This week marks one hundred years since Margaret Thatcher was born. Today I am publishing the chapter about Thatcher from Second Act. Later this week, I will publish the subsequent chapter about networks. The prevailing narrative about how Thatcher became leader isn’t quite right. The usual account is highly political. Network science offers a better explanation for why a relative underdog suddenly became Leader of the Opposition. That will follow in a day or two. Whether you love Thatcher or loathe her, the story of how the unremarkable young Margaret Roberts, who never dreamed of becoming Prime Minister, became the most significant post-war UK prime minister is fascinating.
You might baulk at the idea that Margaret Thatcher was a late bloomer. She became leader of the British Conservative Party aged fifty, which is about the average age that people become party leader. But a few weeks before it happened, no one, including her, thought it could happen. As her biographer Charles Moore said to me, ‘Few expected greatness of her until she was nearly fifty.’ Even the few people who strongly believed in her abilities never imagined she might be Prime Minister, let alone a global stateswoman who would play a role in ending the Cold War. Although she was clearly capable, the actual nature of her talents was unforeseen, and she bloomed much later than many others of her generation. Far from being seen as the person who would become the most decisive and divisive figure in postwar British politics, she was assumed to be a failure in waiting. She confounded expectations.
The Principal of Somerville College, Oxford, where Thatcher was an undergraduate, remembered her as ‘a perfectly good second-class chemist’.[1] After failing to get elected at Dartford in 1950 and 1951, she was rejected as a candidate for Orpington in 1954 and had to wait until the 1959 election, when she won the seat for Finchley aged thirty-four. It would be another fifteen years until she became leader of the Conservative Party. She had never dreamed of being Prime Minister as a child, and even in 1959, when she was elected as an MP, ‘the possibility of one day being Prime Minister did not cross my mind – I just didn’t think there would ever be a woman Prime Minister in my lifetime.’[2] Even when she was in the Cabinet as Education Secretary, her highest ambition was to be the first woman Chancellor. She never indicated she wanted to be Prime Minister to her parliamentary colleagues.[3]
She was a politically active young woman, canvassing in the 1945 election and speaking at political meetings in Colchester in her early twenties. She was regarded as a ‘winner’ by the Dartford association who selected her in 1949. The former MP Lord Balfour of Inchrye said she was ‘A grand young candidate. Speaks well. Good looking. Keen, knows her subjects. Watch and Encourage’. After the 1951 election, the association described her as ‘an amazing young woman with experience and knowledge far beyond her years’ and recommended she ‘not be lost sight of’. They couldn’t reselect her, however, because she was getting married.[4]
But none of that adds up to a serious prediction of her later success. And she was lost sight of: she failed to get selected for Orpington in 1954. She then wrote to Conservative Central Office, ‘I shall continue at the bar with no future thought of a Parliamentary career for many years.’[5] She asked to be put back on the candidates’ list fifteen months later, but for ‘safe Conservative-held seats only’. She had no appetite for more failure. The party promised only to ‘bear your name in mind’.[6] Thatcher was not alone in this struggle. In 1952, several women MPs wrote to Conservative associations complaining that women candidates were given ‘hopeless’ seats to contest ‘over and over again’.[7]
Thatcher was always described as a ‘woman candidate’, which tempered the praise she received. The Maidstone association doubted her ability to be an MP and a mother, despite her having a nanny.[8] When she was adopted for Finchley, objections to having a woman were strong enough to prevent the conventional unanimous vote by the committee after she won the ballot.[9] ‘I am learning the hard way that an anti-woman prejudice can persist even after a successful adoption meeting’, she wrote. In the same letter she wrote that she wore the outfit Donald Kaberry, who ran the candidate list, had recommended.[10] Thatcher also told Kaberry, ‘I seem to have done very little in thirty years.’[11] That wasn’t true – she had been to Oxford, worked as a chemist in two companies, stood for Parliament twice, and qualified as a barrister. But she always expected more of herself. How else would she become Mrs. Thatcher?
In these incidents, some of her later steel is evident. As one of the candidate reports said, ‘The mere fact that she secured selection among 22 candidates interviewed by an association determined not to have a woman, speaks for itself.’[12] But she was not the Iron Lady; that would take many more trials. Later in life, she came to understand that as a middle-class woman in an upper-class man’s world – and especially as a woman about whom so many people had mixed emotional, psychological, and sexual feelings – she could not retreat or show weakness, because that would make it impossible for her to gain power in the future. Being a woman always palliated what people expected of her. In 1970, four years before she became leader of the Conservative Party, the Sun wrote: ‘One day someone will achieve the unclimbed height of becoming Britain’s first woman Chancellor of the Exchequer. It might not be too outrageous for Mrs. Thatcher to wonder whether she could be the one who does it.’[13] Chancellor, maybe; but not Prime Minister.
Thatcher was underrated throughout her career. In 1972, the Sun called her the most unpopular woman in Britain because, as Education Secretary, she had ended free milk for school children. She was widely thought to have been named Education Secretary only because she was a woman. A 1975 biography of Thatcher says Edward Heath was ‘more obliged to have a woman in his cabinet than if he had been a family man’.[14] Education was the sort of brief that a sexist institution could safely give an upstart woman. Heath originally thought about making Thatcher the ‘statutory woman’ in the shadow cabinet in 1966 but didn’t because ‘we’ll never be able to get rid of her’.[15] (He was more right than he knew.) By some accounts, she ‘refused Edward Heath’s offer of shadow social security secretary because it was a job stereotypically reserved for women’.[16] That is difficult to verify, but Thatcher did make a detailed point to the Finchley Times in 1966 about the way women politicians were now experts not just in social and health policy – work that was often assigned to them for sexist reasons – but also on topics like finance and defence.[17]
Shortly after that, William J. Galloway, first secretary and political officer of the US embassy in Britain, chose Thatcher to receive a grant that enabled her to travel to Washington D.C. This was a rare instance of someone recognising her talent. Galloway was impressed by Thatcher’s ‘very strong will’, ‘high standards of ethics and morals’, ‘tremendous self-confidence’, and the fact that ‘she didn’t hesitate to express her views’. He thought of her as ‘a politician who was not seeking support for her own personal advancement’ and described her as ‘the outstanding lady in the House of Commons’ at that time.[18] He did not think of her as an intellectual, however. This is an example of Thatcher being what Alfred Sherman called ‘not a person of ideas but a person of beliefs’. As Charles Moore told me, ‘she was always thinking, thinking, thinking. “What’s right here? What’s the best? What’s the problem? What’s the solution?” But she didn’t have the philosopher’s sceptical mind or pure intellectualism. She wanted results.’[19] It was her strong will, iron morals, and belief in the importance of getting results that steered her to the leadership.
There is some support for the idea that great leaders are not the most educated, but the most decisive. The psychologist Dean Keith Simonton, looking at a data set from 1923, found that the more formal education a leader has, the lower their eminence.[20] This sounds counterintuitive, especially as the data is so old. But US Presidents Truman and Reagan didn’t have much academic success and they were highly eminent. It may not be a firm correlation but it is certainly true that you don’t have to go to a top university to be a good leader. Thatcher had no formal political education, but she was a chemist and a barrister. (She was prouder of being the first science graduate Prime Minister than of being the first woman Prime Minister.) However, she was an attentive and disciplined autodidact.
In 1971, there was a government proposal to change the way science funding was allocated. Difficulties in matching pure science research to practical problems meant the government wanted to ‘marketize’ some research funding. This affected a small number of institutions, but became a political dispute. Thatcher was Education Secretary, with responsibility for science, and was part of the policy discussion. Initially, she took the line that the system should not be changed. The scientific establishment was concerned that a market in funding for a few small organisations would spread to other, larger scientific bodies, jeopardising free, independent enquiry. During the discussions, Thatcher changed her position. The minutes record: ‘The Agricultural Research Council, the Medical Research Council and the Natural Environment Research Council would become organisations primarily dealing with applied research [and therefore research shaped decisively by customer=contractor market language].’[21] The academic Jon Agar sees this as an ‘early moment when Thatcher chose the market as an alternative to established models of resource allocation’.[22]
This exemplifies many important strands of Thatcher’s character that would enable her later success. First, as Agar says, ‘She viewed science as a source of wealth, and therefore as a justified expenditure from the public purse. Yet this elevation made science even more of a test case for her developing views on economic liberalism. If markets could work for science policy, they could work anywhere.’[23] This shows Thatcher’s ability to think about the implementation of ideology; she was not a Friedman copycat or Hayekian mime. She approached problems individually. She was by no means the most ‘Thatcherite’ member of some of her cabinets. Second, her experience as a research scientist in a plastics company, and at the food manufacturer J. Lyons & Co. honed her ability to marry the practical and the theoretical. ‘It was precisely because Thatcher knew what scientific research was like that made her impervious to claims that science was a special case, with special features and incapable of being understood by outsiders.’[24] Her practical mind enabled her to learn the system – and learn how to change it.
There are many other examples of her autodidacticism. While Thatcher was Leader of the Opposition, Martin Gilbert was publishing Churchill’s official biography, including large volumes of documents alongside the narrative volumes. Thatcher wrote to Gilbert about a footnote in one of the document volumes that said Churchill had prepared notes for a book about socialism in the late 1920s.[25] That sharp eye for detail characterized the way she worked as Prime Minister. Everyone who worked with her was impressed at her grasp of minutiae. Lord Carrington said that she ‘actually listens’ and had ‘a very acute intelligence’.[26] Charles Moore told me: ‘She’s extremely unusual in politicians for a sustained interest, sustained over a very, very long period in her case, in office, in the content of what she was doing.’[27]
Thatcher mastered the details by governing on paper. She was rigorous about reading and annotating the huge amounts of paperwork she received, with a system of underlining and squiggles to denote approval or disapproval. She frequently challenged analysis, corrected messaging, demanded more information. She knew that she needed to make decisions to turn ideas into real-world change.[28] Monetarism, free markets, and individual liberty were important concepts, but having those ideas actually change the world required a decider, not an intellectual. It was through her paperwork, her decisions, and her public communications – through work – that she made these ideas real. As Charles Moore told me, she had ‘a resourceful seriousness, which might not be intellectually original, but which was in a political sense, profound… There was simply nobody else in the first rank who was behaving and thinking that way.’[29]
Coolidge, Truman, and Law had the same ‘resourceful seriousness’. They were earnest. Coolidge was so dedicated to reducing the size of government that he had a weekly meeting with his budget director so that they could go through every line of the US federal budget looking for ways of reducing expenditure. In this, as in much of his work, Coolidge modelled himself on Abraham Lincoln, who proved himself a master administrator of the ‘practical affairs of his day’.[30] Through things like cuts to telephone and transportation bills, the renegotiation of contracts for paper, and efficient logistics for the delivery of equipment, Coolidge found a $300,000 surplus in a budget of $3 billion.[31] The Soviet ambassador Averell Harriman said of Truman that ‘you could go into [Truman’s] office with a question and come out with a decision quicker than any man I have ever known’.[32] Similarly, Law was a workhorse during the First World War, his office strewn with papers as he managed the national finances and acted as Lloyd George’s deputy, discussing the conduct of the war with him every morning. To be a leader, you must be able to look at the details and make a decision. You cannot govern with principles, only practicalities.[33]
The other shared characteristic of Law, Coolidge, Truman and Thatcher’s resourceful seriousness is moral earnestness. Law believed strongly in the union with Ireland because of his ancestry. Coolidge had a rock-like resistance to debt based on his family history. Truman’s small-town morals were mocked as corny but acted as a cornerstone for the creation of the postwar world order.
