a very worrying time, but at least I had an income. You must take the doctor’s advice on these things and he needed a complete rest. I am very glad to have come through it.
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Mrs Thatcher would not be drawn further on the subject, but it seems reasonable to surmise that, when Denis left for South Africa, she had no certainty that he would ever return to her. It was not just that he was exhausted and confused: it was also possible that their marriage would end. If that had happened, her world would, indeed, have been ‘upside down’. She would have been alone, without her husband’s support and affection, with two children, not enough money, and a career which, given the attitudes of that time, would certainly have suffered. When she said, ‘I am very glad to have come through it,’ she was implying that she might not have done so. It was the worst personal crisis of her married life.

Tiny hints of her anxiety can be detected in her public pronouncements in this period. In debates in the House of Commons, she more than once brought up her own example as someone who, if widowed under fifty, would not be able to collect her benefit.
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She cited this almost in jest, as part of a general argument about widows’ entitlements and as making the point that her own party did not yet agree with her in the matter, but it does not seem fanciful to find an undertone of anxiety. ‘I am rather lonely on this side of the committee in this matter,’ she told the House.
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She was rather lonely at home too. When Denis returned, the strain she had borne caught up with her and, very uncharacteristically, she fell ill, going down with pneumonia. She was not well enough to attend Winston Churchill’s lying-in-state at the end of January 1965, and had to watch his funeral on television at home.
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She was able, however, to offer a tribute to the great man in the
Finchley Press
. As well as the conventional praises of the national hero, she added one or two more distinctive touches. She noted the ‘bitter blow’ that Churchill had suffered in being dismissed from office in 1945 as soon as he had secured victory in war. And she said how much she liked ‘his refusal … to adopt new-fangled pronunciations of places and names’, and admired his ‘veneration of great institutions’ such as Parliament.
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Critics who regard Mrs Thatcher as an anti-historical radical tend to ignore her romanticism about Britain’s past and her High Toryism about any attacks on the bits of that Britain – Commons, Lords, monarchy, armed services, ‘Winston’ himself – which she most admired.

Denis’s change of job, and the family’s greater financial security, allowed the Thatchers to move house. With no work reason any longer for them to live in the suburbs, and with the twins at boarding schools, they sold Dormers and bought a flat, 34 Westminster Gardens, Marsham Street, one of
the functional London mansion blocks favoured by MPs, at the beginning of 1966. This ended Margaret’s wearisome journey from Farnborough to the Commons. But the Thatchers did not want to lose touch with Kent, and towards the end of the same year they moved into what Margaret misleadingly described as a ‘cottage’ in the country. It was, in fact, a large, comfortable, rather ugly ‘stockbroker Tudor’ house, handsomely situated above the village of Lamberhurst and, less happily, the A21. It was called The Mount. Although the twins never came to regard it as home, and eventually persuaded their parents to sell in favour of a house in central London, Margaret and Denis enjoyed The Mount. Denis later remembered their arrival, shortly before Christmas 1966: ‘Woke up. Lovely morning. Sun shining. I said: “Come on, love. Let’s go to church.” Do you know, the vicar was anti-South Africa and anti-Rhodesia! Came out. Said “Thanks very much, padre.” Never went back!’
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Despite this ecclesiastical disappointment, Denis found other pleasures in Lamberhurst. The golf course was visible from the house, and its proximity, and the leisure afforded by the fact that he was no longer refereeing rugby, persuaded him to play the game seriously for the first time. He enjoyed the local pubs, and he and Margaret made new friendships and renewed others. Among those who lived near by and visited them were Margaret’s Oxford friend Edward Boyle, the party’s education spokesman, and Robert Henderson, her most serious love before her marriage. Another neighbour, the satirist, controversialist and late-in-life Christian Malcolm Muggeridge, first met the Thatchers in this period, and began to exercise some intellectual influence upon her.

Margaret pursued her strong interest in buying antiques. In the 1950s, one day in Richmond Park, she had lost a tie-pin with two sapphires mounted upon it, a present from Denis, and since then she had preferred spending money (though not much)
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on furniture and, above all, porcelain, which she enjoyed displaying in the cabinets for which The Mount afforded room. ‘I was after colour,’
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she remembered, and she bought Crown Derby, Worcester and Coalport. She became quite a familiar sight in the bric-a-brac shops of Tunbridge Wells and Wadhurst and the converted chapel
selling antiques on the A21 at Whatlington. Her strong home-making instinct had greater rein than before, and she felt relief that the financial and marital worries of 1964 were past. In the Labour landslide of 1966, it was Denis’s turn to comfort her, rather than the other way round. He bought her an eternity ring ‘because I was down in the dumps’, which she wore for the rest of her life.
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Although Alec Douglas-Home had led the Conservative Party to a more successful election result in 1964 than many had predicted, Iain Macleod’s attack on the magic circle had hit home, and many Tory MPs did not believe that Home should lead them into the next general election unless it were a snap one called within months of the previous contest. In late June 1965, Harold Wilson announced that he would not seek a dissolution that year, and so the Conservatives felt they had time to effect the change. Moves were made privately to push Home out, and in late July he decided to step down without a fight. This greatly surprised and upset Mrs Thatcher, who had known nothing of the plotting. She complained to the whips, saying, by her own account, ‘Why didn’t you tell us? We would have supported him.’
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She believed, mistakenly, that Home’s wife, Elizabeth, ‘just couldn’t stand it any longer’ and she was angry at what she thought was the press misrepresentation of Home and their obsession with what she called ‘knickerbockers on the grouse moor’. She was grateful to Home for his kindness to her, and she perhaps intuited that she would experience less of this quality from a successor more or less from her own generation.

The candidates for the first balloted Conservative leadership election ever held were Reginald Maudling,
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Edward Heath and Enoch Powell, none of them from the patrician background of the Macmillan–Home era. Of the three, Powell was to prove by far the greatest influence on Mrs Thatcher, but there is no evidence that she considered voting for him. Although respected for his intellectual brilliance and eloquence, Powell, who had once resigned from office and twice refused it, was already viewed as a maverick. The choice, in the view of Mrs Thatcher and most of the parliamentary party (the sole electorate under the new rules), was between Maudling and Heath. Mrs Thatcher knew both men because of constituency contiguity. Heath’s seat at Bexley had been next door to her when she stood in Dartford, and Maudling sat for Barnet, which bordered Finchley.
Initially, for no discernible ideological or political reason, but simply because she found him the more charming, Mrs Thatcher preferred Reggie Maudling. He was not really her type, though, being fat, lazy
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and, as he had shown as the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the end of the last Conservative government, a natural overspender. So it was not very difficult for Keith Joseph, already the senior Conservative to whom she was closest, to persuade her to change her mind. He told Mrs Thatcher that Ted Heath had ‘a passion to get Britain right’,
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a phrase which she was dutifully to use about him in public for years afterwards. She followed Joseph’s advice, and voted for Heath. Remembering the 1965 leadership election in her memoirs, Mrs Thatcher says that Heath had ‘swallowed a good deal of the fashionable interpretation of what had gone wrong in the world between the wars’. He feared nationalism whereas she feared ‘the appeasement of dictators’.
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But this, though a largely correct analysis of the eventual difference between the two, played no part in Mrs Thatcher’s attitude to Heath at this time. She instinctively disliked his gauche manners and his uneasiness with women, but she respected his political seriousness and she liked his father, a down-to-earth character from a lower-middle-class small-business background quite like her own.
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She weighed the candidates fairly dispassionately and decided, without overwhelming enthusiasm, that Heath was the best. After what, by modern standards, was an enviably short campaign of less than a week, Heath won by 150 votes to Maudling’s 133; Powell received 15 votes. Mrs Thatcher was probably giving a true account when she wrote in the
Finchley Press
, shortly after it was all over: ‘The decision was a difficult one to make for both are good. We are all now working hard and happily under Edward Heath. He will be a tough taskmaster, but will only drive others as hard as he drives himself.’
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