Iron Lady

The Thatcher Years

Andrew John, Stephen Blake

• Publisher: Michael O'Mara
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781843179115
• eBook ISBN: 9781843179139
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Biografías políticas

Allowing you to uncover the woman behind the 'Iron Lady' image, 'Iron Lady: The Thatcher Years' takes a thorough at the life and times of Britain's longest-serving twentieth-century prime minister. As both the first woman to become leader of a European country and the first British premier to achieve re-election for three consecutive terms, Margaret Thatcher's has left behind a long and hugely important legacy. Reflecting on her life and character, from her early days growing up as the daughter of a Lincolnshire grocer, to her years as one of the most powerful and controversial of leaders, through to her iconographic status as an international statesman and thinker, this study is accompanied by a selection of quotes by and about this formidable woman.

LIFE BEFORE LEADERSHIP:

Margaret’s Road to Power

I had very little “privilege” in my early years.

1975

In 1925 John Logie Baird transmitted the first television broadcast from his laboratory; Al Capone took over the bootlegging racket in Chicago; Ben-Hur, costing a record-breaking $3.95 million to make, was released; the worst tornado in American history hit Illinois and Indiana. And, on 13 October, Margaret Hilda Roberts was born in Grantham, Lincolnshire, second daughter of Alfred and Beatrice Roberts.

Margaret’s father was a grocer who owned a corner shop on the Great North Road. Alfred had started out from a very poor background, and he brought his daughters up in the puritanical mould, with few luxuries and with the emphasis very much laid on hard work and parsimony. Most accounts of Margaret’s early days leave one with the image of a home run strictly in accordance with Victorian values, and of familial duties performed without question and with a great sense of obligation:

I was brought up by a Victorian Grandmother. We were taught to … prove yourself. We were taught self-reliance. We were taught to live within our incomes. We were taught that cleanliness is next to Godliness. We were taught self-respect. You were taught tremendous pride in your country. All of these things are Victorian values. They are perennial values.

Margaret’s mother, Beatrice Stephenson, was born at 10 South Parade in Grantham (it’s now number 55). She could hardly have thought that her ‘Number 10’ was a precursor to the Number 10, which would be occupied by her daughter from 1979 to 1990.

Alfred and Beatie – as he called Beatrice – had saved enough money to marry by 1917, and two years later they had taken out a mortgage on the North Parade premises that were to be his famous grocer’s shop, which was bought as a going concern.

Alfred was also to become a town councillor in Grantham, although his political affiliations were somewhat woolly: he has been described as a closet Conservative and a ‘moderate’ Labourite, as well as a Gladstonian Liberal. The way Margaret remembers it, you didn’t fight local council elections as a party member back then. It just wasn’t the done thing. Alfred stood as an independent – but, as his daughter acknowledged in later years, at heart he was a conservative:

My father would in earlier years probably have been a Liberal Party voter, but that was when the Liberals stood for small government and private-enterprise economics. For as long as I remember our family was true-blue Tory.

Alfred, just as his daughter would in 1979, achieved a political first: he became the town’s youngest alderman in 1943. He also became the mayor of Grantham in 1945.

Alfred was a fundamentalist when it came to religion. His religion was entirely Bible-based – and this, along with the religious nature of his wife, was to have a considerable influence on the future Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. He did not approve of popular protest, being a great believer in upholding authority, as evidenced by his attitude towards the Jarrow marchers in 1936, when, as Margaret Thatcher was to say in 1975, ‘He did not think that what they were doing was right.’ In the matter of collectivism, as in others, Margaret was to turn out to be very much her father’s daughter.

The Roberts family were Methodists, and Margaret was brought up with a very strong sense of duty: duty to one’s spiritual side, and duty to provide for oneself and for one’s family. Her upbringing contributed significantly to the development of her political philosophies, which emphasized the independence of the individual and the role of private charity, and which were opposed to socialism in all its many manifestations. Her family’s brand of Methodism helped to instil the notion that what a person did voluntarily with his money was his own affair, and that giving in this way was morally superior to any welfare system financed by the taxpayer. This notion was expressed in its most extreme – and controversial – form in the autumn of 1987, when Margaret pronounced that there was ‘no such thing as society’:

If children have a problem, it is [said to be] society that is at fault. There is no such thing as society. There is living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves.

Though this proved to be a highly inflammatory comment, providing a great deal of ammunition for her opponents, it was a indication of her deep belief in the role of the individual, which would become such a defining feature of Thatcherism.

In later years Margaret Thatcher famously – or perhaps infamously – appeared to discount her mother’s role when asked about her early family life. ‘I owe almost everything to my father,’ she once said. Even her Who’s Who entry described her simply as the ‘d. of Alfred Roberts, Grantham, Lincs’, omitting all mention of Beatrice. In November 1985, she was quizzed by Dr Miriam Stoppard on a Yorkshire Television programme, Woman to Woman. She seemed to want to sidestep any discussion of her mother, wishing instead to concentrate on her father. ‘Oh, Mummy backed up Daddy in everything,’ she told her interviewer. Dr Stoppard persisted in her questioning, but, for all her efforts, extracted only grudging comments. For instance, when she asked Mrs Thatcher about familial discussions on current affairs, all she would say was, ‘Mummy didn’t get involved in the arguments. She had probably gone out to the kitchen to get the supper ready.’

However, years later, she did indirectly acknowledge that she owes something to her mother’s housewifely skills. In her memoir, The Path to Power, she talks a little more about Beatrice, saying that she had learned from her ‘what it meant to cope with a househ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• PREFACE
• LIFE BEFORE LEADERSHIP: Margaret’s Road to Power
• LADY IN WAITING: Margaret Becomes a Leader of Men
• THE END OF WINTER: Margaret Steps into the Sunshine
• A QUESTION OF SOVEREIGNTY: Margaret Goes to War
• THE BATTLE FOR THE PITS: Margaret Takes On King Coal
• BRAVERY IN BRIGHTON: Margaret Survives the Assassin’s Bomb
• TARZAN AND THE FLYING MACHINES: Rifts in Margaret’s Cabinet
• TAXING TIMES: Margaret Defends the Indefensible
• END OF AN INNINGS: Margaret Makes a Tearful Exit
• THE MUMMY REMAINS: Margaret Battles On
• APPENDIX: Margaret’s Quotable Quotes
• A SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY