Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (2 page)

It is fair to say that, when Lady Thatcher and I first discussed the project in 1997, she regarded it with the same lack of interest which she usually showed in her own past. Always keen to stick to whatever she had undertaken to do, she granted me several lengthy interviews, and was invariably co-operative. In later years, as her memory declined and long, formal interviews became impossible, she would join me for friendly lunches at which I would extract small nuggets of information from our chats. But what was extraordinary, when one compares it with the way male politicians so often pick over the tiny details of their past achievements, was that she never once urged me to take a particular line, or even inquired
what I intended to say about anything. Like all remarkable leaders, she had a great egotism. She always believed that she, and she alone, had rescued Britain from its post-1945 years of semi-socialist decline. She believed that the ‘-ism’ which derived from her married name would make a permanent difference to the story of human freedom. But she was not at all touchy, or even anxious, about what history might say about her.

This put her biographer in an unusual position. Most biographers working on a living subject have to deal with his or her intrusion, over-enthusiasm or hostility. It is difficult for them not to write in their subject’s shadow. I kept expecting to come under hers, but I never did. This gave me enormous freedom. On the other hand, Lady Thatcher’s lack of aptitude for this sort of work could make her a frustrating source. She could rarely advise me on whom I should talk to about X or where I might find Y. (Luckily, many of those close to her could.) She had turned the key in the lock for me, but seldom seemed to know what was in the room beyond. And when I interviewed her, she found it hard to understand that historical inquiry is not the same as political combat. Her tendency, when asked a question about her past – what her father’s political views had been, say, or whom she had known best at Oxford – was to rush from the particular to the general. On one occasion, I asked her a question about her mother’s occupations. She replied that her mother had been a good seamstress and ‘she did wonderful voluntary work. And that’s the thing about the women of Britain – they do wonderful voluntary work – not like French women,’ and before I could stop her, she had made her escape from an uncongenial private subject to the area of political generalization which she preferred. Often, when all I wanted was a simple piece of information, I would find myself treated to a disquisition on some great matter like the rule of law, unintentionally provoked by a chance word. Sometimes, when her blood was up, Lady Thatcher would decide to ignore altogether the fact that I was her biographer and would treat me as if I were one of those television interviewers, such as Robin Day, with whom she had jousted over the years. ‘You only say that because you’re a socialist!’ she might shout when she felt in a tight corner, though (as she well knew) I was never a socialist in my life. She had a way, as Alan Clark once noted, of ‘jumping the rails’ in conversation. This was fascinating to experience, but not easy for the historian.

For most of her career, Margaret Thatcher showed the same lack of interest in her own papers as in her life story. She was one of those tidy people who get a positive pleasure from throwing things away. She saw it as one of the housewifely virtues of which she was proud. Before any
general election, she made a point of clearing her desk in case she did not return to it. Whenever she moved house or office, which was fairly often, she threw away great piles of documents. She kept almost nothing from her childhood, and allowed a large number of family papers to be destroyed after her father died in 1970. Very little was retained from Oxford, or from early married life. As well as being uninterested in her own records, Mrs Thatcher was naturally secretive and guarded. She did not believe that others had a right to know about her life outside the public sphere. When, in the course of this work, I discovered more than 150 letters that Margaret had written to her sister Muriel between the end of the 1930s and the beginning of the 1960s, I learnt much more about her private life than had previously been revealed by all the other sources put together. She did keep some press cuttings of her early speeches, but tended to throw away things which she considered more personal. By her own account, she did not see the point of keeping many political papers while she was a young MP, or even when she was secretary of state for education, because ‘I just didn’t think I was going to be important.’ It was only when she stood for the party leadership in November 1974, winning it in February 1975, that she began to keep serious political files. This is attributable more to the fact that she had more people around to organize such things than to any interest of her own in keeping records.

