Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (39 page)

On 10 February 1970, Alfred Roberts died, aged seventy-seven, shortly after listening to his daughter’s appearance on BBC Radio’s women’s discussion programme
Petticoat Line
,
*
an interview she had recorded several days earlier
.
He had been ill for some time with emphysema, which had led to weakness in his heart. He also suffered from a cataract which could not be operated on because of his heart condition. In his last months he felt sorrowful and neglected, complaining, of his public work for Grantham, ‘it is surprising how quickly it is all forgotten.’
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He also lamented that ‘I never hear anything from Margaret either by letter or by phone.’
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Margaret did visit him in his last illness, and was much impressed by the number of friends and neighbours who came and cared for him (‘How remarkable to finish up your life with so many genuine friends’).
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Carol remembered Margaret dropping in on her dying father when on the way to Scotland, and being ‘very tearful’ about the state of his health,
¹¹⁹
but her mother was not with him when he died. She was in London, receiving a delegation from the anti-comprehensive group the National Education Association (‘She impressed us far more than Sir Edward Boyle ever managed to’).
¹²⁰
Two days later, she spoke in the Commons debate on the second reading of the ill-fated Education Bill. Alfred’s funeral took place in Grantham on 16 February. According to Margaret’s sister, Muriel Cullen, Margaret did not attend it. ‘When we went to my father’s funeral,’ she recalled, ‘of course she didn’t go, did she? She’d got something on.’
¹²¹

It would seem extraordinarily and untypically undutiful of Margaret not to have attended, and in fact she did go to the funeral. Her two engagement diaries of the period have her down for a meeting of the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) in Paris that day, but in both versions a line is run through the Paris entries, and through the whole day, though no mention is made of the funeral. The
Grantham Journal
also recorded her presence. In further conversation, Muriel remembered that Cissie Hubbard, the local farmer’s widow whom Alfred Roberts had married after Beatrice’s death, had arranged for his will to be read just before the funeral, which Mrs Cullen thought ‘odd’. At this Victorian scene, Mrs Cullen remembered, Cissie invited Muriel and Margaret to pick any
bits of furniture, antiques and pictures that they wanted. Margaret simply said: ‘I want something that was my mother’s.’ Muriel was more forceful, saying, by her own account, ‘I’ll have that and I’ll have that …’ Afterwards, ‘Margaret told me off. She said, “You were a bit blunt, weren’t you?” ’
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It seems impossible, then, that Margaret would have gone to Grantham for the reading of the will and then failed to attend the funeral service immediately afterwards. The correct explanation is that she attended the church service, but not the ensuing cremation. The cremation was organized by Cissie, who upset Muriel by telling her that ‘Family are going’ and then adding, ‘I suppose you’re family.’
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Margaret might have wanted no part in this. It is more probable, though, that, far from home, she took the train back to London in order – as her diaries indicate happened – to keep her appointments for the following day. It was typical of Margaret’s attitude to her father when he was alive to behave correctly but perfunctorily, sometimes with a touch of impatience. In later years, perhaps feeling some guilt about this, she celebrated his influence and his memory more and more. In 1970, she was in too much of a hurry.
*

From the beginning of 1970, the Conservatives felt they should be ready for a general election. Conscious that the party’s policies still lacked final form, Ted Heath called a two-day conference of the Shadow Cabinet at the Selsdon Park Hotel in Croydon, beginning on 30 January. The conference became famous, though its fame was unjustified. Seeking to portray his opponents as right wing, Harold Wilson invented a figure called ‘Selsdon Man’ who, he claimed, had emerged from the conference as the hard-hatted, free-market, devil-take-the-hindmost spirit of Heath’s Toryism. In speaking as he did, Wilson probably did the Conservatives a favour by portraying them as more distinctive, more aggressive and more united round a set of beliefs than they actually were. In his memoirs, Heath himself says, ‘I can think of no major new departure which emerged from Selsdon Park.’
¹²⁴
He rejects, with justification, the subsequent belief on the Tory right that Selsdon had raised the standard of what later became Thatcherism.

Heath does claim, however, that Mrs Thatcher talked ‘a good deal of
the interests of the middle class at Selsdon’.
¹²⁵
The minutes, which are in a sort of abbreviated verbatim, provide little evidence of this. What they do indicate is that she brought into play her practical, female knowledge. When it was proposed that family allowances be paid only to the needy, she warned of the stigma that would be attached to collecting them from the Post Office in such circumstances. And when it was suggested that they be paid through the tax system rather than through direct handout, she said that if the allowance went to the husband and not the wife, ‘it ceases to be a
family
allowance.’
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Most of her interventions, however, concerned her own area. She warned against singling out teachers for a battle over public sector productivity. Forbidden by Heath from any general discussion of education policy – he said that the party had already ‘got our education policy’ – she engaged in only one set-to with him and colleagues. It concerned the proposal for an independent university, favoured by free-marketeers and those worried by the trends in higher education, led by Max Beloff, an academic and Oxford contemporary of Heath’s. The minutes show Mrs Thatcher asking, ‘Can I make a speech giving it a fair wind?’ Worried about the cost, Heath fights shy of this, and adds:

Always said there is nothing to stop them doing it, put their own money in it, keep educational standards – but don’t want it to come to State for money to keep it going. Never commit myself to saying whether independent schools are better than state ones or not … As soon as one says one welcomes this, they say what practical form does your welcome take?

