The Iron Lady

so neither was at home in mid-October; but she was having problems with Denis, who seems to have undergone some sort of mid-life crisis in 1964. This was first disclosed in Carol’s biography of her father, published in 1996, and we only know what little she reveals. It appears that he was working too hard, partly because Atlas Preservatives was under-capitalised and struggling to survive, and he worried that not only his own family but the life savings of his mother, sister and two aunts depended on its continuing success. To someone as robust as Margaret, the idea of Denis having a nervous breakdown must have been alarming. She must have worried about the implications for herself and the twins if he were seriously ill. Not that he did not thoroughly support her ambition. On the contrary, the decision he took, after pondering the direction of his life on safari in southern Africa, to sell the family firm was not only intended to secure his family’s future but represented a deliberate subordination of his career to hers. He was nearly fifty; she was not yet forty. He had done as much as he could with Atlas; he had been warned that he needed to slow down if he was not to kill himself. She was well launched on a trajectory which, win or lose in 1964, might reasonably be expected to lead to the Cabinet within ten years. So he made his decision. But he did not discuss it with Margaret until it was a fait accompli.¹⁷

In fact, the sale of Atlas to Castrol turned out very well for Denis. According to Carol it realised ?530,000, of which his personal share was just ?10,000. But other accounts suggest that it was worth very much more than that. In practice the sale of his family firm made Denis a millionaire. Secondly, instead of narrowing his responsibilities it widened them. Denis had expected to carry on running Atlas for Castrol, but now as an employee without the stress of ultimate responsibility. To his surprise Castrol offered him a place on the board, with salary and car to match. (The car was a Daimler with a personalised number plate, DT3.) When, just a few years later, Castrol in turn merged with Burmah Oil, Denis did very well in terms of share options and once again was invited on to the board. From being the overworked chairman of an insecure paint and fertiliser business, Denis spent the last decade of his working life as a highly paid executive in the oil industry, which in turn left him well placed to pick up lucrative non-executive directorships after his retirement.

4 Opposition

Shadow boxing

FOR the next six years Margaret Thatcher was the Conservative Opposition’s maid of all work. Between 1964 and 1970 she held six different portfolios – three as a junior spokeswoman, successively on pensions, housing and economic policy, and three as a member of the Shadow Cabinet, shadowing Power, Transport and finally Education. When the Conservatives returned to power in 1970 she was confirmed in the last department. But in the meantime she had been given an unusually wide experience of shadow responsibilities which stood her in excellent stead as Prime Minister two decades later, going some way to compensate for her relatively narrow ministerial experience. Though her average tenure of each portfolio was less than a year she did nothing by halves, but always thoroughly mastered each one before moving on.

When in July 1965 Alec Douglas-Home announced his resignation of the Tory leadership, Mrs Thatcher was ‘stunned and upset’. It is a measure of her isolation from Westminster gossip that she claims to have had no inkling that Sir Alec was coming under pressure to step down, allegedly orchestrated by supporters of Ted Heath. ‘I never ventured into the Smoking Room so I was unaware of these mysterious cabals until it was too late.’¹ Her exclusion was partly a function of her sex, but also reflected her compartmentalised life and her nose-to-the-grindstone view of politics. Harder to explain is why she was so upset. Much as she admired Sir Alec, he was clearly not cut out to be Leader of the Opposition; the party needed a more aggressive and modern style of leadership to wrest the political initiative back from Labour and rethink its policies. She had known Heath since their time as candidates in adjacent Kentish seats in 1949 – 51. They had spoken on one another’s platforms, but they had not become close and their acquaintance, as she later put it, ‘had never risked developing into friendship’.² They were in truth very similar people – from similar social backgrounds, both humourless, single-minded and ambitious. But Mrs Thatcher disguised her ambition with a cloak of femininity: her manners were impeccable and she responded to a certain style of masculine gallantry. Heath had a curt manner and made no pretence at gallantry; long before he had any special cause to dislike Margaret Thatcher he was uncomfortable with her type of Tory lady, with her immaculate clothes, pearls, hats and gushing manner. So until she forced herself on his attention he barely noticed her. What attracted her to his standard – and kept her loyal for nine years, despite a personal relationship that never became warm – was respect for his seriousness of purpose, which matched her own. She evidently did not consider backing Enoch Powell, the leading advocate of free-market economics, who was then regarded as a fringe eccentric, but voted for Heath, who beat Maudling by 150 votes to 133, with Powell taking just 15.

Though elected as a new broom, Heath initially felt obliged, with an election possible at any moment, to retain all his predecessor’s Shadow Cabinet. But in October he did reshuffle his front bench. Margaret Thatcher was delighted to be switched at last from Pensions and National Insurance (which she had been doing in and out of office for four years) to shadow Housing and Land.

Wilson was only biding his time before calling a second election in March 1966 which the Tories, even with a new leader, had no hope of winning. In Finchley, Mrs Thatcher did her best to project enthusiasm. But privately she was critical of Heath’s prosaic manifesto. Her own address led on the fundamental theme that every action of the Labour Government increased the power of the state over the citizen. Conservative philosophy was the opposite: ‘The State was made for Man, not Man for the State.’³

The result was never in doubt. Though her vote actually fell slightly, Mrs Thatcher was one of only three Tories to increase her majority, with Labour pushing the Liberals back into third place:

Nationally Labour won a landslide, with a majority of nearly a hundred. The Tories were condemned to another five years of opposition. With the certainty of a long haul ahead, Heath reshuffled his team, taking the chance to drop several of the older hands. There was some discussion of putting Mrs Thatcher in the Shadow Cabinet. Jim Prior, then Heath’s PPS, remembers suggesting her as the statutory woman. There was a long silence. ‘Yes,’ he said.‘Willie [Whitelaw, the Chief Whip] agrees she’s much the most able, but he says once she’s there we’ll never be able to get rid of her. So we both think it’s got to be Mervyn Pike.’⁴

Actually, the idea of a statutory woman was a new one. There had not been a woman in a Tory Cabinet since Florence Hors-burgh in 1954, nor in the Shadow Cabinet since the party went into opposition. But Wilson had included Barbara Castle in his first Cabinet in 1964 and promoted her the following year. If the Tories had to be seen to follow suit, Margaret Thatcher was a more obvious counterpart to Mrs Castle than the much gentler Mervyn Pike. Whitelaw’s preference for keeping Mrs Thatcher down for a little longer suggests that she was already seen as an uncomfortable colleague. Iain Macleod, however, had spotted her potential and specifically asked for her in his shadow Treasury team. Heath agreed. She became Treasury and Economic Affairs spokeswoman, outside the Shadow Cabinet but in some respects better placed to make a mark than she would have been inside it.

This was one of the very few periods in Mrs Thatcher’s career when she operated as a team player, contributing her own particular expertise as a tax lawyer to a delegated effort, opposing the Labour Government’s Selective Employment Tax. She clearly found it a liberating experience. When her own time came to lead she was not so good at delegating, yet she copied much of Macleod’s method of working.

At the party conference in Blackpool in October Mrs Thatcher had the opportunity of replying to a debate on taxation. She spent nine hours preparing her speech, and was rewarded with her ‘first real conference success’.⁵ ‘Thoroughly relaxed,’ the Daily Telegraph enthused, ‘she banged out sentences with the elusive rhythm some of her peers find it so hard to achieve.’⁶ The still pre-Murdoch Sun hailed a new star under the headline, ‘A Fiery Blonde Warns of the