Nor was Mrs Thatcher like those Victorian leaders who wrote voluminous diaries and recorded their thoughts in incessant letters to one another. She never kept a diary. She dashed off enormous numbers of letters (very rarely fully dated), often in her own hand, and with a warmth and charm which delighted the recipients, but these rarely revealed her thoughts in detail. Much more often, they were a few words of thanks, condolence or sympathy. They sometimes contained casual remarks which shed an interesting light on her views, but they almost never set out her reasoning on public questions at any length, or analysed her colleagues closely. She was interested in both these things, but felt safer expressing herself orally. Very occasionally, she put aside time to write her own private account of some important matter. The most striking of these, discussed in this volume, is her account of the Falklands War, which she wrote a year after the Argentine invasion. But, on the whole, the press of business and the fear of leaks reined in any desire she might have had to commit herself on paper. By far the most revealing written records of her political views are the notes she scribbled, as prime minister, on the vast volume of paper which poured across her desk. These were immediate reactions, to be picked up and interpreted by her private secretaries, normally seen by them alone. They
are full of her urgent, often angry style, punctuated more by exclamation marks than by full stops, and emphasized by heavy underlining. She wrote hardly any memos herself.

So Mrs Thatcher’s biographer finds himself examining a life unexamined by the person who lived it. To me, this makes the work more fascinating. In her story of constant activity, one tries to discern the great themes – the nature of her ambition, the foundations of her beliefs, the development of her political skills, her attitude to love, marriage and family, and her methods of rising and surviving as a woman in a world almost completely controlled by men. The fact that she was the first and only woman leader of a British political party made everything different. It is for this reason that I refer to her, throughout her public career, as ‘Mrs Thatcher’: that is what people called her, and the word ‘Mrs’ was very important in their minds. The attitudes of colleagues, rivals and voters towards her – and her approach to them – were radically affected by her sex. Her handbag became the sceptre of her rule. She hardly analysed any of this at all, but she lived it out, often in situations of high drama. My task is to tell this exciting story, and to try to explain – as she never did or wanted to or could – what lies behind it.

There is so much to tell that the biography requires two volumes. I decided that the obvious break which she made in her autobiography – her victory in the general election of 1979 – would be the wrong one. It would make volume two, which would have to contain the whole of her crowded time as prime minister, unnecessarily dense. The break comes, instead, with her victory in the Falklands War in 1982. This was the decisive experience which made her leadership unquestioned within her party. Because of it, she reached her zenith. It provides the natural, climactic moment with which to end the first half of her story.

Readers will see that, once Mrs Thatcher becomes prime minister, there is no easy way to organize the narrative. This is always a problem with the lives of people acting simultaneously in different fields. In many ways, it is preferable to try to tell the story purely chronologically. In politics, as in life, one thing leads to another. It is also valuable, in rendering the life of a prime minister, to show how disparate events cut across one another – a terrorist attack, a bad by-election and a run on the pound may happen all on the same day, and the occupant of 10 Downing Street must deal with all of them at once. In general, I have followed this method. But there are times when a particular subject is so intense, and so separated from the ordinary run of other events, that it has to be treated in a separate chapter. In this volume, I have treated Northern Ireland, the Cold War and the Falklands in this way.

I am also conscious, in writing volume one, that volume two will follow. There are some themes which, though already present in the period covered in the first volume, became more important later. To avoid duplication, therefore, I have given rather little space in volume one to privatization and to Mrs Thatcher’s dealings with intelligence. Both of these will be discussed more fully in volume two. The same applies to what might be called the myth of Margaret Thatcher. She became a hate-figure to the left, a heroine to the right, and a leader of immense prestige abroad, particularly in the United States and Eastern Europe. This, too, will be dealt with more fully in the second volume.

