Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (15 page)

Tony had returned from military service in Germany and was now doing a full honours degree at his old college in Oxford. He had had his fun, and was now missing Margaret. His letter had been, he said fifty-six years later, sincere: ‘I would have meant it. I was serious. I wasn’t just being gallant.’
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Despite what she had written to him about letting sleeping dogs lie, Margaret took up his invitation to meet – which he had renewed in a further letter – though not with unseemly haste. She told Muriel that she would see him in Oxford ‘more to let him see how I’ve changed than to see him!’ On 18 May 1948, she confided in Muriel an account which she had not given in her regular letter to her parents, for rather sly reasons, as she herself explained:

Have written account of Oxford weekend in Ma and Pa’s letter. Bits left out or not made clear are

1. That I was staying with the Mandelbergs [Oxford Conservative friends]. I thought Pop might think I had a very expensive weekend at a hotel and maybe stump up …

2. That I met Tony Bray again once or twice over the weekend. I went to have a late tea with him at 5 o’clock on Friday evening and we drifted on from there to see School for Scandal at the New Theatre and dinner at the Randolph.
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He is more grown up now than formerly although his appearance has changed but little. Strangely enough I found him extremely easy to get on with. There was no embarrassment whatsoever. I was wearing my pale blue frock for theatre – which is rather lovely. We scarcely referred to our past ‘association’ except indirectly by discussing what had happened since we last met. He, I gather, has had a damn good time on the continent –
especially in Brussels [where he went on leave]. The only direct reference I had of times past was when he said quite steadily – ‘you only realise what you had when you’ve lost it – and you know what I’m referring to.’ However I ignored the remark and conversation rapidly picked up and flowed on.

Affecting an insouciance that she clearly did not feel, Margaret continues:

For want of something else to do, I went on the river with him in a punt on Saturday afternoon. There I had a full-blooded apology – which I must in all fairness say sounded very sincere, that said he felt when he went in the army he was expecting to go to the far East for 3 years at least [the war had still been on in Japan] and that he couldn’t ‘ask me to hang on’ all that time, but he didn’t want to kill the feeling between us by writing and saying let’s finish. He now realised that his very inaction must have killed anything there was between us and that in any case it was quite apallingly [sic] rude not to have written. He determined to write the moment he came out of the Army but couldn’t explain on paper all he felt. Hence the ‘circumstances beyond my control’. Having said this apology, he in a very poised and mature fashion steered the conversation into lighter vein once again. I did not comment on the apology – he assured me he had not been infatuated with anyone else (I, of course, didn’t mention Prudence). It all sounded to me as if it were partly true and partly false.

There was one more meeting with Tony that weekend:

I lunched with him again on Monday and we parted. No mention was made of any future arrangements for which I was truly thankful – for it just wouldn’t have been ‘on’ for me, although I quite enjoyed seeing him again for a short time – it satisfied my curiosity – but he’s a weird-looking chap to cart around the place!

By the way, he didn’t know I had been President of OUCA – I didn’t tell him until the last lunch when it arose naturally out of the conversation, – and he was immensely impressed. I also told him about the speakers’ competition [a Young Conservatives’ contest which Margaret had won] which impressed him still more.

Altogether I must say I enjoyed the weekend enormously. For two pins I would have said to hell with BX I’m staying up for another week. The weather was glorious from start to finish. Things couldn’t have been more perfect than they were.
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Margaret did not maintain her resolve about making no future ‘arrangements’. She had another letter from Tony in July and followed it up. Once
again, she wrote to Muriel explaining that what she had said in her letter to her parents had been untruthful:

In point of fact I was not meeting a ‘crowd of old college cronies’ in London yesterday, but Tony. He had written to say if I was ever in London to let him know – so I thought we might have quite an evening out yesterday – and we did. He came up from Southwick [the Sussex village where his parents lived] specially for the day (!). He met me off the train at King’s X at 2.45 … After I had titivated we went along to Fullers in Regent St to have tea.

The couple went on to see
Carissima
at the Palace, where they had ‘absolutely dead central seats’ in the stalls.

