Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (9 page)

I managed to borrow a glorious royal blue velvet cloak which match [
sic
] the blue frock perfectly … I felt on top of the world … The ballroom was marvellously decorated … The refreshments were lovely. Altogether, it was the best and biggest ball I’ve ever been to.
¹⁸

Tony, who had begun the events by presenting her with a Moyses Stevens spray of carnations, took her up to London for lunch at the Dorchester, a tea dance at the Piccadilly Hotel and a performance of Strauss’s
A Night in Venice
at the Cambridge Theatre. Soon afterwards, she invited him to stay the weekend with her parents in Grantham. Although it was a somewhat strained and awkward visit, the fact that it happened was a sure sign that she was seriously interested in him.

However, her seriousness does not seem to have been fully reciprocated, perhaps understandably since Tony was nearly two years younger than she was and not ready to settle down, at the age of eighteen, with such an intense girlfriend.

Charles Moore tracked Tony Bray down in old age, and with the omniscience of an official biographer reached the conclusion that the couple ‘never slept together’,
although Margaret ‘showed a delight in physical intimacy’.
¹⁹
Although they drifted apart when Tony’s short army course ended, they had something of a reunion three years later in 1948, but the old fires were not rekindled. Nevertheless, in that glorious Oxford summer of 1945, against the historical background of the D-Day landings and the expectation of an Allied victory, nineteen-year-old Margaret Roberts enjoyed her first serious experience of romantic love.

SUCCESS IN OUCA POLITICS

However important Tony Bray may have been to Margaret Roberts, politics were more important. To her Somerville contemporaries, she was seen as a rather boring oddball because of her political enthusiasm for the Conservatives. Pauline Cowan recalled:

She amazed me by her persistence in trying to persuade me to join OUCA, She kept on and on at me, even after I had told her that I wasn’t interested because my loyalties were in the opposite direction. She was quite insensitive, as though it was the only thing that really mattered to her … She wasn’t the confiding or pally type. I often thought of her as a rather unhappy person, who had no close friends in the college. Of course we talked over coffee in our digs every morning, but usually about our work, or our shared dislike of one of our landlady’s frequent breakfast dishes – hot pilchards with mashed potatoes. I don’t think Margaret and I have ever been able to look at a pilchard ever since.
²⁰

Pilchards and Conservatives ranked about equal in the popularity stakes at traditionally left-wing Somerville. One college contemporary who tried to dislodge Margaret Roberts from her Tory loyalties was Nina Bawden.
^**
The two undergraduates were doing fire-watching duty together in the summer of 1944. Nina, an active Labour supporter, argued that all the people who joined OUCA ‘were dull as ditch water’. According to Bawden’s account:

Margaret smiled her pretty china doll’s smile. Of course, she admitted, the Labour Club was, just at that moment, more
fashionable
… but that, in a way, unintentionally suited her purposes. She meant to get into Parliament and there was more chance of being ‘noticed’ in the Conservative Club just because some of the members were a bit stodgy.
²¹

Margaret’s passive acceptance of OUCA’s stodginess suggests that, like most Tories of the time, she had little awareness of the coming sea change in British politics. In the mid-1940s, the leading Conservative undergraduates of Oxford tended to be hereditary aristocrats or members of upper-class families with double-barrelled names. M. Roberts (as she was listed on the Association’s term card) came to their attention because she worked so hard at the thankless task of OUCA College Rep for Somerville. She managed to recruit such an impressive number of those extremely reluctant Conservatives in her own college that she was considered for the role of being in charge of all the College Reps in the university, as the General Agent. This was a tedious job, which most undergraduate politicians sought to avoid because it required so much work. On the other hand, the post had status because it was the Association’s fourth highest elected office after the President, Treasurer and Secretary. At the end of her second year at Oxford Margaret Roberts was elected General Agent of OUCA.

