The Iron Lady

Margaret Roberts, still only nineteen, acted as warm-up speaker at meetings before the Squadron Leader arrived. At one such meeting on 25 June, the Sleaford Gazette reported, ‘the very youthful Miss M. H. Roberts, daughter of Alderman A. Roberts of Grantham’, did not talk about agriculture, but spoke with precocious confidence about the need to punish Germany, to cooperate with both the Soviet Union and the United States, and to ‘stand by the Empire’ – as well as the importance of confirming Churchill in power. Having lost Roosevelt, she urged, the world could not afford to lose Churchill too.²⁸

If she expected Kendall to lose and Churchill to be returned, however, she was wrong on both counts. Kendall held Grantham by a huge majority while the Conservative Government was swept from office by a totally unanticipated Labour landslide. Miss Roberts was shocked by the result. ‘I simply could not understand how the electorate could do this to Churchill,’ she wrote.²⁹ She was still more shocked to find that others whom she had assumed to be right-thinking Conservatives were not equally dismayed but elated by the election of a Labour Government. She always had difficulty believing that otherwise decent people could genuinely hold opposite opinions to her own. Looking back over half a century she portrayed the 1945 election as the start of the rot which did not begin to be set right until she herself was elected in 1979.

Returning to Oxford for her third year she found a university transformed by returning servicemen, older than normal peacetime undergraduates, keen both to build a new world and to celebrate their own survival. Lady Thatcher claims to have enjoyed the seriousness of the new influx; but she also allowed herself to unbend slightly and enjoy a little of the new hedonism. ‘It was at this time’, she wrote in The Path to Power, ‘that I first went out to dances and even on occasion drank a little wine.’³⁰ She tried smoking, did not like it and decided to spend her money buying The Times every day instead. She went to the theatre. But she was not, so far as we know, tempted to act: nor did she develop any lasting interest in the theatre. What she did discover was a love of ballroom dancing, a taste which stayed with her, though rarely indulged, all her life.

But who did she dance with? There is no record that she had any serious male friends at Oxford, let alone a boyfriend. The fact is that her social life was wholly subordinated to politics. By her third year, despite competition from the returning servicemen, she was senior enough to stand for office within OUCA. She was first elected to be Secretary, in which capacity she attended a Conservative student conference in London; then Treasurer in the summer term; and finally President in Michaelmas 1946, when she went back to Oxford for a fourth year to take her B.Sc.

In her memoirs Lady Thatcher described her time at Oxford as an important period of intellectual foundation-building. Yet the only books she specifically mentions having read are Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, which was first published in 1944, and Who are ‘The People’? by the anti-socialist journalist Colm Brogan, published in 1943. Reading chemistry for her degree, rather than history or PPE (politics, philosophy and economics) like most aspiring politicians, she was not exposed to the discipline of sampling the whole spectrum of political thought; she was free to read only what she was likely to agree with. But if she did read The Road to Serfdom at this time, she also read Keynes’ seminal White Paper on Full Employment, published the same year. Many years later she produced a heavily annotated copy from her handbag to berate the young Tony Blair in the House of Commons.³¹ She made very little acknowledgement of Hayek’s influence over the next thirty years. But this is not surprising: she was always a gut politician, to whom intellectual arguments were no more than useful reinforcement. It is only retrospectively that she would like to claim an intellectual pedigree that was no part of her essential motivation.

Then, in early October 1946, she attended her first party conference, at Blackpool. She loved it. One of the sources of Mrs Thatcher’s strength in the 1980s was that – almost uniquely among Tory leaders – she was in tune with ordinary party members. That love affair began at Blackpool. Now she met for the first time the Tory rank and file en masse already reacting defiantly to the outrageous impositions of socialism. She was impressed by the sheer number of the representatives, disproving any idea that Conservatism was an extinct creed, and she felt that she was one of them.

From now on she was on the inside track. No one she met at Oxford directly helped her or advanced her career; but having been President of OUCA gave her a standing at Central Office which helped her on to the candidates’ list. What Oxford did not give her was a liberal education. She did not mix very widely or open herself to new views or experiences. She arrived in Oxford with her political views already settled and spent four years diligently confirming them. Undoubtedly her scientific training gave her a clarity and practicality of thought very different from the wishful woolliness of much arts and social science thinking. At the same time she read little or no history at university; and neither then nor later did she read much literature.

This amounted to more than a gap in cultural knowledge. More important, she did not receive the sort of education that delights in the diversity of different perspectives or might have exposed her to the wisdom of philosophic doubt. Her mind dealt in facts and moral certainties. She left Oxford, as she went up, devoid of a sense of either irony or humour, intolerant of ambiguity and equivocation. Her study of science at school and university chimed with her strict moral and religious upbringing and reinforced it, where a more liberal education in the arts or humanities might have encouraged her to question or qualify it. This rigid cast of mind was a source of unusual strength in Mrs Thatcher’s political career. But it was also a severe limitation, exacerbating a lack of imaginative sympathy with other views and life-experiences which ultimately restricted her ability to command support.

She left Oxford in the summer of 1947, a qualified research chemist. For the past year she had been working under Dorothy Hodgkin, trying to discover the protein structure of an antibiotic called Gramicidin B, using the same technique of passing X-rays through crystals that Professor Hodgkin had successfully applied to penicillin. As it happened Gramicidin B was more complicated than penicillin, and she failed to crack it. There was no discredit in this: success was not finally achieved until 1980. She was still awarded her degree, but it was not the degree she wanted. In the short run it was the only qualification she possessed: it was as a chemist that she must start her working life. But she had already set her mind on going into politics.

2 Young Conservative

Standing for Dartford

ONLY twenty-one and fresh down from university, Margaret Roberts at least had a marketable qualification. In her final term at Oxford she had signed on with the University Appointments Board. She attended a number of interviews with prospective employers before being taken on by a firm called BX Plastics, based at Manning-tree in Essex.

BX Plastics was a well-established company which developed new materials for such products as spectacle frames, raincoats and electrical insulation. During the war it had been taken over by Distillers; later, it was swallowed by the American Union Carbide Corporation, and finally by BP. In 1947 the company employed about seventy researchers. Margaret Roberts was one of ten graduates taken on that summer – three of them women, who were paid ?50 a year less than the men. (The men got ?400, the women ?350.) She had understood that she was going to be Personal Assistant to the Research and Development Director, but was disappointed to find herself just another laboratory researcher, working on surface tensions to develop an adhesive for sticking polyvinyl chloride (PVC) to wood or metal.

During the eighteen months she worked at BX Plastics she lived in digs ten miles away in Colchester. She lodged with a young widow, Enid Macaulay, at 168 Maldon Road. Another lodger, probably not by coincidence, was the secretary of the local Young Conservatives. The likelihood must be that the first thing Margaret did on coming to Colchester was to approach the YCs for help with finding accommodation. Mrs Macaulay, interviewed in the early 1980s, remembered two things about Miss Roberts: first that she was always very smartly turned out – ‘nice suits, nice blouses, nice gloves’; and second, her determination to be a politician. She was always busy with