I was wearing my blue frock and little blue hat, little fur jacket with all wine accessories. And I forgot to mention he presented me with a spray of pink roses! Actually, my outfit looked extremely nice and I saw several people turn to look at it. During the interval we went and had gin and vermouth in the bar … Tony had booked dinner for nine o’clock at Kettner’s – quite a fashionable West End restaurant.

The dinner, after more gin and vermouth, was ‘wonderful’. ‘I really enjoyed the evening very much – though I wouldn’t dream of re-striking up the association with Tony … PPS. I don’t want a job in a sales organisation – they’re awful jobs. If you see any more adverts though let me know.’
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In some form at least, the association continued. In early December 1948, Margaret went to Oxford and told Muriel, ‘I saw Tony twice during the weekend [the weekend in which she finally sat her viva for her BSc] … I did theatre and dinner with him on Saturday evening … and went to tea on Sunday.’
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In January 1949, she wrote, ‘I had a letter from Tony on Saturday asking me how I was etc but suggesting that we spend another day in town together sometime. An offer which I shall probably accept when I get a free Saturday.’
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The next month ‘I had a valentine from Tony! Quite a funny one, with a letter asking when I shall be visiting Oxford again.’
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After that, there are no further surviving mentions of Tony Bray in Margaret’s correspondence. This is not surprising, perhaps, since he had once again shown interest in another woman. According to his account early in the twenty-first century, the relationship with Margaret had, indeed, rekindled in 1948, but late in the winter of 1949 he took a girlfriend skiing in Austria, telling Margaret that he was going for winter sports, but not mentioning the woman. Although he was fond of Margaret, he said, he realized that she was embarking on a serious political career and she was ‘so determined to make her own way’. He believed that ‘A
woman should be a woman’ and his idea of a woman did not include a full career. The renewed relationship with Margaret came to an end in 1949, and in June of the following year Tony Bray became engaged to the woman who remained his wife until her death more than fifty years later. He telephoned Margaret to inform her of the event and received ‘polite congratulations: she didn’t wax lyrical.’
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He did not invite her to his wedding – ‘It would have been the kiss of death.’
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For her part, Margaret, probably more excited by Tony than she would explicitly admit, even to Muriel, did not want to be hurt again.
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In the winter of 1948, she wrote to Muriel, who by this time had a boyfriend called Ken,
^†
and gave her sister some advice: ‘I should definitely not give Ken anything for Christmas – he can give you something if he likes, that’s different.’ But she also expresses some self-doubt: ‘I don’t know that your “male” problem is the same as mine – you seem infinitely more successful with them than I do with his Colchester counterpart!’
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The ‘Colchester counterpart’ is obviously a generic type of man that Margaret feels she cannot find, but was also, it seems likely, a man called David Papillon, a leading Young Conservative in Colchester, an able young solicitor and businessman, much liked and admired in the town. Margaret records her excitement when Papillon sent her a Christmas card or asked her to a party. He also travelled by train with her to the party conference in Llandudno in 1948 which put her decisively on the way to her political career. Margaret considered him smart, charming and powerful, and was ‘rather cross’ when her fellow lodger, Kay Stokes, turned up to his New Year party in a ‘chiffon blouse exactly the same colour as my turquoise one’.
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He was also unattainable because, unknown to Margaret, he was homosexual.
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Throughout her life she remained innocent about such things. In any event, her letter to Muriel shows her looking for other men while Tony Bray was still on the scene, and feeling a little wistful about not really finding them. As is visible in her frequent references to how other people turned to look at her if she wore something striking, she depended heavily on the approval and attention of others for her self-confidence. This confidence continued to grow as her career prospered, and, as we shall see, 1949 proved to be
the year when her success really began, but in the winter of 1948 she still felt a little frail.