Ever since she had helped with committee-room duties in Grantham during the 1935 general election, when she was nine, Margaret had taken an interest in the mechanics of Conservative Party electioneering. She had polished these skills at a wartime by-election in the town in February 1942 when, to the consternation of local Tories, their candidate lost the seat by 367 votes to a colourful local Independent. Although Margaret was little more than a leaflet deliverer, she was shocked by the result and criticised the party’s administrative weaknesses in failing to get its voters to the polls. ‘Then and later the Conservative Party was inclined to complacency’, she concluded.
²²

No such complacency was allowed while Margaret Roberts was General Agent of OUCA. Under her ‘queenly sway’, reported
Isis
, its membership climbed to over a thousand for the first time since the 1920s.
²³

In the general election campaign of summer 1945, she recruited a regiment of student canvassers, who helped Oxford’s Conservative Parliamentary Candidate Quintin Hogg
^††
to hold on to the seat, narrowly defeating the Labour challenger Frank Pakenham, later Lord Longford.

Later in the 1945 election, Margaret Roberts went back to Grantham, where she delivered her first political speech to be reported. She made her debut on
the hustings supporting the Conservative candidate Squadron Leader G.A. Worth. The
Grantham Journal
reported that she had inherited ‘her father’s gift for oratory’, and commented that ‘the presence of a young woman of the age of nineteen with such decided convictions has been no small factor in influencing the women’s vote in the division’.
²⁴

Her convictions were reported in greater detail in another local newspaper, the
Sleaford Gazette
. According to its two-column account, the nineteen-year old alderman’s daughter voiced two strands of opinion that came to prominence again four decades later, when she was prime minister. The first, predictable in 1945, was her antagonism towards Germany: ‘Germany had plunged the world into war. Germany must be disarmed and brought to justice … just punishment must be meted out.’ Her second and more unexpected theme was her advocacy for developing Britain’s relationship with the Soviet Union. She heaped praise on Churchill and Eden for having ‘worked unsparingly for cooperation with Russia’.
²⁵

These early views of the nineteen-year old warm-up speaker destined to become Britain’s first woman prime minister were submerged in the great Labour landslide victory of 1945. Margaret attended the Grantham constituency count, which ended in the defeat of Squadron Leader Worth. Then she went to watch the national results in the Grantham Picture House where, like most Tory activists, she was utterly astounded by the outcome. She could not understand how the electorate could have ousted Winston Churchill from No. 10 Downing Street.

Returning to Oxford after the long vacation, Margaret Roberts, as General Agent of OUCA, did not appear to have been subdued by her party’s crushing defeat. One of her first actions was to co-author and chair an OUCA policy report on how to revive Tory fortunes in the university. Her own unmistakable tones are to be found in several passages of the report which, in somewhat hectoring style, told OUCA that it ‘can no longer drift in its present aloofness’ and must become ‘an active proselytising body, and should have an active propaganda policy’.
²⁶
The responsibility for implementing these initiatives was given to the General Agent.

Taking charge of proselytising and propaganda did no harm to the student political career of Margaret Roberts. She became Treasurer and then President of OUCA in the elections of March and October 1946. One of the reasons for
her success was her increasingly confident speaking ability. It was transformed by Mrs S.M. Gatehouse, who had her own niche in the history of twentieth-century OUCA as its public-speaking tutor.

Stella Gatehouse was an Oxfordshire vicar’s wife who was recruited in the 1930s by Conservative Central Office to give weekly speech-making lessons to undergraduate members of OUCA. She was a formidable character with a touch of Joyce Grenfell in her own diction. Gentle with stumbling novices, but fierce with youthful arrogance, her classes were lively affairs, which knocked several generations of aspiring parliamentarians into better oratorical shape. Between 1938 and 1970 at least twenty future Tory ministers were cajoled and charmed by ‘Mrs G’ into improving their public speaking.

Mrs G was a good talent spotter. In 1961, she was asked to predict which of her former pupils would have most success in politics. She replied, ‘No 1, Michael Heseltine. No 2, Margaret Thatcher.’
²⁷
Since the former was not even an MP at that time and the latter was a little-known back-bencher that was quite a forecast.

