Thatcher's Britain

The Politics and Social Upheaval of the Thatcher Era

Richard Vinen

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781847392091
• eBook ISBN: 9781471128288
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Britain's first female prime minister remains a political figure of almost mythical proportions. Margaret Thatcher divided a political nation, became a cultural icon, and was the longest-serving prime minister of the twentieth century. Her period in government coincided with extraordinary changes in British society and in Britain's place in the world. Thatcher's Britaintells the story of Thatcherism for a generation with no personal memories of the 80s, as well as for those who want to revisit the polemics of their youth. It seeks to rescue Thatcher from being seen as John the Baptist for Tony Blair, stresses that Thatcherism was not a timeless phenomenon, but rooted in the 70s and 80s, and focuses our attention away from her legend, to what her government actually did during this tumultuous period in British history.

Chapter 1 THATCHER BEFORE THATCHERISM, 1925–75

There is… the sheer romance of it, which will remain alive for generations of readers in the wider world who may know little of late twentieth-century British politics and care even less. A woman from the provincial lower-middle class, without family connections, oratorical skills, intellectual standing or factional backing of any sort, established herself as leader of a great party which had represented hierarchy, social stratification and male dominance.

Alfred Sherman (adviser to Margaret Thatcher)¹

I seem to have done very little in thirty years.

Margaret Thatcher, March 1956²

Margaret Thatcher did not share the fascination with her petit-bourgeois origins that was felt by so many of her admirers and enemies. The volume of her memoirs dealing with her time in Downing Street was published before that dealing with her life up to 1979. No doubt this was partly due to decisions taken by publishers and literary agents, but the order also reflects a feeling that Margaret Thatcher’s early life made sense only when seen through the prism of her later career. Thatcher herself seems to have found the young Margaret Roberts to be an inscrutable figure. In her autobiography she thanks her ‘memoirs team’ for their skill in unearthing ‘all the multifarious files where little bits of modern lives are written down and stored away³ – as though her researchers had discovered a person previously unfamiliar to the adult Margaret Thatcher.

During her early years in parliament, Margaret Thatcher was usually seen as a typical Conservative lady. Her clothes, voice, pearls and general air of strained formality seemed to belong to the world of the garden party and the summer fête. An American diplomat who met her in 1973 described her as ‘an almost archetypical, slightly to the Right-of-center Tory whose views are strongly influenced by her own middle-class background and experience’. It was clear that ‘middle class’ in this context meant ‘upper-middle class’ – the meeting had taken place over lunch at the Connaught Hotel.⁴

When she ran for the leadership of the Conservative Party in 1975, Thatcher’s campaign team paraded her humble origins precisely because these origins seemed to run against the popularly held view of their candidate. One member of that campaign team – George Gardiner MP – subsequently published a biography of Margaret Thatcher.⁵ It was one of the first full-length biographies; it was also, at least for a long time, the last book that was written by an author who had full access to Margaret Thatcher and to other members of her family.⁶ Gardiner portrayed Margaret Roberts as the hard-working daughter of a Methodist grocer from the Lincolnshire town of Grantham. Grantham was almost turned into a brand name by Thatcher’s associates. Thatcher’s son was to name the enterprise at the centre of his business operations after his mother’s birthplace.⁷ But Margaret Thatcher rarely went back after she left home at the age of eighteen. Many of her ministers had, or at least affected to have, a visceral attachment to the area in which they had been born. Thatcher was never really happy anywhere except central London – for all her allegedly ‘suburban’ qualities, she regarded the retirement home that she and her husband briefly owned in Dulwich as being too remote.

Subsequent discussion of Thatcher was to make so much of the vices, or virtues, that she had allegedly acquired from her upbringing that it is sometimes hard to dig the real experience out from under the weight of subsequent mythology. Thatcher did not mention either her mother or her sister in her Who’s Who entry. This provoked one Labour MP to build a psycho biography around Thatcher’s alleged abnormality in this respect.⁸ But Thatcher’s memoirs contain a convincing account of her grief at her mother’s death. Equally, most historians have underlined Thatcher’s close relations with her father and the extent to which his example inspired her subsequent career. However, the precise details of Thatcher’s relations with her father were rewritten in successive accounts. In one interview she expressed pleasure at the fact that her father had lived to see her on the government front bench.⁹ In fact, as she recalls in her memoirs, he had died several months before she entered the cabinet.