Because of her upbringing in a small town, with a religious, business-owning family, Thatcher saw her mission as moral, not merely economic. She told her speechwriter Ferdinand Mount that her real task was to ‘restore standards of conduct and responsibility’. Mount records that after a day of meetings full of ‘haranguing visitors for hours’ she would kick off her shoes, have a glass of scotch, and ‘“resume the harangue’ with him ‘as though we had never met’”[34] (Lynda Lee-Potter once said: ‘She doesn’t talk in sentences so much as entire chapters and she’d be brilliant at that party game where you mustn’t reply “Yes” or “No” to anything.’[35]) Mount found her total lack of small talk unbelievable. She was ‘indifferent to most of the tricks of paradox, ambiguity, understatement, and saying the opposite of what you mean, which pepper the talk of almost everyone in the country’.[36] No wonder Heath and Whitelaw had been so reluctant to have her in cabinet; no wonder she was regarded wearily by her colleagues. But to achieve what Margaret Thatcher achieved you have to be a uniquely serious person, which often isn’t simple or easy for others to deal with. She never let conformity distract or subdue her earnestness.
One common criticism of Thatcher, related to how seriously she took herself, is her slightly warped view of reality. Mount says that she remembered working with him twenty years before and recalled him as an energetic young man who had agreed with her when he was in fact rather idle and hadn’t agreed with her at all. ‘Successful politicians – perhaps people who are successful at anything – ’, Mount writes, ‘need to doctor the past if they are going to keep going’.[37] It was always a moral vision of the world that kept Thatcher going. Her distortions were made in service to that bigger belief.
Galloway was right to note Thatcher’s other qualities, apart from her educational background, as the most important ones. The way Thatcher started studying political philosophy rather late, once she was on track to the top, is sometimes mocked, or noted as an example of her unsuitability to be leader. In fact, Thatcher’s relative unsophistication as a political intellectual was an advantage. The Finchley Times said in 1966 that she was ‘no blue-stocking’, and ‘as her appearances on “Any questions” and her down-to-earth approach to politics confirm, she is no hide-bound academician’.[38]
Galloway got to know the Thatchers relatively well, going to dinner with them and becoming friendly with Denis as well as Margaret. He later recalled that in the mid-1960s ‘she was then the same woman who later became Prime Minister; in other words she would not hesitate to voice her views to anyone whomever. She was different from other women in the House of Commons. She was not particularly liked by her colleagues because of her personality and her kind of aggressiveness.’ Galloway recalled that Jim Prior was an early admirer – though they would later be at odds in cabinet. According to Galloway, Prior ‘persuaded Heath, against his will, to take her in the shadow cabinet. According to Jim, she was not shy about joining in the deliberations. She irritated Heath repeatedly, and Jim had to intervene with him frequently to save her neck.’ Most people judged Thatcher on appearances, on whether she irritated them; they let their prejudices get the better of them. For that reason, they didn’t see her coming.
She didn’t see herself coming either. Galloway congratulated her when she became Leader of the Opposition and she wrote back: ‘I still do not know quite how it all happened! Six months ago I should have said it would be impossible.’ Despite his enthusiasm, even Galloway didn’t quite realize who she was. ‘I have to confess, although I liked her very much, I never in the world thought she would become prime minister’.[39]
Being able to get things done was part of Thatcher’s pitch to be Conservative Party leader. In a television interview a few days before polling, she said of her career, ‘I’ve gone on at each stage, first a member, then a parliamentary secretary, then a minister tackling each job and I think getting on top of it.’ When she was asked why it should be her challenging Heath and not a more senior MP, she made a virtue of her quick decision-making: ‘The interesting thing was, I didn’t hesitate, I took the decision quickly and I’ve never had any doubt about it, that it was the right decision and I never faltered and I’m in no doubt now.’ She also made a pitch of her beliefs rather than her ideas. ‘I don’t like Opposition very much, I much prefer to have the chance to put one’s beliefs into action.’ She made it clear that her core beliefs about the role of the state were formed before she was seventeen or eighteen.[40]
Being a woman made her easy to overlook, but the men around her were also overlooking one of her key political advantages. Her position as a middle-England housewife, who said she had delayed her political career when she had small children, was a favourable one that she used to some effect.
Her first two elections were 1950 and 1951. Britain had been through five years of more intensive rationing than during the war. According to one academic, ‘The index of food rations shows that rations of fats, meat and other sources of animal protein were lower and more volatile after 1945 than during the war.’[41] The only cheese available was consistently substandard, sometimes called Government Cheddar. At least one woman used it to light fires.[42] Food rationing was a major political issue, consistently among the highest concerns of the general public in opinion surveys in the late 1940s. Even in 1949, 75 per cent of the public still thought their diet was worse than before the war.[43] Rationing became a political issue again in 1951 when the meat ration fell to a new low.[44]
Rationing became a central issue for the Conservatives.[45] It was especially important to housewives, who had to work out how to feed their family. They were the ones to stand in the queues, and were often treated badly by shopkeepers. This is why Churchill used to describe socialism as ‘queuetopia’.[46] Although the swing from Labour to the Conservatives was smaller among women than men, it was larger among middle-class women.[47]
The 1951 election, called by some ‘the housewives election’, saw a larger number of women candidates. The journalist Ruth Adam wrote ‘no woman member of any kind, at this period, dared to forget to describe herself as a ‘housewife’.[48] Margaret Thatcher didn’t call herself a housewife because she wasn’t one in 1951. But the importance of housewife rhetoric, a Tory staple since the Great Depression, was not lost on her. In her 1950 election address she said, ‘I ask every housewife, does she want her sugar to increase in price and go down in quality?’[49] In 1966 she told the Finchley Times that women ‘have a wider understanding [than men] of problems affecting the family, and of matters such as health and welfare’.[50] In her 1970 election address she said, ‘Inflation, the worst for twenty years is with us again. Pensioners and housewives are helpless as they watch the extra shillings eaten up by price rises.’[51] She also used to talk about giving up politics in the 1950s, when her children were young, to signal her credibility to mothers and housewives.[52]
When she was Leader of the Opposition, her publicist Gordon Reece was careful to put her on radio programmes like the Jimmy Young show and in magazines that appealed to Labour-voting housewives.[53] In 1978, the Conservatives ran a poster set out as a Cosmo quiz. It asked who was more likely to know what it was like to do the family shopping: a) James Callaghan [Thatcher’s opponent], b) Your husband, or c) Margaret Thatcher.[54] In 1979, she countered press accusations that she hoarded food by saying, ‘Well, you call it stockpiling, but I call it being a prudent housewife.’[55] Remarkably, she gave that interview to a magazine called Pre-Retirement Choice, three months before she stood for the leadership. She said that with Denis turning sixty (she was nearly fifty), she was buying items like sheets and towels that she would need in ten years’ time, as a hedge against inflation.[56] Although she said she hoped to keep working for another fifteen or twenty years, those are hardly the words of a woman who expected to be Leader of the Opposition in six months.
