Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (11 page)

‘I must say I was very pleased with her for this,’ Professor Hodgkin wrote to a scientific colleague in 1988. ‘I tended to encourage my Somerville chemists to spread their wings if they wanted to go off into other fields … I was sent from America and Moscow several gramicidin, antibacterial peptides, which are still providing difficult problems for X Ray analysis … Gerhard Schmidt [a Jewish refugee scientist] started working on the simplest, gramicidin S from Moscow … Margaret helped him with growing heavy atoms containing crystals but all proved too complex to solve.’ (Indeed, it took over forty years more to solve some of them.) ‘The measurements they did were eventually useful.’
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How good a scientist was she? She certainly had a serious interest in the subject – one which she would deploy in future years. She liked to point out that she was the first prime minister with a science degree, rather than boasting that she was the first woman prime minister. After going down, she went back to Oxford to call in on old friends in the crystallography department, and she records, in letters to Muriel written during and shortly after Oxford, the pleasure of meeting famous scientists like Linus Pauling and Max Perutz, and of visiting Cambridge to meet fellow crystallographers. She worked hard at it, too, winning two college prizes in her first two years, experiencing many an essay crisis and demonstrating the ability, so famous in later life, to study late into the night. When she took her exams at the end of her third year, she had to sit some of them in the sanatorium. Margaret told friends that she was ill at the time, but there is some evidence that she was suffering more from nervous exhaustion brought on by overwork.
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At the end of her fourth year, she was awarded a respectable second-class degree. Janet Vaughan, a scientist but not a chemist, said disparagingly of Margaret: ‘She was a perfectly adequate chemist. I mean nobody thought anything of her.’
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But her judgment may have been coloured by the strong political antagonism she felt towards Margaret in later
years. Professor Hodgkin, who also differed politically from Margaret,
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but knew her and liked her better, was fairer: ‘I came to rate her as good. One could always rely on her producing a sensible, well-read essay and yet there was something that some people had that she hadn’t quite got.’
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Margaret herself would not have disagreed with her tutor’s view. Speaking in praise of Dorothy Hodgkin in later life, she referred to a conversation with Max Perutz in which, she said, he told her that, in science, ‘reason and maths can get you so far, but you need inspiration on top.’ There is ‘a fascinating link’, she went on, ‘between art and science’.
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Dorothy Hodgkin, she believed, had that inspiration, that artistic, imaginative gift. It is not something she would ever have claimed for herself. Indeed, for all her astonishing self-confidence in some areas, Margaret never boasted of an intellectual mastery that she did not possess: at Oxford, she met many people who were her intellectual superiors, and she had no trouble recognizing this and deferring to them.

It was true, too, as Dorothy Hodgkin also said, that ‘she was not absolutely devoted’ to chemistry,
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that, as Betty Spice put it, ‘her heart wasn’t in it’.
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While at Oxford, she developed a growing interest in the law. In her memoirs, she records that her father, as mayor of Grantham in 1945–6, sat automatically on the magistrates’ bench. She would go along with him, during vacations, to the Quarter Sessions, at which an experienced lawyer would be in the chair as recorder: ‘On one such occasion my father and I lunched with him, a King’s Counsel called Norman Winning … At one point I blurted out: “I wish I could be a lawyer; but all I know about is chemistry and I can’t change what I’m reading at Oxford now.” ’
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Winning said he had read physics at Cambridge but had then stayed on to do a second degree, in law. She replied that she could not afford to do this, so Winning explained that the other way (‘very hard work’) was to get a job in or near London, join an Inn of Court and study for the Bar in the evenings. In her memoirs, Mrs Thatcher sets all this in the context of her later life – ‘And this in 1950 is precisely what I had done’
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– but it is important to note that the bent towards law was already so strong at Oxford as to tempt her away from chemistry, and to remember that, in 1945–6, she had no clear prospect of being able to do what Winning suggested. When she
started applying for jobs before leaving Oxford, one of the considerations which governed her choice was the possibility of combining the job with legal studies. Writing to Muriel in the early summer of 1947, she describes interviews for a job at ICI’s Billingham plant near Stockton. She likes the idea of the work, but says that it is six hours from London which ‘would be an awful disadvantage for the Bar Exams’.
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Although she began reading for the Bar before her marriage in 1951, the certainty that she could afford to start a legal career came only with the financial security that Denis Thatcher brought her.

In later years, Margaret Thatcher discerned a pattern in her youthful interests: ‘As a Methodist in Grantham, I learnt the laws of God. When I read chemistry at Oxford, I learnt the laws of science, which derive from the laws of God, and when I studied for the Bar, I learnt the laws of man.’
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This was an honest enough résumé of her reverent interest in the splendour of certain types of knowledge. Her belief in the rule of law as the foundation of politics was one of the strongest and most often repeated in her creed. But her account probably underplays the extent to which she saw all her main occupations, the law not the least, as instrumental to her pursuit of a political career. Thus at Oxford she remained an active Methodist, even going on the preaching circuit, where her sermons were reported as ‘most impressive’.
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She was a keen member of the Bach Choir. She was a conscientious and interested chemist, but her obsession, her dream, was politics. ‘I had a passion for history,’ she said fifty years later, ‘and a passion for politics. Politics is living history.’
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She was probably projecting on to the past an interest in history which she did not exhibit much at the time, but it is true that she had already conceived a passion for politics. She joined OUCA as soon as she went up to Oxford, and threw herself into its activities. Hers was not, at this stage, a strong engagement with political ideas and beliefs, nor yet the undergraduate love of politicking. It was simply a determination, entered into without apparent self-examination, to engage in political life, re-energize political organization, and to do it as well as she possibly could.

Although the war provided the subject of constant and consuming interest for undergraduate conversation, it had the curious effect of making Oxford less actively political than at many other periods, notably the 1930s. This was partly because so many men were away in the forces. The Oxford Union, the centre of university political debate, allowed only men to take part in debates.
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It was also because the overriding need to win the war
produced, if not agreement about post-war politics, at least a determination not to quarrel. As Margaret Thatcher said, when talking fifty years later about the wartime political atmosphere at Somerville, ‘You couldn’t but be patriotic in wartime because so much was at stake.’
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Contemporaries remember that, although the progress of the war was constantly discussed in casual mealtime conversations, controversial issues were not. According to Amy Wootten, typical Somerville table talk would move between war news to its small consequences – ‘They’ve got bananas in a shop in the High’ – to the ordinary gossip of the day. Most undergraduates were quite religious, and, as at KGGS, it was more likely God than Soviet Communism or economic policy that they, including Margaret, could be found debating.
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Political awareness was quite low. Amy Wootten, in fact, was under the misapprehension that Margaret was a Liberal, just because her two fellow chemists were.
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This absence of political controversy characterizes Margaret’s correspondence with her sister throughout her time at Oxford. Admittedly, Muriel was not a highly political person, but it is still striking that Margaret’s letters to her contain scarcely a single expression of political views and next to nothing about current political events. Politics, when it occurs, is presented as an activity requiring a great deal of work but also opening up social opportunities and giving pleasure. It is something to be done, not something to be debated. Only one witness can recall having an actual political argument with Margaret at Oxford. Pauline Cowan remembered that Margaret was the very first person she met at Somerville and that Margaret’s first act had been to try to recruit her for OUCA which, considering herself a Communist, she refused. Pauline shared digs with Margaret in Richmond Road in 1945–6, and recalled the ‘rather unpleasant breakfasts’ cooked by the landlady consisting of dishes like hot pilchards with mashed potato. She and Margaret had at least one argument over breakfast about the structure of post-war society and how egalitarian it should be. She cannot remember much of what was said, but she collected the sense that ‘Margaret disapproved as well as disagreed.’
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This argument was exceptional, though. Even Mary Wallace, who knew Margaret from Grantham and was active in OUCA, has no memory of her ever expressing any political views.
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Conservatism at Oxford towards the end of the war, although it had a surprisingly large number of recruits, was not spoiling for a fight. It did not, for instance, warn of the dangers of too uncritical an association with Stalin or cry out in protest at the growth of the welfare state. When working on her memoirs in the 1990s, Margaret struggled to recall her views at the time. On Anglo-Soviet friendship, she said, ‘We never felt right about it. This unbeliev
ably cruel man got to be called “Uncle Joe” because of wartime propaganda.’
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She also recalled reading Friedrich von Hayek’s
The Road to Serfdom
, which was published in 1944.
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But there is a sense that these memories are dredged up rather than strongly felt, and Margaret herself admitted that ‘I cannot claim that I fully grasped the implications of Hayek’s little masterpiece at the time.’
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‘The times were political,’ she declared of her Oxford period in 1994; ‘how on earth had war happened again?’,
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but there is no evidence that this was the subject which she and her fellow youthful Tories discussed much. Indeed, there is a curious, cosy feeling about student political discussion at that time, as if people believed, somehow or other, that everything was going to be all right.

