Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (13 page)

For career reasons, Margaret Thatcher may well have been planning ahead politically when she opted to do taxation law professionally. Her strategy was right, because some twenty years later it was her speeches on the Finance Bills of 1974–5 that played a vital role in winning the leadership of the Conservative Party.

THE BUMPY ROAD TO FINCHLEY

Although happy in her marriage, the mid-1950s were a frustrating period for Margaret Thatcher in her career. She did not shine at the law, and her quest for a seat in Parliament was faltering. The problem in both fields was the prejudice of that era against ambitious women.

Neither the bar nor the Conservative Party would ever have admitted to any such prejudice. Yet it was a reality Margaret Thatcher had to face. Her difficulties in finding chambers and being given good briefs seem to have been affected by the undercurrent of male chauvinism that then prevailed in the bar’s world of clerks, silks, juniors, pupils and Inns of Court. It was still a Dickensian milieu, at best only half open to women of talent.

There was plenty of male chauvinism in the Conservative Party too, although paradoxically much of it came from women activists in constituency associations. They had a large say on candidate selection committees. Their voices were often hostile to women contenders in general, and Margaret Thatcher in particular.

After her rejection at Canterbury, she had a succession of disappointments. Although Conservative Central Office supported her strongly, she lost out in the final rounds at Orpington, Beckenham, Hemel Hempstead and Maidstone. In Orpington, she was pipped at the post by a local resident, Donald Sumner,
whose pitch to the selectors was that what the constituency needed was ‘someone in Parliament who knows the state of the roads in Locks Bottom’.
¹⁸
Margaret Thatcher managed to laugh at her rival’s winning line, but the next three defeats left her feeling ‘hurt and disappointed’.
¹⁹

Her difficulty was that a worrying pattern seemed to be emerging in these rejections. Unlike the short-listed male contenders she was pointedly asked questions suggesting that she might have problems balancing the demands of being a wife and mother with the demands of being an MP.

These tensions came to a head at Maidstone where she started the race as favourite, partly because of some keen lobbying on her behalf by the retiring Member Sir Alfred Bossom. In the final round she was up against two agreeable lightweights, Captain John Litchfield and John Wells. Neither of them could hold a candle to her in terms of speaking ability and political knowledge.

At the end of the speeches on the set topic ‘My policy if I was adopted as the Candidate for Maidstone’, she was ‘miles ahead’, according to one of the selectors, Bill Henderson. But in the end, he and evidently others thought that she ‘completely ballsed it up’ when answering questions.
²⁰
The report by the Deputy Central Office Area agent, John Entwistle, explained the problem:

She was asked about her ability to cope as a Member, having in mind the fact that she had a husband and a small family, and I do not think her reply did a lot of good. She spoke of having an excellent nanny, and said that as a Member she would have the mornings free (quite ignoring that fact that Members have committees in the mornings). She also spoke of having the weekends free, and made no reference to spending time in Maidstone at the weekends. She did say she would have to give up the Bar.
²¹

Reading between the lines, it was her response to the loaded question ‘about her ability to cope’ that cost her the seat. Afterwards, she fumed to Denis that no similar questions had been asked to John Wells, who had four children under ten, or to Captain Litchfield, who had two. Selection committee life seemed unfair.

John Wells, who won the nomination on the final vote by forty votes to Margaret Thatcher’s twenty-seven votes, was an affable, nonchalant Old Etonian fruit farmer who represented Maidstone for twenty-eight years. He was one of nature’s backwoodsmen, more noted for his absences than his contributions to the House, which were usually confined to the subjects of local roads and
apple orchards. On the night of his selection there was a vocal minority who thought Margaret Thatcher had been treated unfairly. Twelve of them took the unusual step of refusing to make the choice of Wells formally unanimous by the customary show of hands at the end of the meeting. This feeling that the runner-up had been hard done by was also reflected in a note to Central Office by the President of the Maidstone Conservative Association, who went out of his way to sing her praises:

Mrs Thatcher: Very pleasant personality – good speaker – calm yet forceful delivery and very much to the point – Has a thorough grasp of politics – tendency to the right of centre – A fine brain – great ‘appeal’. This lady should surely be in Parliament soon.
²²

The lady herself was despondent after Maidstone turned her down. Her spirits might have fallen further had she been aware at the time how strongly the initial tides of prejudice were running against her in Finchley, the next seat she decided to try for.