Interestingly, in that interview she talked about how as a cabinet minister, when she had to make an appointment to committee, she looked to people who were retiring. Those choices often faced prejudice:
I would suggest the names of people who have just retired from industry or commerce. These are the people with invaluable experience.
But often when you put down their names the reaction would come back – well, don’t you think they are too old? This is a terrible dilemma and I said unless we are going to use some of the talent and skill and experience of some of these people we are going to deprive ourselves of the advice they can give.[57]
So Margaret Thatcher was an advocate for late bloomers.
Her housewife rhetoric shows how her electability came from her core beliefs and experiences, some of them rooted in her experience as a working mother who felt, as she told one journalist, like she went around the house on roller skates.[58] Analogies and rhetoric drawn from her experience and identity as a working mother gave her an advantage over the men she was competing with. This was all part of the practical learning she acquired over the course of her unplanned career.
These core beliefs were not just beneficial to Thatcher in the crude sense of winning votes. They underpinned her approach to problems such as how to tackle inflation, whether to make mortgage payments tax deductible, and how to end the Cold War. Part of what enabled her to succeed when no one thought she could was the fact that she was not a fashionable thinker. To have been able to talent-spot Margaret Thatcher, this is what you would have needed to see. Not her Hayekian credentials, not her technocratic policy platform, but her beliefs, her experiences, and (as William J. Galloway saw) her ethics, energy, decisiveness, and indifference to popularity.
Her talents very nearly went un-spotted. Ladbrokes had her at 50-to-1 against for being next Conservative leader in October 1974 – four months before she won. At that time, only Keith Joseph was thought of as a possible replacement for Ted Heath.[59] The 1975 biography says she was almost entirely unknown before the leadership election.[60] This was certainly true abroad. When she visited the United States in 1967 and 1969, ‘official Washington did not consider her sufficiently significant to put itself out for her’.[61]
Even Airey Neave, who ran her leadership campaign, only backed her because Edward du Cann decided not to stand. Neave wrote in his diary that Thatcher had a ‘good chance’ but was a difficult ‘sell’. Two months before the leadership election, he wrote that there was ‘no unanimity’ about Thatcher and that Heath’s stock was rising among MPs.[62] Neave had admired Thatcher as a fellow scientist but showed some reluctance to back her. Even to her supporters, her talents were not obvious.[63]
Indeed, hardly anyone thought a woman could be Prime Minister. The former Scottish Labour MP Jean Mann wrote in 1962 that there was very little chance of a woman even becoming Chancellor or Foreign Secretary. (There still has not been a woman Chancellor in the UK.) Mann was impressed with Thatcher’s determination, accomplishments, and businesslike attitude – her maiden speech was also the introductory speech for a Private Members’ Bill – and forecast that the young MP might be capable of the Foreign Office.[64] One person who realized Thatcher was a viable candidate was the Times journalist Bernard Levin, who wrote that there had already been women leaders of Sri Lanka, India, and Israel, the first two of which were ‘countries even more male dominated than Britain’.[65] Thatcher, he said, had a ‘vivid and challenging public image’, would be able to use her sex to her advantage, was clever, had stamina, and ‘will not be easy to ignore’.[66] Despite this prescient insight, Levin said he would still vote first for Edward Heath.
He wasn’t alone. Heath was led a poll of Party members in the Daily Express and the National Union. The peers and grandees supported Lord Carrington.[67] Thatcher herself supported Keith Joseph. Even in early November 1974, three months before she became leader, she said, ‘The party isn’t ready for a woman and the press would crucify me’.[68] It was only on 20th November, when Keith Joseph dropped out of the race after making a controversial speech, that Thatcher decided to stand. Fate intervened.
Only a month earlier, Airey Neave had written in his diary, ‘We could find nothing but objections to possible candidates e.g. Whitelaw, K. Joseph, Carr, Margaret Thatcher’.[69] The Economist described her as ‘precisely the sort of candidate who ought to be able to stand, and lose, harmlessly’.[70] Edward du Cann took weeks to decide if he would stand, so support was hovering around him. This went on into 1975. Thatcher was not just unknown but, in the words of her publicist, ‘was not at this stage good at either communicating with people, or on television’.[71] Many factors contributed to her win, not least Airey Neave telling MPs that if they didn’t vote for her they would be stuck with the deeply unpopular Heath. Neave inflated Heath’s support to the Evening Standard to scare MPs. ‘Faced with the prospect of yet more Heath, several men with no time for Mrs Thatcher voted for her’.[72]
There was one lone Tory grandee who predicted Thatcher would be the next leader. In 1972, Lord Margadale told lunch party guests that Thatcher would replace Heath, three years before she did. It’s not clear how serious his prediction was. Thatcher had been described as a future Prime Minister as early as 1958, when she was selected to be the candidate for Finchley. This was a prediction that she would be Prime Minister ‘of England’.[73] This use of England instead of Britain was quite normal for Tories at the time, and was often how Thatcher spoke. But it suggests windy rhetoric rather than inspired prognostication. How many association members predict that they are selecting a future Prime Minister? Despite this prediction, Thatcher was only selected for Finchley because the chairman rigged the count. He ‘lost’ two of her opponent’s votes, thinking his privilege would secure him another seat. (It didn’t.) Whether or not Margadale was more reliable than the Finchley bar-stool seer, the idea of Thatcher as leader was regarded by his lunch guests as ‘very extraordinary’.[74] She required fate to intervene in Finchley, in Keith Joseph’s withdrawal from the race, and in Airey Neave’s change of allegiance.
The reason she hadn’t quite won in Finchley in 1958 was that many association members did not want a woman candidate. (Many of those who opposed her were the association wives.) Not much had changed in fourteen years, when the idea of a woman leader was as unlikely as a woman MP had been. As Bernard Levin said in 1974, in an article written before he realized Thatcher was a serious possibility, ‘The male chauvinism of the people of this country, particularly the women, is still dreadful, and her sex would be a severe handicap’.[75] Even Norman Tebbit, later one of her most loyal supporters, didn’t think of her as a potential leader. Many people, he said, thought she was ‘fortunate to get into Ted Heath’s cabinet’.[76] Thatcher herself thought there were limits to what she could do as a mother. She told Miriam Stoppard in 1985 that she’d been lucky to get a London seat. If she’d had a Yorkshire seat, she said, she wouldn’t have wanted to leave her family for long periods of time.[77]
When she was elected it was only the start of her challenges. The speechwriter Ronald Miller’s ‘reaction was partly chauvinistic and partly, to my surprise, a sort of residual loyalty to the strange man [Ted Heath]’.[78] The MP Ken Clarke recalled after Thatcher died, ‘I can remember old boys on the back benches saying” Oh it’s alright down here in London but in the North they won’t vote for a woman as Prime Minister”’.[79] Harold Wilson, the Prime Minister, condescended Thatcher by calling her ‘my dear’ during parliamentary debates. ‘He underestimated her terribly’, recalled the MP Shirley Summerskill.[80]
In 1977, after two years as Leader of the Opposition, she did not have the confidence of many members of the shadow cabinet. Lord Hailsham, the distinguished lawyer, and Lord Carrington, the aristocrat, had a meeting where they discussed their lack of confidence in Thatcher. They were worried the Party was becoming right-wing, and believed that she was ‘politically unaware’; they lamented that while there were several men who would do a better job it was not possible to have another leadership election.[81] Both men would later serve in Thatcher’s government –before she won a historic landslide victory in 1983.
Carrington never quite got over his ambivalent feelings about Thatcher, telling a colleague in the early 1980s, when he was Foreign Secretary, ‘if I have any more trouble from this fucking stupid, petit bourgeoise woman, I’m going to go’.[82] This sort of criticism had long dogged Thatcher: in 1974, Enoch Powell dismissed her chances to be leader by saying, ‘They wouldn’t put up with those hats and that accent’.[83] He had a point, but didn’t realize how effectively she would be able to alter both her appearance and her voice. And snobbishness cut both ways. When she decided to stand for the leadership, Thatcher went to Edward du Cann’s house with Denis, so du Cann could assess her as a candidate. He described Margaret and Denis sitting on the sofa together as being like a butler and housekeeper seeking employment.[84]
In 1978, George Younger, who later served in all her cabinets, wrote about Thatcher’s mood during shadow cabinet discussions: ‘Once more I doubt Mrs. T’s coolness. She rattles on, arguing everything & is a bad chairman’. Notice the phrase “Once more I doubt…” Younger had faith in his leader. But he was quick to see her flaws, and knew that she relied on the changing political conditions of the country to succeed: ‘There has been a fundamental shift of attitude over the past 3 years, and I believe the people want a change’.[85] This is the same analysis Jim Callaghan made shortly before Thatcher won the 1979 election. As David Cannadine said, ‘The majority of her senior colleagues had remained his [Heath’s] loyal supporters until the end, and only one of them, Joseph, had voted for her. So despite her victory in the leadership election, Thatcher was in a weak position’.[86] Until she was elected, few people attributed much of Thatcher’s success to her
To prove herself, and to make herself into a credible candidate for Prime Minister, Thatcher worked hard. Much is made of her makeover, with the Barbara Castle hairstyle and a voice coach from the National Theatre to lower her tone. Gordon Reece played a Henry Higgins role to modify her accent.[87] (Reece was something of a late bloomer himself, starting his PR career aged forty.)[88] This was an inevitable consequence of being a woman; no one remembered what her male predecessors wore. Women politicians were obliged to be more attentive than their make colleagues about their apperance for Thatcher’s whole career. Jean Mann wrote that women M.Ps. always dressed well when giving speeches because even a short speech by a woman would be reported, and “nothing can escape the male eye.”[89]
The way Thatcher understood the importance of appearance to politics was ultimately more important than the details of her hairstyle and voice pitch. She understood television better than other leaders – she was ‘very conscious of being accurate’. Her presentation and appearance were part of a complete package with her strong convictions and grasp of details.[90] In this respect, she resembled Barbara Castle in more than appearance. Castle, too, was a hard worker, who spent long hours absorbing statistics and official reports while her male colleagues took long lunches. ‘Battling Barbara’ was surely an influence. They both knew the importance of housewife rhetoric – Castle was photographed for the 1945 election darning her husband’s socks. They both liked loud hats. They both continued to do domestic duties while maintaining hectic work schedules. They even shared the same preference for a light breakfast, yoghurt and fruit in Castle’s case, coffee and fruit for Thatcher.[91] If you want to outpace your entitled male rivals, it doesn’t help to have a heavy stomach.
Equally important were Thatcher’s visits to countries across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the USA, where she first met Ronald Reagan in 1975. And her development as a leader of her own party, which was by no means accepting of her monetary and fiscal beliefs when she became leader. By 1978, when the famous winter of discontent started, when strikes left Britain without refuse collectors or grave diggers, and inflation topped 13 per cent, Thatcher was able to take advantage of the crisis. This was only the latest in a series of problems of this nature that politicians of all parties had failed to solve for a decade.
And she became a flourishing orator. In 1970, her recorded election broadcast had been deemed unsatisfactory by party headquarters. Ronald Miller thought she had little idea of the impact of television and came ‘over as stilted and self-conscious with a tendency to over-elocute’. By the time she became Prime Minister, Miller says, ‘she was a practised performer prepared to take on all comers’.[92] One of the ways she garnered credibility was by outperforming the Labour Chancellor Denis Healey in the House of Commons. On one occasion, when he mocked her supposed privilege and made sexist references, she retorted, “Some Chancellors are macroeconomic. Some are fiscal. This one is just plain cheap.” Lord Gowrie, a member of the shadow Treasury, remembered Thatcher as ‘the only person who was really knocking him about in the House of Commons’. The Tories were demoralized. They had lost two elections; Heath was a weak leader; and the candidates to replace him were lacklustre. Suddenly they ‘saw one of their members looking tremendous, brilliantly briefed, and knocking a very able Chancellor for six in the House. And they were rather dazed by this,’ Gowrie believed that this display of energy and purpose, ‘revitalised the backbenches’. Characteristically, ‘she knew more, she’d done her homework’.[93] Thatcher’s long apprenticeship, her work habits and grasp of the details, had made her ready to make the most of this unexpected opportunity.
She impressed MPs of all parties with her strongly-argued, well-informed, logical arguments about taxation, spending, and inflation – an echo of the way Bonar Law made his reputation. She wasn’t afraid to link detailed policy arguments to philosophical arguments about freedom. She was finding her voice, and it was making her more popular. You didn’t (and don’t) have to agree with her to find her compelling. As the biographer John Campbell said, ‘it was not her convictions that they voted for, but her conviction’.[94]
This conviction became stronger and better articulated. Her oratory had many facets: her ability to make an audience laugh, despite being humourless sometimes herself; her capacity for aphorism; her capability to distinguish between, and combine, the moral and the practical; her use of detail; her forthright defence of her position; her instinctive timing; her serious, deadpan expression. All of these qualities come into view after 1975. Her career was then punctuated by defining moments of rhetoric: ‘the iron lady of the western world’; ‘you turn if you want to, the lady’s not for turning’; ‘there is no alternative’; ‘all attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail’; ‘we have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state at home only to see them reimposed at the European level’; ‘if you want something said ask a man; if you want something done ask a woman’; ‘when people are free to choose they choose freedom’; and perhaps most famously, in response to the idea of the European Commission, ‘No. No. No.’ These lines were written by speechwriters, but they were delivered in the singular, unforgettable voice of Margaret Thatcher.
Truman and Eisenhower needed the war for their talents to flourish; Coolidge needed the death of Harding; and Law needed the fractious, failing state of his party. Thatcher needed a leadership vacuum in the Conservative Party – plus inflation and the economic collapse of the late 1970s – for her talents to become evident. Later on, she would also benefit from the Falklands War.
But Thatcher was ready when fate intervened. Who else could offer her combination of energy, decisiveness, experience as a working mother, and oratorical gifts to become one of the most enduring political leaders of the twentieth century? How else would she get the chance to showcase these qualities other than in a leadership election when none of the men couldn’t decide to run and where the obviously failed leader refused to talk to the people who were voting?
Who else would have been so resilient? Thatcher turned adversity to advantage. She was surrounded by people who wanted to duck the fight or quit the course. She was the political energy behind the 1981 budget. She was the determination behind the Falklands War. She was the spirit that opposed the Miners’ Strike. She was the visionary who darted around Whitehall chanting ‘every earner an owner’. She was the libertarian refusenik who stood firm against what she thought of as evil, winning Nelson Mandela’s praise for advocating for his freedom, and Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan’s admiration for her Cold War–ending diplomacy. She was the one prepared to tell the EU to focus on expanding western freedom to eastern Europe at a time when Delors was arguing that the Commission should originate 80 per cent of legislation for member states. She was the one who secured the British rebate, a policy much derided but never reversed. She was the one who insisted on visiting the Gdansk shipyards on a visit to Poland, despite being banned by the Polish government. (Her visit spurred talks between the union and the government that were part of a process of liberalisation. Radek Sikorski, the Polish MEP, has said, ‘For those behind the Iron Curtain, she was a member of the anti-communist “Holy Trinity” – consisting of John Paul II, Ronald Reagan and herself – who altered the fate of the West, and consequently the fate of those outside it’.)[95]
She was, in William J. Galloway’s words, the one who ‘restored the nation’s stature and became a force to be reckoned with in international affairs’. He called it, ‘one of the most striking turnarounds in a nation’s affairs ever’. Galloway also saw more clearly than many parochial British commentators that Thatcher’s important role in world affairs started in the Falklands, which ‘went a long way toward reminding the world that, although there was no longer an empire, the UK still held a seat in the top international council. British arms, once more, proved their worth’.[96]
There is a lot of disagreement about her reforms. Where she was determined, she was contentious. Britain was a disputatious country before she arrived, and remained so throughout her tenure. Although her policies were mostly unchallenged by the governments that followed, to be called a Thatcherite is rarely a compliment in British politics. But amid this discord, Thatcher’s personality is not in dispute. The character who made all of this possible, for better and for worse, is not contentious. She is a symbol of the inexhaustible. She was famous for her stamina and her stubborn determination.
This, too, had to be learned. In 1971, when she ended free school milk, Thatcher went from being a relatively anonymous politician to being known as ‘Mrs Thatcher, Milksnatcher’. She was nearly sacked. She was hounded by a misogynistic press. It was draining. People who knew her said she was always tired. She considered quitting politics. The Daily Mail columnist Jean Rook wrote: ‘Show some spunk, Margaret. Remember flaming Barbara Castle who came back at critics like a blow-lamp’. This was a trial that as Moore says ‘she did not pass easily’.[97] But she did pass. It was milk that made Mrs. Thatcher indefatigable.
There were other important moments in the early 1970s that forged the resolve of the woman who would become famous for riding in a tank. She was advised to stop wearing her pearls in 1972, as they did nothing for her image as a prickly, out-of-touch, upper-middle-class woman, who was being mocked in the press. She thought for a moment and then shot back, ‘No! I’m damned if I will! They were a wedding present from my husband and if I want to wear them I’m going to!’ Ronald Miller recalled, ‘Her voice was rather high-pitched and her fair hair bobbed furiously but there was no mistaking her contempt for such personal attacks or her resolve not to bow to them’.[98] She was hardening from the woman candidate who had taken fashion advice from Conservative Head Office into Mrs. Thatcher, the Iron Lady.