On the greater issues, most notably how to handle the questions of prices and incomes, Selsdon did not resolve matters. But, thanks to Wilson’s free publicity, the conference looked quite good, and the Conservatives stood high in the polls.

By May, this lead had reversed, and on 22 May 1970 Harold Wilson seized the chance to call a general election for 18 June. The Conservative manifesto,
A Better Tomorrow
, emphasized practicality. Launching it, Heath invoked ‘modern techniques’ and promised to change ‘the whole style of government’. He made very little of what was to prove his most important single achievement – Britain’s plan to enter the EEC. In the launch press conference, there was no question about education. The manifesto section on the subject began with the words ‘In education above all the problem of resources is crucial,’ and promised more spending on primary school buildings, the expansion of nursery schools and the raising of the school leaving age to sixteen. On the vexed matter of comprehensives, the manifesto supported the freedom of local education authorities to decide, but ventured that ‘in most cases the age of 11 is too early to make final decisions which might affect a child’s whole future’. It added, however, that comprehensivization ‘on rigid lines is contrary to local democracy and contrary to the best interests of the children’. In short, it tried to have it both ways.

Mrs Thatcher was lined up to appear in party political broadcasts for the election, but after a pilot in which she was considered to have performed badly, being too stiff and unnatural,
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she was withdrawn from the front line. She spent most of the campaign, which she expected the Conservatives to lose, in Finchley, focusing on economic woes, law and order, and – coding her criticism of mass immigration – conserving ‘our British character’.
¹²⁹
The choice for the British people, she said in a letter issued to the press on 1 June, was between ‘two essentially different ways of life’, one in which the state grabbed more and more power and the other in which ‘the role of the State is to help people discharge their own responsibilities’. Mrs Thatcher’s main foray outside the constituency was to Scarborough, to address the conference of the National Association of Head Teachers on 25 May. Still an ingénue in media matters, she failed to deliver a key part of her text because of the lateness of the hour, and was verbally roughed up by journalists who insisted on being allowed to report it all the same.
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It proved to be the most controversial passage: ‘There are those who wish only to read the comic strip and the headline, whose
problems, stemming sometimes from home backgrounds, cannot be overcome, however dedicated the teacher …’
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Labour tried to make something of this in the campaign, claiming that she was writing off a third of children as ineducable. It made little impact. To the confusion of the opinion polls, the Conservatives won the election with an overall majority of thirty-one. The Finchley result was as follows:

Both Mrs Thatcher’s vote and her majority were up. Hearing late that night on the car radio that the Conservatives were winning, the Thatchers, who were driving to Lamberhurst, turned round, and went to the
Daily Telegraph
party at the Savoy.
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Margaret Thatcher duly entered the Cabinet for the first time, as Edward Heath’s secretary of state for education and science, accepting the appointment on 20 June 1970. Although she often referred to the fact that she was a scientist, she made very little of the fact that she had, briefly, been a teacher. She had not much enjoyed the experience.

She had found herself in the role because of the war. In a reorganization of the academic year to allow Lincolnshire pupils more time to help with the potato harvest in the autumn, the county’s schools resumed for the Michaelmas term in the middle of August, after a break of only two weeks. In 1944 this allowed Margaret, whose long vacation from Oxford began in early June, to earn money and help the war effort by teaching at Grantham’s Central School for Boys, which was short of staff, for nearly two months of the summer term, and then, until she returned to Oxford early for fire-watching duties there, for three weeks of the following term. Still aged only eighteen, she taught science, but also maths, and, under protest, other things too. ‘School has not gone down any too well this past week,’ she wrote to Muriel. ‘We are working terrifically hard and I have no free periods at all. Also the marking is heavy. I have a set of
English essays
to mark this weekend as well as some algebra and physics and I’ve never seen such appalling tripe in all my life.’
¹
She also had to take the boys for swimming lessons at the Grantham baths: ‘We don’t go in with them during the lessons, but stay on the bank and try to teach them by yelling at them what they are doing wrong. I don’t think it is a very satisfactory method personally, but still I don’t think I’d like to appear in front of them in a bathing costume with my present figure.’
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In addition to her formal duties, Margaret also took on the personal coaching of David, a would-be naval cadet, who needed cramming for his maths exams. ‘I’m afraid he’s not a very smart kid at all,’ she told Muriel. ‘He is alright while I am sitting over him watching everything that he does but the moment I leave him to his own devices everything begins to go wrong.’
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Later she complained, ‘… I cannot make up for his lack of intelligence,’
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and she did not ‘hold out much hope for him because while he has improved a great deal since I have had him, – he still doesn’t know his tables properly and nothing I can do for him can ever make up for that. I think teaching him has been the hardest earned £2-2s I’ve ever had or hope to have in my life.’ She went on, ‘I was relieved to have finished teaching on Friday evening. It was like being released to freedom once more.’
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The school, however, was enthusiastic: ‘Mr Thorpe [the headmaster] was awfully nice the last day and thanked me … all in front of the school who clapped wildly for what seemed like ages. ’ She added, untruthfully, ‘I was quite glad when the ceremony was over.’ Margaret was happily conscious of having caused some excitement in the place: ‘It has been quite a novelty for them to be taught by an Oxford undergraduate and I heard quite a deal of the “Oxford accent” being talked behind my back.’
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Gerald Nicklem, a pupil at the school, remembered Margaret appreciatively as ‘an English rose’ who had ‘a lovely skin and hair attractively done, so we boys thought it a great treat to have this young lady teaching us.’
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