Once or twice during Margaret Thatcher’s early days as Leader of the Opposition I thought I could hear echoes in her parliamentary speeches of Mrs Gatehouse’s recommended techniques. These included rubrics such as: ‘Summarise your argument with a good strong boom at the end of your last paragraph’; and ‘Have a crescendo, but keep it short and sharp, with no more than six words’. At the end of a 1976 debate in the division lobbies of the House of Commons, I wondered in a conversation with Margaret Thatcher if her speech earlier in the day could have been influenced by Mrs Gatehouse’s lessons. ‘Yes, Mrs G transformed my speaking’ was the response.
^28
‡‡

One of the principal duties of the President of OUCA is to organise ‘the term card’, the published list of visiting speakers. This task requires a great deal of correspondence and persistence. President-elect Margaret Roberts was remarkably prescient in attracting both famous and interesting guests. They included two future prime ministers, Anthony Eden and Alec Douglas-Home; a future Lord Chancellor, Lord Kilmuir, who had achieved fame as a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials; and a future Chancellor of the Exchequer, Peter Thorneycroft.

Wining and dining such guests at the Randolph Hotel before and after the public meetings gave Margaret Roberts new social and networking skills. Her experiences at OUCA focused her thoughts on becoming a Member of Parliament.

There are several versions of how and when the first stirrings of Parliamentary ambition manifested themselves in Margaret’s life story. Her own accounts (retold on different occasions to several interviewers) suggest that an almost Damascene flash of light on the road to Westminster hit her at a Lincolnshire dance, or during a midnight argument with ‘one of the boys’ after a village hop at which young RAF pilots were present. All these conversion experiences are dated post-1945, and involve a surprise declaration of intent followed by a solemn commitment in words such as ‘Suddenly it was crystallised for me. I knew.’
²⁹

Perhaps the discrepancies between these various descriptions can be rationalised by the formula used in the Scottish Psalter, ‘Another version of the same’. That said, the most authentic of the versions to judge by its simplicity and its source is given by Margaret Goodrich.

In her account there are no pilots, no dancing and no theatrical pronouncements. The scene was the vicarage at Corby Glen near Grantham, where Canon and Mrs Goodrich hosted ‘a very unsophisticated party’ for their daughter’s twenty-first birthday in December 1944. No alcohol was served, and there was no dancing or music. Towards midnight the festivities had dwindled to a handful of girls sitting round the kitchen table drinking cocoa. During the conversation Mrs Goodrich asked Margaret Roberts what she wished to do in life. The reply was memorably forthright: ‘I am going to be an MP. I want to be an MP.’
³⁰

The didactic certainty of these words left quite an impression. They had the ring of the increasingly confident nineteen-year-old General Agent of OUCA, who had put herself in charge of ‘propaganda’. Perhaps she felt she could show her hand this early in a private setting, for the Goodrich vicarage was safe territory. Some two and half years later, Margaret Goodrich was again the recipient of another surprising confidence about her friend’s political ambition, at the end of term at Oxford. The two Margarets were walking down South Parks Road near Rhodes House, when Margaret Roberts declared: ‘Of course this degree is not much use to me as an MP. I must now try to read Law.’
³¹

The remark was further confirmation that by the time she left Oxford she had found her vocation.

REFLECTION

Oxford confirmed rather than changed the personality of Margaret Roberts. She arrived from Grantham with a mind-set of certainties and ambitions. Her university years sharpened these qualities but did not visibly deepen them. Unlike most undergraduates, she knew from the start her direction of travel.

Her journey was not easy, for she had to overcome many overt and covert barriers of prejudice. Male chauvinism was still a surprisingly strong obstacle. Margaret would have enjoyed honing her debating skills at the Oxford Union, but it did not admit female members until 1963. The same was true of many other clubs, from the Oxford University Dramatic Society to the Alembic Society. The latter was the meeting ground of all science students, unless they happened to be women – so she was excluded from it.

A more subtle form of prejudice was social snobbery. Margaret Roberts felt it from the Cheltenham old girls at Somerville, from the mother of the first young man she fell for and probably in many other settings. Oxford in those days was described as a university of seven thousand experts on class. In such an environment a grocer’s daughter would have had to endure an unfair share of slights and snubs. But her insecurity may well have been the spur to her ambition.