Margaret Roberts was born in 1925. She was the second daughter of Beatrice, a seamstress who had run her own business before marriage, and Alfred, a tall good-looking man whose one indulgence seems to have been smoking, and who had been excluded from military service during the Great War on account of his poor eyesight. Alfred Roberts became manager of a grocery, and he saved enough money to buy his own shop in 1919. He was a devout Methodist and a well-known lay preacher. He was also a local politician. He had been a Liberal and was elected to Grantham Town Council as an Independent, though he seems to have been recognized as a functional Conservative by the time he became Mayor of Grantham in 1945. Certainly the Labour Party, which took control of Grantham Town Council in 1952, saw him as an opponent and ended his career as an alderman.

As John Campbell has shown, presenting the Roberts family as simply belonging to the ‘provincial lower-middle class’ ignores some important details. For one thing, Alfred Roberts was a good deal more prosperous by the 1930s than the average shopkeeper; he eventually bought two shops and employed several people. The gap between him and his neighbours was all the more marked because the Roberts family did not strictly speaking live in Grantham but in Little Gonerby, a working-class area built around a brewery. Alfred Roberts’ political career also brought him into contact with other local notables – some of rather patrician background. The notion of Alfred Roberts as a sturdy exponent of free enterprise is also slightly misleading. His shop was a sub-post office and consequently, in a small way, an agency of the state.¹⁰

Margaret was a bright child and her father, who regretted his own lack of schooling, devoted great effort to her education. He sent her to the state elementary school in Huntingtower Road, which was said to be better than the school that was nearer to her house. In 1936 Margaret won a place at Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ Grammar School. Grammar schools were to play an important part in Thatcherite mythology, but Thatcher did not belong to the post-war generation of grammar school children who enjoyed free places courtesy of the Butler Education Act (1944). She went to grammar school in an age when parents were still required to pay, though the fees were more modest than they would have been at a private school. KGGGS took some girls from quite humble backgrounds on scholarships, but Thatcher was privileged by the standards of the school, and of Grantham more generally. She was always well dressed and, perhaps the result of being a grocer’s daughter at a time of rationing, better fed than most of her contemporaries.¹¹

A girls’ grammar school in the late 1930s was a good place to be educated. It was one of the few institutions in which young women could escape from male condescension. No one seems to have suggested that Margaret Roberts should study subjects ‘appropriate for a girl’ or to have objected to her decision to specialize in science. Economic depression had driven bright graduates who needed secure jobs into the teaching profession. Male casualties in the First World War had increased the number of spinsters who, like Muriel Sparks’s Miss Jean Brodie, lived their lives through the girls whom they taught, and girls’ schools, unlike those for boys, did not lose their youngest teachers to the armed forces during the Second World War.

In 1943 Margaret Roberts left home to read chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford. Oxford has educated twenty-five British prime ministers, including all the graduate prime ministers who took office in the second half of the twentieth century. Thatcher was not, however, the usual Oxford undergraduate. She was a woman in a male-dominated institution. She was a scientist in a university notable for its emphasis on the arts. Most of all, her university career began at a time when a large proportion of her male contemporaries were away fighting in the war. Her Oxford was one of black-outs and rationing rather than balls and punting.

Margaret Roberts was not a well-known Oxford figure. The only important political friend she made at Oxford was Edward Boyle, who was later to be her boss when she was a junior minister at the Department of Education in the 1960s and with whom she was to remain on good terms in spite of their differences. Julian Critchley, who came up to Oxford in the early 1950s, recalls: ‘The talk… was of great men who had just gone down, Robin Day, Peter Kirk, Jeremy Thorpe and Ken Tynan. Shirley Caitlin, later Williams, was talked of as Britain’s first woman Prime Minister. No one mentioned Margaret Roberts.’¹²

Thatcher’s relationship with Oxford was notoriously difficult.¹³ The university refused to grant Margaret Thatcher an honorary degree (a distinction conferred on all previous Oxonian prime ministers). When she became prime minister, dons made much of her apparently mediocre academic record; her former tutor insisted that Margaret Roberts had been an unremarkable student. Thatcher’s intellectual attainments generally were to be a subject of much discussion for the rest of her career. Her enemies derided her as a philistine of vulgar tastes who was interested only in knowledge that had some economic utility. There was much amusement when she told an interviewer that she was ‘rereading Frederick Forsyth’s The Fourth Protocol’.¹⁴ Even her closest associates often implied that there was something deficient, or at least strange, in her intellect or education.’¹⁵

Yet occasionally we see glimpses of a very different kind of mind at work in Margaret Thatcher. She knew a great deal of poetry and had a special affection for Kipling, an unfashionable taste that she shared with George Orwell and Antonio Gramsci. She could be deeply affected by books such as Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago or Harold Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind.¹⁶ She disliked the poems of T. S. Eliot (the mere willingness to express dislike suggests that poetry mattered to her), but Anthony Powell overheard her talking about Helen Gardner’s study of The Four Quartets.¹⁷ Her interest in science was not purely utilitarian. She took pride in Britain’s record of scientific achievement (particularly the number of Nobel prizes that its citizens had won) and, as secretary of state for science and education, she defended ‘blue skies research’. Thatcher sometimes expressed disdain for ‘intellectuals’,¹⁸ but she had a high, perhaps excessive, regard for ‘first-class minds’.