The fact was that, in common with almost all her fellow Conservatives at the end of the war, Margaret had a fairly strong belief in the capacity of Whitehall men and ideas to run the country in a humane and orderly way. She admired the White Paper on Full Employment, closely and directly influenced by Keynes, which appeared in 1944, and she credited ‘Winston’, as she always in later life referred to Churchill,
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with wisdom in creating the Ministry for Reconstruction and Development. Administrative thinkers like Oliver Franks
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at the Ministry of Supply, who subsequently served her well in his inquiry into the Falklands War, commanded her confidence, as did Sir William Beveridge for his report on Social Security in 1942 and R. A. Butler for his Education Act of 1944.
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She liked the fact that the wartime economy was ‘an economy with a purpose’ which gave almost everyone a job.
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She said that she didn’t feel she was a ‘right-wing Tory’ at the time: ‘Fairness is a big streak in the British character,’ a streak which was satisfied by rationing.
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To the extent that her Toryism at this stage went beyond an instinctive loyalty to the non-unionized classes of society, its chief characteristics were a sense that collectivism threatened both freedom and economic success, and a romantic imperialism which saw the British Empire as ensuring civilized values, even in its process of decline. Indeed, these two things combined in her perception. She said that what she wanted was ‘a freer society, which produced a large part of the power
that made Britain great’.
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She was also struck with the idea that Utopias were dangerous. Although a scientist, she recalled that she was always suspicious of those who tried to apply the scientific method to politics: ‘you get Utopian government.’
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In 1944, she saw the film of J. B. Priestley’s play
They Came to a City
, and derived from it the idea that ‘You can’t get a solution that ignores human nature.’
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The end of the war in Europe in May 1945 and the general election in July hardened politics up. Margaret took part in the campaign – mostly, since it was held on 5 July,
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in Grantham rather than Oxford. In those days, the mainstay of election campaigns was the public meeting, and it fell to Margaret to act as the warm-up speaker for the Conservative candidate, Squadron Leader Worth, as he toured the villages surrounding Grantham night after night. She remembered these occasions quite self-critically: ‘I wasn’t terribly good at keeping going. My training had been scientific. Therefore I spoke in short sentences … machine-gun style,’
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but her readiness to do so showed precocious courage. She already had some experience of speaking, having talked that spring, for example, to the Grantham Rotary Ladies on ‘A Day in the Life of an Oxford Undergraduate’ and having put on a performance at OUCA of which she boasted to Muriel: ‘I gave my paper on Agricultural Policy which was a staggering success.’
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But as she was a woman and someone who, aged nineteen, was still not old enough to vote,
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when she spoke she was bound to attract local attention.