Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (10 page)

The main purposes of her Oxford life were political. Yet in those days she focused not on ideas but on the mechanics of elections and membership drives. She did read Hayek’s
Road to Serfdom
in 1944, but its impact on her was minimal until she re-read it on the recommendation of Sir Keith Joseph, thirty years later. OUCA was her vehicle for career advancement, not intellectual curiosity.

OUCA was also the arena where she met interesting young men. All her boyfriends came from the Tory stable. Her wider circle of male acquaintances, such as Sir Edward Boyle, Maurice Chandler and Johnny Dalkeith (later the Duke of Buccleuch), were also active in OUCA. Finding a husband may have been subliminally on her agenda, but once her relationship with Tony Bray cooled, she made no discernible progress towards it.

The
joie de vivre
that manifests itself in the journeys of many Oxford undergraduates seems to have been largely missing from the life of Margaret Roberts. She may have had some happy moments, but on the whole she was too intense and competitive. After four years spent mainly in the science labs and at OUCA meetings, she had never warmed to Oxford.

In later life her relationship with her
alma mater
became even colder when Congregation, its governing assembly, voted to refuse her an honorary degree. This was an unprecedented snub to a serving prime minister. Despite this hurtful insult from the university, Margaret Thatcher retained a genuine affection for her old college. She gave generously to its various appeals and supported the creation of an auditorium centre named after her in the main quadrangle.

Another strange indication of the bond she felt for her college came on the day in October 1984 when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated in New Delhi. It was just two weeks after the Brighton bombing. On hearing of the Indian Prime Minister’s death from her Political Secretary Stephen Sherbourne, Margaret Thatcher clasped his arm saying: ‘What terrible news! First they tried to get me. Now they get her. And we were both at Somerville.’
³²

These events involving Somerville’s two prime ministers lay far ahead in the future. At the time when she went down from Oxford in 1947, Margaret Roberts had to deal with her immediate concerns of the present – how to get her first job and how to continue her interest in Conservative politics.

4

First steps in politics

YOUNG CONSERVATIVE

By the time she left Oxford, twenty-one-year old Margaret Roberts had firmly decided that her future career lay in politics. But there were practical hurdles that had to be overcome on the road to this objective. They included getting her first job; securing a place on Conservative Central Office’s general list of approved candidates; and winning the nomination for a constituency. It says much for her energy and determination that she achieved these goals within the next two years.

It was not all plain sailing, for some aspects of her personality could rub other people up the wrong way. As she travelled around the country meeting prospective employers she had several disappointments. One of them came at a factory in Billingham, North Yorkshire, owned by Imperial Chemical Industries. The manager who turned her down wrote in his report, ‘This young woman has much too strong a personality to work here’.
¹

The strength of her personality continued to make both positive and negative impressions. When she did find a job in September 1947, working as a researcher for British Xylonite Plastics at Manningtree in Essex, she was unhappy during her first few months with the company.

Some of her fellow researchers thought she put on airs and graces, because she spoke with a posh accent and seemed overdressed as she travelled to work on the company bus wearing a Burberry coat and gloves. The unfriendly nicknames ‘Duchess’ and ‘Auntie Margaret’ were applied to her at this time.
²

At BX she was never bashful in expressing her political opinions, not always to the approval of her colleagues. One of them, Joyce Duggan, used to tease Margaret Roberts by joking to her, ‘There goes the future Prime Minister’.
³
These catcalls from the clerical department were taken in good part. But Joyce Duggan
also remembered that Margaret could become aggressive in her politics, turning red in the face when she argued over issues of the day.

Her boss, Stanley Booth, was also underwhelmed by his researcher’s political certitudes. ‘Her views seemed rather simplistic’, he recalled. ‘She believed … that people should stand on their own two feet. I’d come up the hard way and didn’t quite see things quite like that.’
⁴

However people saw her at work, Margaret Roberts was not letting the political grass grow under her feet. She was a hyperactive Young Conservative, becoming Secretary of the Colchester branch in 1948, entering the national speaking competition and attending regional Young Conservative conferences all over the home counties and South East England. At one of these conferences in Kent in the summer of 1948, a speech she delivered on the economy mightily impressed the Chairman of the county’s Conservative Associations. He was Alfred Bossom, Member of Parliament for Maidstone.
^*
‘Miss Roberts, yours was the best speech I have ever heard from a Young Conservative’, declared Alfred Bossom. ‘May I have the honour of recommending your name for the candidates’ list?’
⁵