Margaret Thatcher’s last year at Oxford coincided with the return of the generation of men who had fought in the war. Almost the first political association she joined after graduating was called the ‘39 to 45’ club. Throughout her career, Thatcher was to come up against men who had had ‘a good war’. Especially when she was accused of having ‘usurped’ patriotism during the Falklands War of 1982, her opponents were to make much of her comparatively inactive role during the Second World War. David Ennals, a Labour MP who opposed British intervention in the Falklands and who perhaps anticipated the fact that he was to be swept away in the Conservative landslide of 1983, pointedly reminded her that he had been ‘storming up the beaches of Normandy’ in the summer of 1944.

In the 1940s and 1950s the war pervaded politics in ways that made it all the more difficult for a woman who wanted to have a political career. Candidates campaigned in uniform and evoked their experiences of war at every opportunity.¹⁹ Thatcher’s first experience of elections came when she supported Squadron Leader Worth in Grantham in 1945. Her own attempts to become a candidate for a winnable Conservative seat brought her into competition with a succession of decorated heroes. At Beckenham her rivals included Major Ian Fraser MC. At Hemel Hempstead she lost out to Lieutenant Colonel Allason. At Finchley the two other names on the shortlist from which Thatcher finally emerged victorious were, respectively, a holder of the Military Cross and a former member of the Special Operations Executive.

How did Margaret Thatcher herself look back on the war and how did it shape her politics? Sharp-eyed observers noted that Thatcher’s references to the Second World War tended to concentrate on one year of the conflict: 1940.²⁰ Time and again, Margaret Thatcher was to refer to Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and, most of all, our ‘finest hour’, a phrase that Churchill had used in a speech of 18 June 1940.²¹ This focus on one year and, more particularly, on the months between May and September might be explained in all sorts of ways. It focused attention on a war that had been fought by a small group of men under the leadership of Winston Churchill and centred on the south of England. It avoided much reference to the large-scale industrial mobilization that came later in the war. It emphasized Britain ‘alone’. In spite of her Atlanticist sympathies, Thatcher made little reference to the American role in the war. The Soviet Union was even more conspicuous by its absence – indeed the focus of her speeches on the early part of the war sometimes went with an emphasis on the fates of Finland²² and Poland,²³ both countries that raised embarrassing questions about Soviet behaviour.

Thatcher’s ‘memory’ of the Second World War was, like many aspects of her public personality, partly constructed by other people. Some of the ‘Churchillian’ references that so annoyed Thatcher’s enemies had, in fact, been inserted into her speeches by advisers and ghostwriters.²⁴ The most systematic attempt to separate the ‘good’ war of Churchillian patriotism from the ‘bad’ war of increasing state power was made by Nigel Lawson.²⁵ Some of Thatcher’s opponents also developed their own particular interpretation of the Second World War. They emphasized mass mobilization, working-class participation and plans for a new social order that were drawn up in 1943 and 1944. The phrase ‘people’s war’, coined by the eccentric Communist soldier Tom Wintringham, was used frequently by the Left during the 1980s. Wintringham became an object of interest partly because his ideas could be used to attack the defence policy of the Thatcher government.²⁶

The notion that Thatcher herself tried to rewrite the history of British participation in the Second World War to suit her political project is unfair. In public, she spoke respectfully of wartime projects for a new social order; indeed she was ostentatiously respectful towards the memory of the wartime leaders of the Labour Party, partly because she found it useful to contrast them with the supposedly lesser men who led the party later. She even occasionally spoke in terms that seemed very close to those who talked of a ‘people’s war’.²⁷

It is true, however, that Thatcher focused most on the exploits of airmen and soldiers in 1940, rather than the more large-scale mobilization tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Thatcher before Thatcherism, 1925–75
• Chapter 2: Thatcherism before Thatcher? Enoch Powell
• Chapter 3: Becoming Leader
• Chapter 4: Opposition, 1975–9
• Chapter 5: Primitive Politics, 1979–83
• Chapter 6: Unexpected Victory: the Falklands
• Chapter 7: Victory Foretold: the Miners
• Chapter 8: Serious Money, 1983–8
• Chapter 9: Divided Kingdom?
• Chapter 10: Europe
• Chapter 11: The Fall
• Conclusions
• Some Thoughts on Sources
• About the Author
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright