The Real Iron Lady (14 page)

It was not such a harmonious picture on the EU front, however.

Was it because M. Mitterand was French that he was able to discern subtlety in Margaret Thatcher's approach to Europe? In any event, Conservative newspapers like
The Sun
and the
Telegraph
were not inclined to describe it that way: headlines like ‘Maggie says no', and even the infamous ‘Up Yours Delors' abounded, leaving the British reader in no doubt about the Prime Minister's stance on Europe.

Douglas Hurd, who became Foreign Secretary in 1989, describes Mrs Thatcher's approach to German reunification:

(This seminar was held at Chequers in March 1990, soon after the Berlin Wall came down. Its discussions were widely leaked to the press. According to Hugo Young, as a result of the seminar, Mrs Thatcher ‘withheld her approval
of reunification until well past the date when a concession to realism would have been better advised'.)

On her last visit to Paris, on 20 November 1990, and already knowing that she had failed to win outright a leadership vote within the Conservative Party, Margaret Thatcher discussed Iraq and Kuwait with President Mitterand. They failed to agree, but she continued to pursue an Anglo-French entente as a counterbalance to German influence.

When she stepped down, President Mitterand paid generous tribute to her, saying that ‘she had played a historic role in Great Britain and in Europe', and that he greatly admired her courage and determination. ‘She was an opponent but she had a vision. In the end, I got on very well with her.'

To the Briton in the street, Margaret Thatcher's approach to foreign affairs was defined by her attitude to Europe. Her successor, John Major, who had also served as her Foreign Secretary, gives a sensitive analysis of her line on Europe in his autobiography:

O
ne of the most intriguing features of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister was the fact that she was, so patently, not ‘one of us'. She obviously relished the image of herself swimming against the tide of the Establishment, as ‘the rebel head of an Establishment government', as she put it at a Downing Street reception. Many Prime Ministers see themselves like this: John Major, certainly, and probably also Tony Blair. Indeed, it must often seem that way when you are confronted with Cabinet colleagues, each with his or her own agenda, and a party that opposes change. But with Margaret Thatcher it went deeper than that. She wrote in
The Path to Power,
‘I was often portrayed as an outsider who by some odd mixture of circumstances had stepped inside and stayed there for
eleven-and-a-half years; in my case the portrayal was not inaccurate.'

She was most definitely not ‘born to rule'. Her origins as the daughter of a Methodist shopkeeper in an East Midlands provincial town, her state education at primary and secondary level, the fact that she read a science subject at Oxford and (worse still, coming from her background) was, unexpectedly, a Conservative – all of this meant that she could not easily be categorised or ‘placed' by those in the various worlds into which she climbed, except perhaps by giving her the catch-all status of ‘outsider'. Even Ted Heath, like her a product of a grammar school education, and from a humbler background than hers, had ‘had a good war', and thus was easier to pigeon-hole.

In fact in Grantham, at the time when Margaret Thatcher was growing up, the Roberts family were anything but outsiders. They must have been regarded by others as both well-to-do and powerful. Her father was self-made. He left school at thirteen and, through careful management, hard work and a thrifty approach, saved enough to buy first one grocery shop and then another. The family had help in the house and even a maid, before the war. Mrs Roberts was a gifted seamstress and tailoress, so the two girls, Margaret and Muriel, her older sister, were always beautifully and smartly turned out. Margaret had piano lessons and was sent, not to the primary school closest to the Roberts home, but to a better one some little distance away. At ten years old she won a scholarship to the
fee-paying girls' grammar school, Kesteven and Grantham Girls' School. The scholarship was means tested, so Alfred Roberts had to pay the rest of the fees; her sister Muriel had also attended the school and presumably fees were paid in her case, too. The school had a uniform, some items of which would have had to be bought, not made. The family took regular holidays, although separately as the shops could not be left, even though a total of four workers were employed.

Margaret Thatcher never sought to present her early life and background as a rags-to-riches story, for the simple reason that it was not one. She did, however, consistently express gratitude for what her upbringing had taught her. In fact, her family's position in Grantham could certainly have been described as middle class, if she or they had wished to make such a claim. What is interesting about it is the sheer ignorance of small-town dynamics displayed by those of her former colleagues and the many commentators who seek to sneer at her origins, because, as she wrote in
The Path to Power:

In addition, one of the shops was a post office, and its franchise was an important part of Alfred Roberts's business. There would have been in the shop a branch of the Post Office Savings Bank, and elderly people would have visited weekly to get their pension. ‘As grocers,' she wrote, ‘we knew something about the circumstances of our customers.'

The sum total of all of this is that Margaret Thatcher had, from an early age, first-hand experience of a wide social range of people, and a knowledge of their circumstances that those ‘born to rule' could never acquire, imprisoned as they are, from cradle to grave, in their own social class. It was certainly a better preparation for a future politician. This could have been one reason why she found the effortless superiority of the ‘born to rule' politician so unutterably exasperating. And why she said, in an interview in the
Sunday Times
, 3 August 1980, ‘Deep in their instincts, people find what I am saying and doing is right. And I know it is, because that is the way I was brought up. I'm eternally grateful for the way I was brought up in a small town. We knew everyone, we knew what people thought.'

Her remarkable father's outstanding career in public life must also have given her a broad view, not only of local government, but also of the structure, workings and organisations of a small-town community, impossible to acquire for those coming from a supposedly more sophisticated metropolitan background. It must certainly have
given her a vicarious taste of power, since, at the zenith of his public career, Alderman Roberts had an influential finger in many Grantham pies. He was a powerful man.

He was elected an independent councillor to the Grantham Borough Council in 1925. Later, in 1936, he became chairman of the Finance and Rating Committee, a very powerful position in local government. He served a term as Mayor of Grantham in 1946 and was made an Alderman. As a local sub-postmaster, he played a key role during the war, in charge of pensions and military payments and dealing with other emergency arrangements. In addition to this, he was chairman of the local branches of the Chamber of Trade, the Rotary Club and the Workers' Education Association. He was a director of the Trustee Savings Bank and a governor both of the Kesteven and Grantham Girls' Grammar School and of the King's School, Grantham, a long-established boys' grammar school. He was a senior figure in the Finkin Street Wesleyan Methodist Chapel, where the family attended services twice every Sunday, a lay preacher and a trustee of at least ten other local Methodist churches. There is no indication that Alderman Roberts did anything other than fulfil his public duties with dedication and honour in every respect. Indeed, in the goldfish bowl of public life in a small provincial town, he would not have lasted long had his conduct not been above reproach. But the talk in the Roberts household must have been interesting and highly varied, given the number of organisations in which Alderman Roberts had an interest,
the wide range of people who came in and out of the shops every day, and the challenge of making a living in trade with all its changing circumstances. Margaret Thatcher had, therefore, from her earliest years, an insight into many aspects of life denied to children above or below her on the social scale. As she said, ‘Living over the shop, children see far more of their parents than in most other walks of life. I saw my father at breakfast, lunch, high tea and supper. We had much more time to talk than some other families, for which I have always been grateful.'

For a future politician, such an upbringing and childhood would be a great advantage. However, it was not seen as such by those who liked to patronise the grocer's daughter, many of them in the Conservative Party. It was commonly recounted in the House of Commons that some Tory grandee had described the party to his friends in the City as being like a cavalry regiment led by a WRAC corporal. Unsurprisingly, Margaret Thatcher never took to the grandee element in the party.

Willie Whitelaw, himself the grandest of grandees, served Margaret Thatcher with the utmost loyalty. But even he, after he had left office, admitted that he would never have dreamt of socialising with the Thatchers.

Small wonder then, that after a hostile press conference much later in her career, she remarked to Bernard Ingham: ‘The thing about you and me, Bernard, is that neither of us are smooth people.' She might have added, ‘And nor are we One of Them.'

When she went up to Oxford, she would have been justified in a certain pride in her achievement. No one in her immediate family had been to either Oxford or Cambridge. To win a place at seventeen years old, as she did, was a great achievement. Nor should she have found her background any kind of handicap: there would have been plenty of clever grammar school girls like her at Somerville. She was nice-looking, hard-working and diligent, and yet at the start she found Oxford ‘cold and strangely forbidding'.