MENTORED BY ALFRED BOSSOM MP

Alfred Bossom was one of the minor characters of British politics, but he became a major influence on the life and career of Margaret Roberts. He was a rich but obscure Tory back-bencher. His greatest claim to fame prior to meeting her was that he had once been the subject of a much-quoted Churchillian wisecrack. Soon after his election as the Conservative MP for Maidstone in 1931, Alfred Bossom was introduced to Winston Churchill, evidently in a convivial mood, on the terrace of the House of Commons. ‘Bossom, Bossom; that’s a funny name’, observed Churchill. ‘Neither one thing nor t’other.’
⁶

In 1932, tragedy struck the Bossom family when Alfred’s wife and eldest son were killed in a flying accident. In what may have been a reaction to his loss, the Member for Maidstone redoubled his commitment to his political activities,
with emphasis on two unusual angles. ‘My father carved out an odd political niche for himself’, said Alfred’s son, Sir Clive Bossom. ‘He specialised in giving parties and bringing on protégées. Margaret Roberts was his star young guest and pupil on both fronts.’
⁷

Alfred Bossom made his fortune in the early years of the twentieth century, building skyscrapers in New York, Dallas and Houston. He was a British-born and trained architect. When he returned to his native London in 1926, he was a star of his profession, designing the landmark Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane. His success enabled him to enter politics and to buy a grand home at No. 5 Carlton Gardens overlooking The Mall.

From this house he entertained lavishly, so much so that he was regarded as a successor to the legendary pre-war hostess Lady Londonderry because of his generosity in holding glittering political soirées. His annual white-tie dinner on the eve of the new parliamentary session became a fixture for the Tory elite, and was attended by the cabinet and every Conservative prime minister, from Stanley Baldwin to Anthony Eden. Margaret Roberts was invited for the first time in November 1948.

In addition to being a good host, Alfred Bossom was regarded as having a keen eye for talent among aspiring Tory candidates. He was a diligent attender of Conservative Party meetings in Kent, often driving down from London to their functions three or four times a week in his yellow Rolls-Royce. Several of the Young Conservatives he picked out owed their eventual ascent to Westminster to the encouragement they received from the MP for Maidstone. He was, unusually for the time, helpful to aspiring women candidates.

The Americanised Bossom believed that the country needed more women MPs. ‘We’ve got to find successors to Lady Astor’, he used to say.
⁸

In the post-war years he helped to groom two young protégées for this role. The first was Patricia Hornsby-Smith,
^†
a flame-haired Young Conservative branch secretary who became MP for Chislehurst. The second was Margaret Roberts.

Alfred Bossom was the first national political figure to see the potential of Margaret Roberts. In the most practical and effective of ways he became her mentor, patron and introducer to the upper echelons of the Tory hierarchy. His many kindnesses to her included helping her with political and travelling expenses; supporting her application for the candidates list; entertaining her at his lunches and dinner parties; advising on her speeches; guiding her on constituency selection meetings; urging her to get married; hosting her wedding reception at 5 Carlton Gardens; and trying unsuccessfully to get her chosen as his successor as the Member for Maidstone.

Aspiring politicians are lucky if they have a good mentor and patron to help them along their road. Margaret Roberts needed Bossom’s early encouragement because, for all her ambition, she was full of insecurities both financial and political. In 1949 she was not even trying to get on the Conservative Party’s approved list of candidates because, as she put it, ‘With no private income of my own there was no way I could have afforded to be an MP on the salary then available’.
^‡
9
She also had serious doubts about her short-term prospects for winning a nomination for a constituency. When an Oxford friend, John Grant, asked her if she hoped to be an MP one day, she replied: ‘Well, yes, but there’s not much hope of that. The chances of my being selected are just nil at the moment.’
¹⁰

These odds changed when, with Alfred Bossom’s help, she attended the Conservative Party Conference in Llandudno in 1948.

YOUNG CANDIDATE

Margaret Roberts had not been planning to go to the 1948 Party Conference until Alfred Bossom began championing her cause. He tried to get her included in the delegation of Kent Young Conservatives to Llandudno, but when this did not work out she managed to wangle a conference pass as a representative from the undersubscribed Oxford University Graduate Conservative Association (OUGCA).
¹¹

Bossom helped her with her travelling and accommodation expenses, and took her under his wing by inviting her to the parties he was hosting for the
Maidstone and Kent Area delegates. But she was disappointed at not being called to speak on a motion deploring the Labour government’s abolition of university seats. She nearly went back from North Wales in a mood of frustration, but her spirits were lifted by an unexpected invitation to a lunch on Llandudno pier.

The invitation came from John Miller, the Chairman of Dartford Conservative Association. He was under some pressure from Conservative Central Office to pick a candidate for this safe Labour seat in North Kent. A friend at the conference urged him to consider Margaret Roberts.

