political activity of one kind or another, either with the YCs in Colchester or away at weekend conferences.1
When she was not away on Sundays, however, she kept up her religious observance. She attended the Culver Street Methodist Church and, as she had done at Oxford, joined other young people on missions to the surrounding villages. She may have preached: she is certainly remembered reading the lesson, with her too- perfect elocution. To her fellow Methodists in Colchester she appeared very grown up and sophisticated, more at ease with older people than she was with her contemporaries.
So far as we know she took no active steps to advance her political career. Though she attended weekend conferences, cultivated her contacts and practised her speaking, it was too soon to start looking for a constituency. She did not even apply to go on the Central Office list of prospective candidates. One would like to know what her imagined timetable was, how long she intended staying with BX Plastics before starting to read for the Bar, her next objective. As it was she had a lucky break. She attended the 1948 party conference at Llandudno – not as a representative from Colchester, but representing the Oxford University Graduates Association. An Oxford acquaintance introduced her to the chairman of the Dartford Conservative Association, John Miller, who happened to be looking for a candidate. This introduction changed her life.
Dartford had already been seeking a new candidate for a year. For twelve months Conservative Central Office had been sending lists of possible contenders, but Miller and his committee did not think much of any of them. Dartford, admittedly, was not an enticing prospect – though it was a good place for a first-time candidate to cut his teeth. It was a rock-solid Labour seat with a majority in 1945 of more than 20,000, and one of the largest electorates in the country, covering the three north Kent estuary towns of Dartford, Erith and Crayford. The local Association was run down, following ‘a succession of mediocre agents’.2 Miller, an energetic local builder, was determined to pull it round. He was initially doubtful about the idea of a woman candidate, taking the conventional view that a tough industrial constituency was no place for a woman. But he introduced Miss Roberts to other members of his delegation over lunch on Llandudno pier, and they were impressed. Miller could see that the novelty of a forceful young woman might be the shot in the arm his Association needed. She was invited to put her name forward. Meanwhile, Miller wrote again to Central Office mentioning her, but also requesting more names for consideration. They sent him another eleven, but agreed to see Miss Roberts if she would like to come into the office. She did, and ‘created an excellent impression’.3
Miller still tried to persuade a number of local businessmen to stand – among them a paint manufacturer named Denis Thatcher who had recently stood as a Ratepayers’ candidate for Kent County Council. ‘He came to my office in Erith and asked me to think about it,’ Denis recalled. ‘I said no without hesitating.’ Instead a slate of Central Office-approved hopefuls was interviewed in London in late December, from whom five were shortlisted for a run-off in Dartford at the end of January 1949. On 14 January the deputy area agent wrote to the deputy party chairman:
Although Dartford is not a good constituency for a woman candidate there is a possibility that Miss Margaret Roberts will be selected; her political knowledge and her speaking ability are far above those of the other candidates.4
The Dartford Executive agreed with the area agent. Miss Roberts was selected over four male rivals and recommended for adoption by the full Association four weeks later.
The same area agent attended the formal adoption meeting on 28 February and reported enthusiastically to Central Office that Miss Roberts had made a ‘brilliant’ speech attacking the Labour Government, and the decision to adopt her was unanimous.5 The meeting was also notable for Alfred’s presence on the platform – the first time that father and daughter had ever spoken from the same platform.
There is a piquant symbolism in Alfred’s presence at this meeting; also present that evening was Denis Thatcher. He was there as an ordinary member of the Association, but he was invited to supper afterwards to meet the candidate. Denis was then aged thirty-three, general manager of Atlas Preservatives, the family paint and chemicals business founded by his grandfather. During the war he had married a girl named Margaret (known as Margot) Kempson; but she was unfaithful while he was away fighting in Italy, and the marriage did not survive. He was now divorced, and openly looking to remarry. It seems that he was immediately struck by Margaret Roberts, who bore a startling resemblance to Margot. After supper he drove her back to London to catch the last train home to Colchester. This was the start of the relationship that became the anchor of her life. It developed gradually over the next two years; but it began that evening of her adoption meeting, which therefore marks the critical watershed of her career. She arrived, as it were, on her father’s arm: she left with her future husband. Her adoption for Dartford was thus the moment when she turned her back on Grantham. Oxford was an escape route; Colchester no more than an interlude. But though she did not go on to win Dartford she did put down roots, both political and personal, in suburban Kent. By marrying Denis Thatcher she embraced a Home Counties lifestyle. Of course Grantham remained in her blood, but for the next twenty-five years she steadily suppressed it.
Once adopted, Margaret threw herself into the constituency with total commitment. Though she could not seriously hope to win, she had been given an unexpected chance to make her name. She had at most fifteen months before the election to make an impact. First of all, though, she had to move nearer the constituency. So long as she was living and working in Essex she had a very awkward journey into London and out again to get to Dartford. But she could not afford to give up her job with BX Plastics until she had found a more convenient replacement; and this was not easy. She had several interviews, but found employers understandably reluctant to take on someone who made no secret of her political ambitions. Eventually she was taken on by the food manufacturers J. Lyons as a research chemist, working in Hammersmith.The job has usually been described as testing ice cream and pie-fillings, but Lady Thatcher writes in her memoirs that ‘there was a stronger theoretical side to my work there, which made it more satisfying than my position at BX had been’.6 Be that as it may – she was never very interested in theory – she stayed in pie-fillings scarcely longer than she had in plastics: less than two and a half years.
Three months after her adoption she was able to move to Dartford, where she stayed with a local Tory couple. For the next few months her routine was punishing. Commuting to London every day meant getting up before six to catch a bus to the station, a train to Charing Cross, then another bus to Hammersmith; the same in reverse when work finished, followed by an evening of canvassing or meetings, chauffeured around the large constituency by a rota of members; and, finally, speechwriting or other political homework late into the night. It was at this time in her life that she discovered, or developed, the ability to manage on only four hours’ sleep.
But Margaret Roberts was having more fun than she had ever had in her life before. She was in her element. She was busy, she had a mountain to climb and she was the leader. She led from the front, by exhortation and tireless example, and she was the centre of attention: not only local attention, but the first stirrings of national attention, drawn by the still-novel spectacle of a young woman hurling herself into politics. By sheer energy and enthusiasm she pulled a moribund constituency party up by its bootstraps.
Attlee called the General Election, exceptionally, in the middle of winter. Polling day was 23 February; the campaign was fought in miserably cold, wet weather. Miss Roberts’ energy, tackling a solid Labour stronghold in these conditions, won universal admiration. Whether or not she really believed it, she managed to persuade her supporters that she had a real chance of winning.
She fought on the slogan, unveiled at her formal adoption meeting on 3 February, ‘Vote Right to Keep What’s Left’ – six words which brilliantly encapsulated her message, simultaneously identifying the Conservatives with morality and Labour with ruin and decline. Of course she sounded the same themes as other Tory candidates up and down the country, urging lower taxes, lower public spending and incentives to enterprise in place of rationing and controls. But she expressed these routine prescriptions with unusual fundamentalism. Hayek may have been in her mind as she painted the election as a choice between two ways of life – ‘one which leads inevitably to slavery and the other to freedom’.While other Conservatives – particularly those who had been in the war – were anxious to blur such sharp distinctions, accepting that 1945 had shifted the political argument permanently to the left, Margaret Roberts made no such concession:
In 1940 it was not the cry of nationalisation that made this country rise up and fight totalitarianism. It was the cry of freedom and liberty.7