In 1971, a group of students had chanted ‘“Thatcher out, Socialism in!’ ‘Thatcher is here to stay!’ she told them. She had to face several unpleasant demonstrations that year, requiring police protection. In 1985, she said facing those protests was ‘just about the very best training a Prime Minister could have’.[99] In a 1989 interview, she said she worked in a more concentrated way than she had in the past, which was something she had learned to do over the years.[100] The pearls distracted her critics from the way Mrs. Thatcher was her inner steel.
Other important aspects of Thatcher’s success – her ‘enormous powers of concentration’, her ability to get by on less sleep than other people – were noted early, by a school friend.[101] Although Moore writes ‘she was not as invincible as she believed’ and often showed signs of tiredness, her ability to work hard on minimal sleep was well observed.[102] Ian Gow, her Parliamentary Private Secretary, said on the news in 1982, ‘I don’t know whether she needs less sleep. She certainly gets less sleep. But I think it’s really a triumph of the spirit over the flesh’.[103]
Is there a better phrase to describe the role of tenacity in her success than ‘the triumph of the spirit over the flesh’? This comes from the Methodism of her childhood, with its emphasis on duty and conscientiousness. ‘We were brought up to work’, she told Kelvin McKenzie. ‘It was a sin not to work’.[104] It was the same for Law and Coolidge and Truman and Eisenhower. They had the chance to go an easier way. Their lives did not always reward their efforts. They did not have to persist. In a sense, it was strange that they did. Eisenhower could have left the military for a well-paying private sector job. Before the Senate, Truman assumed he would retire to a sinecure. Law sought the leadership because of fortuitous circumstances; he never looked for fortunate ones. He declined the chance to be Prime Minister twice, putting country before ambition.
A combination of endurance, learning, ideas, energy, and decision was how a woman whom few people expected anything of, with no senior cabinet experience and a very small support base, , became a great world leader, out of nowhere, aged fifty. She was lucky, but not passive. Lord Carrington said, ‘She used the luck and she’s been determined and courageous’.[105] As Mrs. Thatcher said, when asked about the potential male contenders for the leadership, ‘I didn’t hesitate, I took the decision quickly and I’ve never had any doubt about it, that it was the right decision and I never faltered and I’m in no doubt now’. This ability to decide had been evident in her earlier career. It was what William J. Galloway noticed about her. And again and again, decisiveness would mean Margaret Thatcher was almost constantly underrated for the ten years she stayed in office. As John Campbell said, ‘She made her own luck; she seized chances from which others shrank, and she exploited their hesitation with ruthless certainty.’[106]
Every time fate intervened, she was ready.
[1]. David Canadine, Margaret Thatcher: A Life and Legacy (Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 7.
[2]. ‘Written Interview’, Pionyerskaya Pravda, Margaret Thatcher Foundation, 10 March 1990, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107894 [accessed 27 June 2022].
[3]. London School of Economics, Thatcher, The Thatcher Factor/1, 001/3, Interview with Jeffrey Archer, pp. 6, 7.
[4]. 1949–59 (candidate): Interview with Marjorie Maxse, 1 February 1949, Thatcher MSS (1/1/1), Margaret Thatcher Foundation, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/109915 [accessed 27 June 2022]; 1949–59 (candidate): Beryl Cook to J. P. L. Thomas, 1 February 1949, Thatcher MSS (memoirs boxes), Margaret Thatcher Foundation, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/109917 [accessed 27 June 2022]; 1949–59 (candidate): Letters of reference, 1 February 1949, Margaret Thatcher Foundation, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/109916 [accessed 27 June 2022]; 1949–59 (candidate): Beryl Cook report on Margaret Roberts, Conservative Party Archive CCO 220/3/11/6, 19 November 1951, Margaret Thatcher Foundation, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/111242 [accessed 27 june 2022].
[5]. Margaret Thatcher to John Hare, 3 January 1955, Thatcher MSS (1/1/1), Margaret Thatcher Foundation, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/109935 [accessed 27 June 2022].
[6]. 1949–59 (candidate): Donald Kaberry Interview with MT, 14 March 1956, Donald Kaberry to Margaret Thatcher 15 March 1956, Thatcher MSS (1/1/1), Margaret Thatcher Foundation, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/109938 [accessed 27 June 2022].
[7]. Rachel Reeves, Women of Westminster: The MPs Who Changed Politics (Bloomsbury, 2019), p. 79.
[8]. ‘Extract from report on candidates interviewed by Maidstone Division’, Thatcher MSS (1/1/1), 18 March 1958, Margaret Thatcher Foundation, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/109943 [accessed 28 June 2022].
[9]. ‘Extract from memo Miss Harris to Mr. Karberry’, 15 July 2022, Thatcher MSS (1/1/1), Margaret Thatcher Foundation, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/109944 [accessed 28 June 2022].
[10]. Margaret Thatcher to Donald Kaberry, 18 August 1958, Thatcher MSS (1/1/1), Margaret Thatcher Foundation, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/109946 [accessed 28 June 2022].
[11]. Margaret Thatcher to Donald Karberry, 16 March 1956, Thatcher MSS (1/1/1), Margaret Thatcher Foundation, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/109939 [accessed 28 June 2022].
[12]. ‘Reports received from Central Office Area Agents on Parliamentary Candidates: Finchley – Mrs Margaret Thatcher’, 1 November 1959, Thatcher MSS (1/1/1), Margaret Thatcher Foundation, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/109947 [accessed 28 June 2022].
[13]. Tony Shrimsley, ‘Margaret: First Woman Chancellor?’, Sun, 10 April 1970, Margaret Thatcher Foundation, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/101809 [accessed 28 June 2022].
[14]. Lewis, p. 75.
[15]. Moore, p. 185.