When he heard that Margaret Thatcher had put her hat into the ring to be his successor, the sitting Member, Sir John Crowder, expostulated to the Party Chairman, Lord Hailsham, that Conservative Central Office was trying to rig the selection in order to give Finchley a choice between ‘a bloody Jew and a bloody woman’.
^†
23

These prejudices sound inconceivable today but they were not uncommon in the Tory Party of the 1950s.

In fact, the view from headquarters was discouraging to all female contenders. The Deputy Central Office Area agent for North London (herself a woman) had already reported: ‘For your information, I gather that Finchley are determined to see some women so that they may be seen to have gone through the motions, but I should be very surprised indeed if they selected one.’
²⁴

Finchley was a North London constituency. It was regarded as a safe Conservative seat because of its prosperous commuter districts like Totteridge,
Whetstone, Hampstead Garden Suburb and Friern Barnet. It had a large Jewish community making up about 20 per cent of the electorate.

The Conservative Association was thought to be dysfunctional and disenchanted with its MP, Sir John Crowder. A loud and overbearing figure, he was a landowner, an Old Etonian and a senior officer of the powerful 1922 Committee of Conservative backbenchers. It was believed that the Finchley selectors wanted a fresh face who was as different as possible from their sitting Member. Margaret Thatcher at least fitted this bill. From a field of 150 entrants, she was shortlisted as one of three candidates for the final run-off, which was to be decided on 14 July 1958.

Good luck and bad luck then intervened. Margaret Thatcher’s good fortune came when one of the last three, Christopher Montague ‘Monty’ Woodhouse, withdrew because he had been selected as the candidate for Oxford. In front of the ninety members making the final choice, he might well have been her most formidable competitor for he was a war hero of the Greek resistance, a scholar and a former Director of the Royal Institute of Foreign Affairs at Chatham House.

After the exit of Monty Woodhouse, the Executive Committee would not accept a run-off between the two remaining candidates, Thomas Langton and Margaret Thatcher. So the final round was enlarged to a four-sided competition by bringing in the two next placed runners-up from the interview stage, Ian Fraser and Francis Richardson.

The other three finalists were all married men. They brought their wives. Mrs Thatcher was unable to be accompanied by her husband. Denis was away on a business trip to South Africa, ‘going out after orders’, as she told the meeting.
²⁵
She felt his absence was an unlucky blow to her chances, but there was nothing she could do about it. Communications with that part of the world were so slow in the 1950s that Denis had no idea his wife had reached the last round. Her letter giving him this news had failed to catch up with him.

The fight for the Finchley nomination was tantalisingly close. On the first ballot Margaret Thatcher squeezed ahead by a single vote. She scored thirty-five votes to the thirty-four votes cast for Thomas Langton. As a Brigadier who had lost a leg but won a Military Cross in the Second World War, he was a popular but inexperienced local candidate. The remaining two runners were eliminated after collecting only twenty-two votes between them.

On the second ballot Mrs Thatcher made it to the winning post by a nose.
^‡
She had forty-six votes to Langton’s forty-three. It was not the most decisive of triumphs. However, it is custom and practice at Conservative Party selection meetings for even the narrowest victories to be confirmed as unanimous by a subsequent show of hands.

Unfortunately, a determined minority of the Finchley Conservative Executive committee refused to go along with the tradition of unanimity. A small but vocal group of Association members, relentlessly opposed to the idea of a woman MP, tried to deny Margaret Thatcher the nomination. Their attempt to re-open the voting got nowhere. She was declared to be the selected candidate, and the date for her formal adoption meeting was set for the end of the month.
²⁶

The press gave her selection a gushing welcome. ‘Tories Choose Beauty’, ran the headline in the London
Evening Standard.
‘The woman many Tories reckon their most beautiful member has been chosen as candidate for Finchley.’
²⁷

Two days later a discarded copy of this newspaper was picked up by a passenger nursing a hangover on the Johannesburg–Lagos leg of a homeward-bound flight to Heathrow. He was Denis Thatcher. After a hard drinking night with his business friends, he had ‘staggered aboard the plane’ when his eye caught the
Evening Standard
report of his wife’s selection in Finchley. He was proud and delighted, but reacted with typically self-deprecating humour. ‘It was bloody lucky that I was away because it was a close-run thing’, he recalled. ‘If they’d taken one look at me, they would have said, “We don’t want this pair”.’
²⁸

Constituency adoption meetings to confirm a selection committee’s choice of a candidate are usually harmonious events, but occasionally they run into
turbulence. Conservative Central Office was anticipating trouble at Finchley on the night of 31 July because the rump of objectors at the executive committee was expected to remain vocal.

Despite these inauspicious signs, Margaret Thatcher’s adoption meeting on 31 July 1958 was a personal triumph. By all accounts she made an outstanding speech and routed her critics. Reports on her adoption to Conservative Central Office by the area agent confirmed that the audience had contained a clique known to be opposed to a woman candidate but continued: ‘Mrs Thatcher gave a most excellent speech and altogether went down splendidly.’
²⁹

When the resolution proposing her adoption was put, it was carried according to the local paper, ‘with about five descensions [
sic
] who looked extremely red-faced and stupid’.
³⁰
The
Finchley Press
waxed even more lyrical in its account of the proceedings:

The Conservatives came to see – and went away conquered. If any had come to oppose – they went away converted … Speaking without notes, stabbing home points with expressive hands, Mrs Thatcher launched fluently into a clear-cut appraisal of the Middle East situation, weighed up Russia’s propagandist mores with the skill of a housewife measuring the ingredients in a familiar recipe, pinpointed Nasser as the fly in the mixing bowl, switched swiftly to Britain’s domestic problems (showing a keen grasp of wage and Trade Union issues), then swept her breathless audience into a confident preview of Conservatism’s dazzling future … Willy-nilly, her spell-bound audience felt the exhilaration of Conservatism planing through the spray of a lifting wave.
³¹

Margaret Thatcher remained far more down to earth than the journalist who concocted this rhapsodic mixture of culinary and aquatic metaphors. But she was disappointed not to have won over her doubters. Unsettled by the absence of this reassuring word at the end of the meeting, the new candidate bleakly noted that some Conservatives ‘were still determined to make life as difficult as possible’ for her.
³²

A few days after her adoption, she wrote to the new Vice Chairman in charge of candidates at Central Office, Donald Kaberry MP: ‘I am learning the hard way that an anti-women prejudice among certain Association members can persist even after a successful adoption meeting, but I hope it will subside when I have done more work in the division.’
³³

Margaret Thatcher’s idea of hard work was to ‘campaign as if Finchley was a marginal seat’.
³⁴
She started to hold meetings, functions and canvassing sessions on three evenings each week.

Although she was right to take no chances against a background of disagreements within the Association about her selection, there was little doubt that Finchley was safe Conservative territory. The constituency was a prosperous swathe of North London with a strong preponderance of owner-occupiers, managers and commuters. There were only two potential obstacles. The first was the lethargy and disunity of the Tory workers. The second was an attempt by an opportunistic Liberal candidate to woo the large Jewish vote on the grounds that some Conservative activists had displayed anti-Semitism by blackballing Jews for membership of the Finchley Golf Club.

Margaret Thatcher briskly sorted out both difficulties. She went to see the Chief Whip, Ted Heath, to brief him on her constituency problems. He responded helpfully, arranging for a succession of past, present and future cabinet ministers to come and speak in Finchley. They included Iain Macleod, Peter Thorneycroft, John Boyd-Carpenter and Sir Keith Joseph.
^#
The latter, although oddly described by the
Finchley Press
as ‘a cricketer’, was a leading figure in the national Jewish community.
³⁵
His support was helpful in putting an end to the rumours that Margaret Thatcher condoned anti-Semitism in the local golf club or anywhere else. In fact, she had a lifelong affinity for Jews, as her later career was to show.