Of course, she did not win, yet such was the enthusiasm of her campaign that her agent persuaded himself that she had an even chance. In reality the mountain was far too steep for her:
But Miss Roberts had cut Dodds’ majority by a third and won herself golden opinions. After such a successful blooding there could be little doubt that she would get a winnable constituency before long. Her problem was that nationally the Conservatives had almost, but not quite, overturned Labour’s 1945 majority. Attlee survived with an overall majority of just five. This meant that there was likely to be another election very soon, making it difficult for candidates like Margaret Roberts to seek greener pastures.
Marriage to Denis
Margaret Roberts’ first parliamentary campaign must have done wonders for her self-confidence. She knew now that she was on her way.With her course firmly set, she could begin to equip herself professionally for the career that lay within her grasp. Testing pie-fillings was no preparation for the House of Commons. As soon as the 1950 election was out of the way she applied to the Inns of Court to start reading for the Bar. She gave up her digs in Dartford and rented a flat in Pimlico. Instead of commuting daily to Hammersmith and returning to Dartford every evening to canvass, she could now devote her evenings to the law, visiting the constituency only when required. She did not really believe that one more push would win it. Yet she was still more visible than most candidates in hopeless seats.
Living in London also enabled her to see more of Denis Thatcher, who drove down to Atlas Preservatives each day from Chelsea. Since their first meeting on the night of her adoption, their relationship had developed slowly. Margaret had little time for social life in the eleven months up to the election; moreover, they were commuting every day in opposite directions. It was ‘certainly not’, she later insisted, love at first sight.8
Margaret and Denis were not an obviously well-matched couple: they had very few interests or enthusiasms in common. Yet at the time they met each was exactly what the other was looking for. Denis was thirty-three in February 1949. He had been deeply hurt by the failure of his first marriage. He wanted to marry again before he got too old, but was wary of making another mistake. What he liked about Margaret Roberts, on top of her looks, her energy and her youthful optimism, was her formidable practicality. She was not a girl who was going to make a mess of her life, or complicate his with feminine demands. Dedicated to her own career, she would leave him space to get on with his. She too was ready to get married, on her own terms. Hitherto she had never had much time for boyfriends. She had male friends – indeed, she preferred the company of men to women – but they were political associates with whom she talked and argued, rather than kissed. She always preferred men older than herself.
Though she had made a great impact in Dartford as a single woman, Alfred Bossom – leader of the Kent Conservatives and something of a mentor at this time – advised her that to advance her career she really should be married. Moreover, in sheer practical terms, marriage would enable her to give up her unrewarding job and concentrate fully on law and politics.
At the same time her practicality disguised a romantic side to her nature. At the height of her political power Mrs Thatcher was notoriously susceptible to a certain sort of raffish charm and displayed a surprising weakness for matinee-idol looks. Denis did not have these exactly, but he was tall (which she liked), upright and bespectacled (like her father, though Denis was more owlish). He had fought in the war and retained a military manner, at once slangy, blunt and self-deprecating. As managing director of his family firm he was comfortably off, drove a fast car and had his own flat in Chelsea. In the still grey and rationed world of 1950 he had, as she writes in her memoirs, ‘a certain style and dash… and, being ten years older, he simply knew more of the world than I did’.9 But she would not have fallen for a playboy. It was his work that took Denis round the world, and she admired that. She was a great believer in business, and export business in particular. Atlas Preservatives was just the sort of company on which British economic recovery depended. Beneath his bluff manner, Denis was a serious businessman of old-fashioned views and a moral code as rigorous as her own. He was much more relaxed about politics than she was, but he shared her principles and embodied them in practice. It was not an accident that politics brought them together.
Thus they complemented one another perfectly. While each answered the other’s need for security and support, each also appreciated the other’s self-sufficiency. Both were dedicated to their own careers, which neither ever curtailed for the other – not Margaret when their children were young, nor Denis when she became a Cabinet Minister.
Only once, around 1964, did Margaret’s growing political prominence strain Denis’s tolerance near to breaking point. For the most part he accepted, in a way remarkable for a man of conservative views born in 1915, the equality – and ultimately far more than equality – of his wife’s career with his own. In this he was indeed ‘an exceptional man’.10 Needing a husband, Margaret chose shrewdly and exceedingly well. Marriage to Denis was the rock of her career.
He actually proposed in September 1951. He says he made up his mind while on holiday in France with a male friend. ‘During the tour I suddenly thought to myself “That’s the girl”… I think I was intelligent enough to see that this was a remarkable young woman.’11 She claims that she ‘thought long and hard about it. I had so much set my heart on politics that I hadn’t figured marriage in my plans.’12 Be that as it may, she accepted. But the 1951 General Election came first. Attlee went to the country again in October. Miss Roberts – for the last time under that name – threw herself back into electioneering. It can have done her no harm that Central Office leaked the news of her engagement the day before polling. But of course the seat was still impregnable. She took another thousand votes off Dodds’ majority. More important, the Tories were narrowly returned to power (on a minority of the national poll). Just seven weeks later Miss Roberts became the second Mrs Thatcher.
The wedding, on 13 December, emphasised the bride’s new life in the Home Counties rather than her Midland roots. She was married in London, in the Wesleyan Chapel, City Road – ‘the Westminster Abbey of the Methodist Church’13 – but this was mainly because Denis, as a divorced man, could not remarry in an Anglican church. Alfred thought the ceremony ‘half-way to Rome’,14 and from now on Margaret increasingly identified herself with the Established Church. She did not even wear white, but a brilliant blue velvet dress with a matching hat decorated spectacularly with ostrich feathers, a replica of the dress worn by Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, in Gainsborough’s painting.
Typically, the honeymoon combined holiday with work – a few days in Madeira sandwiched between business trips to Portugal and Paris. It was Margaret’s first experience of foreign travel, but she never had much time for holidays; she was almost certainly impatient to get back to start homemaking, passing her Bar exams and looking for another seat. On their return she moved into Denis’s flat in Swan Court, Flood Street, Chelsea, just off the King’s Road, and began life as Margaret Thatcher. With marriage accomplished, she told Miriam Stoppard many years later, ‘this was the biggest thing in one’s life now sorted out’.15
Motherhood and law
After the precocious triumphs of her two Dartford candidacies, Margaret Thatcher’s career was stalled for the next six years. Just when she had made such a spectacular beginning, marriage and then motherhood took her abruptly out of the political reckoning. In the long run, marriage set her up, both emotionally and financially: Denis’s money gave her the security and independence to dedicate her life to politics. But in the short run it set her back five years.
Not that she became a housewife: far from it. But she was obliged to concentrate her energies on her secondary ambition – to become a lawyer – while putting her primary political goal temporarily on hold. She was forced – reluctantly – to sit out the 1955 General Election. Not until 1958 was she able to secure a winnable constituency from which to resume her march on Westminster. Frustrating though it was at the time, this enforced