Although I have spent my career in journalism, following politics closely, I must admit that I often find political biography dull. The amount of detail can seem disproportionate to the rather moderate interest of the character whose life is related. In the life of Margaret Thatcher, the amount of detail is huge, but the interest of the character does not fail. In the reaction to her death, it has intensified. She is someone about whom it is almost impossible to be neutral. People are fascinated, appalled, delighted by her. Many think she saved Britain, many that she destroyed it. The only thing that unites them is their interest. As she passes from current controversy into history, this interest is undimmed. Mrs Thatcher is becoming a national archetype round whom argument will forever swirl, like Henry VIII, or Elizabeth I, or Nelson, or Winston Churchill. And because of her sex, her beliefs and her character, she is also a global archetype – a leader against whom all others are measured: for some, a cautionary tale, for others, a lodestar.

  
1.
Margaret Robert’s with her father,
c
. 1927. (©
Manchester Daily Express
/Science & Society Picture Library)

  
2.
Margaret Roberts’s mother, Beatrice Stephenson, as a young woman. (© Lady Thatcher. Reproduced with permission from
www.margaretthatcher.org
, the website of the Margaret Thatcher Foundation)

  
3.
Margaret Roberts aged nine, from the class of 1934 at Huntingtower Elementary School. (© Rex Features)

  
4.
Exterior of the Roberts family shop in Grantham. (©
Manchester Daily Express
/Science & Society Picture Library)

  
5.
Margaret Roberts among the girls who matriculated from Somerville College, Oxford, 1943. (With permission of the Principal and Fellows of Somerville College, © Gillman and Soame)

  
6.
Tony Bray outside the Radcliffe Camera. (By kind permission of Tony Bray)

  
7.
Margaret Roberts at the wedding breakfast of Shirley Ellis, Grantham, 1947. (By kind permission of Shirley Ellis)

  
8.
Tony Bray as an army officer. (By kind permission of Tony Bray)

  
9.
Margaret plays piano in the Bull Inn, Dartford, 1949. (© Hulton Deutsch/Corbis)

10.
Margaret the scientist at J. Lyons, 1950. (© Chris Ware/Keystone Features/Getty Images)

11.
Margaret Roberts’s first election address, Dartford, 1950. (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Conservative Party Archive, Shelfmark: PUB 229/9/5)

12.
With Lord Woolton, Westminster, 1951. (© PA/PA Archive/Press Association Images)

13.
Margaret as bridesmaid at her sister Muriel’s wedding, April 1950. (By kind permission of Jane Cullen)

14.
Robert Henderson, Buckingham Palace, 1957. (By kind permission of the Henderson family)

15.
Margaret Roberts with handbag at a Dartford fête, 1951. (© Ullsteinbild/Topfoto)

16.
Letter from Margaret to Muriel, 1951. (By kind permission of Andrew Cullen)

17.
Letter from Margaret to Muriel about Denis Thatcher, 1949. (By kind permission of Andrew Cullen)

18.
Denis Thatcher and Margaret Roberts after their engagement, 1951. (© Topfoto)

19.
Denis and Margaret’s wedding reception, December 1951. (© Alpha Press)

20.
Married love, 1957. (By kind permission of Jane Cullen)

21.
With infants Mark and Carol, August 1953. (©
Daily Mail
/Rex Features)

22.
Seeing Mark and Carol off to school, 1959. (© Barratt’s/S&G Barratts/EMPICS Archive)

23.
Gardening at Dormers, 1959. (PA Photos 1663252 © PA/PA Archive/Press Association Images)

24.
At home with Mark and Carol, 1961. (© Popperfoto/Getty Images)

25.
The new member for Finchley arrives at Westminster, October 1959. (© Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

26.
Mrs Thatcher in front of Big Ben, 1961. (© Popperfoto/Getty Images)

27.
With John Boyd-Carpenter, 1961. (© Keystone/Getty Images)

28.
‘Women About the House’,
Sunday Times Magazine
photo story, June 1964. (© Snowdon/Camera Press)

29.
Margaret plays the piano to her family, June 1970. (© Ian Showell/Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

30.
Mrs Thatcher as Secretary of State for Education, the London American School, 1971. (© Popperfoto/Getty Images)