She was not given to self-pity, then or at any time later in her career, and threw herself into her work as a scientist, into church activities, music and, of course, politics. But at Oxford, it was her choice of party that made her an outsider. Much of the comment from her contemporaries of the time focuses on the fact that she did not seem to talk about much else apart from the Conservative Party. She was certainly not frivolous or given to undergraduate larks. The fact is that scientists at Oxford, certainly in the late 1950s when I was there, and probably to this day, spent much of their time out of college at the labs. They there-fore tended to eat and socialise together, rather than mix with those reading humanities subjects. They also had to do a fourth year of study before taking their final exams, so their rhythm of work was different. But the views of those at Oxford with her, tutors or undergraduates, were given after she had become Prime Minister, and political antipathy may have affected their later pronouncements. At the
very least, their judgements seem remarkably untouched by any kind of academic detachment. Take the comments of Dame Janet Vaughan, Principal of Somerville for part of the time Margaret Roberts was there. ‘She was a perfectly adequate chemist. I mean nobody thought anything of her. She was a perfectly good second-class chemist, a beta chemist.' The Nobel Prize winner Professor Dorothy Hodgkin thought well enough of her to invite her to be a research assistant in her fourth year, and said, ‘I came to rate her as good. One could always rely on her producing a sensible, well-read essay.' But of course, Margaret Roberts's real sin was to be a Conservative. That was the reason that she was not invited to Dame Janet's social occasions at weekends and why some of her fellow undergraduates recall her as ‘unmemorable' or as ‘someone who was never young'. For them, that she dared to be different from them was the unforgivable sin.

And so history repeated itself, in the famous episode in 1984, when her old university refused to give her – the first and, so far, the only woman to become Prime Minister of Britain – the honorary degree they had awarded to Attlee, Macmillan, Heath, Wilson, Douglas-Home and Eden. The opposition was led by a committee of 275 objectors to the award, on the grounds that Margaret Thatcher had done irremediable damage to the cause of education and, in particular, higher education. This was undoubtedly the view of some; my own view of their collective motivation, however, has been for ever influenced by a very senior don
gleefully telling me, at a college high table a few years later, that, ‘Oxford hadn't had so much fun for years.' Oxford's reputation was not enhanced by its stance; I believe that the general public thought it petty, small-minded and politically motivated, and I regretted that my old university should apparently not care about the impression given by its stance. Margaret Thatcher's public response was dignified. She said, ‘If they do not wish to confer the honour, I am the last person who would wish to receive it.' Privately, the episode did not reinforce her enthusiasm for the Establishment.

It was wonderfully summed up, in a typically double-edged way, by a remark of Harold Macmillan to Roy Jenkins in 1985, here reported in Anthony Kenny's
A Life in Oxford.

She once startled Sir Anthony Parsons, her foreign affairs adviser, by saying to him, ‘Do you know, Tony, I am so glad I don't belong to your class.' ‘What class would that be, Prime Minister?' Parsons replied. ‘The upper middle class who see everybody's point of view but have no view
of their own.' This exchange, recorded by Peter Hennessy in
The Prime Minister,
is extremely revealing of her whole attitude to the class hierarchy in Britain.

She appeared to have no time at all for the whole Establishment, the traditional ruling elite. She gave the impression of wanting to take them all on: the BBC, Oxford and Cambridge, the civil service, especially the Foreign Office, and the state-funded professional classes. She had a strong distaste for local government, which might seem surprising given her own father's eminent town hall career; on the other hand, she may have been shocked, as were most people with any kind of regard for the democratic process, by the fact that immediately after the 1979 general election, which she won handsomely, some militant-controlled councils announced that they would challenge the result. We used to sit in the House of Commons Tea Room, gloomily reckoning up all the interest groups her government, and ours for that matter, had offended and wondering quite how this might play out at the polls. Not that it seemed to matter to her. No one could have been less concerned with political popularity.

This iconoclastic disregard for the conventions certainly extended to the management of her Cabinet and her attitude to the civil service, even to other ministers' special advisers (although not to her own). On occasion, she actually seemed to take the view that she was nothing to do with her own government – or ‘the government' as she sometimes used to refer to it – and that one of her roles
was to protect the public from it. Compared with all her successors, she enjoyed very favourable press coverage, but, far from being grateful, she treated even the most well-respected journalists with disdain.