There is one curious footnote to the story of Tony Bray and Margaret Thatcher. In 1973, Tony, who had pursued a career as a stockbroker, was engaged in a detailed study of the housing market. It was his job to forecast the development of house-building to see how the share prices of construction companies might move. In doing so, he formed the view that it would be logical to let sitting tenants buy their council houses, freeing up the receipts to build more housing. He worked up a paper on this and in 1974 sent it to Edward Heath,
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by this time, following the Conservative defeat at the election in February, the Leader of the Opposition. He mentioned to Heath that he had known Margaret Thatcher at Oxford and so Heath, who by this time had made her shadow environment spokesman and therefore responsible for this area of policy, suggested that Bray talk to her. Margaret invited him to the Central Lobby of the House of Commons. The two had not met or spoken since 1950. Tony noticed a change in her manner over the quarter of a century: ‘She was more the grande dame, aware of her own presence, a little bit condescending’; she made only the most glancing acknowledgment of their old acquaintance and got straight down to the policy, towards which she was very receptive. A lunch to discuss the policy more fully was planned, to be held at Tony’s stockbroking firm, but when it eventually took place Tony found himself excluded from the occasion of which he was himself the architect. He does not know why, but blames colleagues, not Margaret.
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He never saw her again.

Many people in the 1970s were toying with market-based solutions to the problem of council houses and the idea was current in Tory circles, so it would be an exaggeration to say that Mrs Thatcher was introduced to what turned out to be one of her most successful policies by her first boyfriend, but it has a grain of truth.

Tony Bray had been right to detect a hardening of Margaret’s seriousness about a political career. Her opportunity came with the Conservative Party conference in Llandudno in early October 1948. Margaret was to go, as a representative not of Colchester but of the Oxford Conservative Graduates’
Association. She looked forward to the conference keenly and wanted to dress appropriately. She went shopping in London and visited Bourne and Hollingsworth and Peter Robinson: ‘I decided I couldn’t possibly go to Llandudno with the “communal” coat [this seems to have been a garment which the two sisters shared] as the only top-coat I had … so I drew some savings certificates out and bought a fine light-weight black wool swagger. It’s of a rather distinctive design,’ she wrote to Muriel,
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and sketched a picture of it for her (‘I’ve drawn it rather stunted’). The coat cost £9 11s 6d. As so often, Mar-garet added, ‘(Don’t mention new coat to parents).’

As she prepared for the conference, Margaret had no clear thought that it would produce any development in her career. In August, indeed, although she also applied for new jobs in London, she had sent off an application to the Colonial Office in pursuit of her childhood ambition of working abroad as a civil servant in the Empire, sought referees and also put her name on the Overseas Scientific and Technical Register.
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Such appointments would have kept her out of politics. And when she did reach Llandudno, she found the conference more disappointing than the one at Blackpool which had so excited her (see
Chapter 3
). ‘The level of speaking was very low,’ she told Muriel,
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a view which may perhaps have been connected with the fact that, to her disappointment, she was not asked to speak for the motion which her association had submitted, calling for the retention of the special parliamentary seats for the universities and the City of London which Labour was pledged to abolish.

What did happen, though, is that the twenty-three-year-old Margaret fell in with an old Oxford mentor and friend, John Grant, a director of Blackwell’s the booksellers, and a man she looked up to: ‘I always enjoy talking with him. He’s quite the most mentally mature person of his age (34) that I know.’ At Llandudno, she had dinner with him on the Wednesday, and lunch and dinner with him on the Friday. On this last occasion, ‘we had a long discussion over personal and political affairs and a job for me. We went on talking until 2.30 am.’
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She discussed with Grant, among other things, the fact that she had no money to be a parliamentary candidate and that, because of this, she had not even tried to get on the party’s central list of approved candidates.
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John Grant was the man who that week gave Margaret the introduction which was to launch her political career. According to Margaret’s published account, at some point on the Friday Grant happened to be sitting next to John Miller, a builder who was the chairman of Dartford Conservative Association. Dartford, a Kent town by the Thames on the eastern fringes of London, was a strong Labour seat. Miller told Grant that the association was looking for a candidate because their existing one, a Major Grubb,
had withdrawn. Grant immediately recommended Margaret Roberts to Miller. Miller objected that ‘Dartford is a real industrial stronghold. I don’t think a woman would do at all,’
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but agreed that he and his wife Phee and their association’s Women’s Chairman should lunch with Grant and Margaret on Llandudno pier the next day (in that era, the party conference did not end until Saturday afternoon). The lunch took place and Margaret made a very favourable impression. Nothing definite seems to have emerged from it at the time. Indeed, in her full description of the conference in her letter to Muriel, Margaret makes no mention of the meeting with the Dartford dignitaries. But before the end of the year it had borne fruit.