‘Oh, but Dartford is a real industrial stronghold. I don’t think a woman would do at all’,
¹²
was Miller’s immediate reaction. But he reconsidered it. He made contact with Miss Roberts, inviting her to lunch with the key members of the Dartford delegation at a restaurant at the end of the pier, on the last Saturday of the conference, just before the final address of the leader of the party, Winston Churchill.

Margaret Roberts presented herself well at this lunch. Several of the Dartford delegates were impressed with the forceful opinions of the young woman they were meeting for the first time. But some of them had reservations on the question of whether she would be the right choice as the Conservative standard bearer in an industrial seat. Their doubts seem to have been more about the sex than the strength of the potential candidate for in the 1940s Conservative women MPs were a rarity. John Miller himself felt that the vigorous Miss Roberts might have just the right fighting spirit to bring down the large Labour majority and to breathe life into his somewhat moribund Association.

Although the early signals from Dartford seemed to have been positive, there followed a disconcerting three months of silence. John Miller used the time to assemble a list of twenty-six candidates, even though he already had expressed his own preference for Miss Roberts. He still wanted a strong slate to choose from. Among those he approached was a local businessman, Denis Thatcher, who had stood in a council election as the representative of the Ratepayers’ Association. ‘I said no without hesitating’, was Thatcher’s response to the suggestion that he should put his hat into the ring for the nomination.
¹³

Dartford Conservatives followed the traditional pattern of constituency association selection procedures. They interviewed the long list of Miller’s twenty-six hopefuls in two rounds, reducing them down to a short list of five. The final selection of the Parliamentary Candidate was made from this quintet at
a meeting of the fifty strong Executive Committee of the Association, held on 31 January 1949 at the Bull Hotel in Dartford.

Margaret Roberts went into this final run-off as the favourite with the backing of the Chairman. The Central Office Deputy Area Agent, who attended all the interviews, described her speaking ability and political knowledge as ‘far above those of the other candidates’.
¹⁴

If that was the way the betting was moving before the run-off, Margaret Roberts turned it into a certainty. In her fifteen-minute speech and in her answer to questions she gave a fiery performance. Not only was it in harmony with the views of her audience, it was streets ahead of her competitors. The best of these was the runner-up Anthony Kershaw, an Old Etonian barrister with a fruity voice and a less than stellar intellect. A gregarious, clubbable figure who later became a Gloucestershire MP and a junior minister in the Heath government of 1970–74, he was no match for Margaret Roberts on the night of 31 January 1949. She won the nomination by a clear majority on the first ballot.

The next milestone in the developing love affair between the Dartford Tories and their new candidate was her adoption meeting. This is a formal event, which by Conservative tradition has something of the feel of a coronation ceremony, as the victor of the selection process is presented to and acclaimed by the full membership of the association. Her adoption had two ingredients that were unusual. The first was an unprecedentedly high turnout at the meeting. The second was the presence of her father and her future husband.

Despite a cold, frosty night on 28 February 1949, 380 Dartford Conservatives turned out to inspect and approve the Executive Committee’s choice of candidate. They were not disappointed. As the Central Office Area Agent reported to headquarters: ‘It was a first class show; quite the best meeting of any type that the Dartford constituency has held for many a long day. Miss Roberts made a brilliant speech, and the decision to adopt her was unanimous.’
¹⁵

The brilliance may have owed some of its sparkle to being the equivalent of ‘preaching to the choir’. It consisted mainly of a trenchant attack on the Labour government’s economic policies expressed in language that was both simple and super-patriotic: ‘The Government should do what any good housewife would do if money was short – look at their accounts and see what was wrong’, declared the candidate. Furthermore, ‘If the Socialists continued with
their disastrous policy, unemployment and other evils would result and the working people would suffer’.
¹⁶

This message of thrift and anti-socialism must have gone down well with the person in the audience whose presence meant most to the candidate – Alfred Roberts. It was the first time father and daughter had spoken from the same platform. Their dynastic duet was emotionally moving and politically astute. At a time when the party leader, Winston Churchill, was wooing the Liberal vote, Alfred testified that his family had always been Liberal but it was now the Conservatives who stood for the old Liberalism.
¹⁷

One other listener in the hall destined to become a dynastic pillar in the family life of Margaret Roberts was Denis Thatcher. He warmly applauded the new candidate’s anti-socialist rhetoric, and congratulated her on it after the meeting. They had an opportunity to talk at a supper party after the adoption given by staunch Tory supporters Mr and Mrs Stanley Soward. He worked in the constituency for the Atlas Preservative Company of Erith and had invited along his managing director, Denis Thatcher.