[16]. Luke Blaxill and Kaspar Beelen, ‘A Feminized Language of Democracy? The Representation of Women at Westminster since 1945’, Twentieth Century British History 27:3 (September 2016), pp. 412–449, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hww028
[17]. Margaret Thatcher, ‘Interview for Finchley Times’, 9 December 1966, Margaret Thatcher Foundation, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/101297 [accessed 21 June 2022]
[18]. Giles Scott-Smith, ‘“Her Rather Ambitious Washington Program”: Margaret Thatcher’s International Visitor Program Visit to the United States in 1967’ Contemporary British History, November 2003, pp. 65–86. doi: 10.1080/13619460308565458
[19]. Author’s interview with Charles Moore, https://commonreader.substack.com/p/charles-moore-interview?s=wdetails
[20]. Dean Keith Simonton, Genius, Creativity, & Leadership: Historiometric Enquiries (Harvard, 1984), p. 65.
[21]. Jon Agar, ‘Thatcher, Scientist’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 22 June 2011, DOI:10.1098/rsnr.2010.0096), Margaret Thatcher Foundation, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/112774 [accessed 24 June 2022], p. 10.
[22]. Ibid., p. 12.
[23]. Agar, ‘Thatcher, Scientist’, p. 12.
[24]. Ibid.
[25]. Martin Gilbert, In Search of Churchill (HarperCollins, 1995), p. 266.
[26]. London School of Economics, Thatcher, The Thatcher Factor/1, 002/2, Interview with Lord Carrington, p. 4.
[27]. Author’s interview with Charles Moore.
[28]. John Campbell, Margaret Thatcher: Volume One: The Grocer’s Daughter (Vintage, 2007), p. 265.
[29]. Author’s interview with Charles Moore.
[30]. Shlaes, Coolidge, pp. 254–5.
[31]. Ibid., pp. 277–8.
[32]. A. J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World, reprint edn (Bantam Books, 2020), p. 247.
[33]. For details of Bonar Law, see Robert Blake, The Unknown Prime Minister: The Life and Times of Andrew Bonar Law, 1858–1923, reprint edn (Faber & Faber) and R. J. Q. Adams, Bonar Law: The Unknown Prime Minister (John Murray, 1999).
[34]. Ferdinand Mount, Cold Cream (Bloomsbury, 2009), p. 289.
[35]. Interview, Daily Mail, 1 March 1990, Margaret Thatcher Foundation, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107885 [accessed 27 June 2022].
[36]. Mount, Cold Cream, p. 290.
[37]. Ibid., p. 286.
[38]. Margaret Thatcher, ‘Interview for Finchley Times’, 9 December 1966, Margaret Thatcher Foundation, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/101297 [accessed 21 June 2022].
[39]. Charles Stuart Kennedy, ‘Interview with William J. Galloway’, 28 September 1999, The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project, Library of Congress, pp. 102–4, 136, 142, http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000406 [accessed 30 June 2022].
[40]. Margaret Thatcher, TV Interview for Granada TV World in Action, 31 January 1975, Margaret Thatcher Foundation, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/102450
[41]. Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Rationing, Austerity and the Conservative Party Recovery after 1945’, The Historical Journal, 37 (1994), pp. 173–97 (p. 177).
[42]. Simon Garfield, Our Hidden Lives: The Remarkable Diaries of Postwar Britain (Ebury, 2005), p. 251.
[43]. Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Rationing’, p. 179.
[44]. Ibid., pp. 178–9.
[45]. Ibid., pp. 193–4.
[46]. David Kynaston, Austerity Britain, 1945–1951 (Bloomsbury, 2008), p. 385.
[47]. James Hinton, ‘Militant Housewives: The British Housewives’ League and the Attlee Government’, History Workshop 38 (1994), pp. 128–56, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4289322 [accessed 20 June 2022]. There was a sixteen-point swing for middle-class women, compared to seven points overall for women and thirteen points for middle-class men.
[48]. Ruth Adam, A Woman’s Place, 1910–1975 (Chatto & Windus, 1975), p. 162.
[49]. Margaret Thatcher, ‘1950 General Election Address’, 3 February 1950, Margaret Thatcher Foundation, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/100858 [accessed, 21 June 2022].
[50]. Margaret Thatcher, ‘Interview for Finchley Times’, 9 December 1966, Margaret Thatcher Foundation, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/101297 [accessed 21 June 2022].
[51]. Margaret Thatcher, ‘1970 General Election Address’, 28 May 1970, Margaret Thatcher Foundation, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/101754 [accessed, 21 June 2022].
[52]. Margaret Thatcher, ‘Interview for Finchley Times’, 1 August 1969, Margaret Thatcher Foundation, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/101678 [accessed, 21 June 2022].
[53]. Denis Kavanagh, ‘Sir Gordon Reece’, Independent, 26 September 2001, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/sir-gordon-reece-9201156.html [accessed 4 July 2022].
[54]. Laura Beers, ‘Thatcher and the Women’s Vote’, in Making Thatcher’s Britain, ed. Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders (Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 113–31 (p. 119).
[55]. Moore, Margaret Thatcher, p. 278.
[56]. Ibid., p. 277.
[57]. John Kemp, ‘Mrs Thatcher’s Plans for Retirement’, Pre-Retirement Choice, January 1975, pp. 13–14, Margaret Thatcher Foundation, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/102055 [accessed 24 June 2022].
[58]. Margaret Thatcher TV Interview for Granada TV World in Action, 31 January 1975, Margaret Thatcher Foundation, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/102450
[59]. Canadine, Margaret Thatcher, p. 35.
[60]. Russell Lewis, Margaret Thatcher: A Personal and Political Biography (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 4.
[61]. Canadine, Margaret Thatcher, p. 16.
[62]. Moore, Margaret Thatcher, pp. 276, 277, 280.
[63]. Ibid., p. 285
[64]. Jean Mann, Woman in Parliament (Odhams Press, 1962), p. 31
[65]. Bernard Levin, ‘The Tories’ Best Hope of Salvation’, The Times, 23 January 1975, p. 16.
[66]. Bernard Levin, ‘Find the Lady Should be the Cry If Tories Want a Change’, The Times, 28 January 1975, p. 14.
[67]. Lewis, Margaret Thatcher, p. 2.
[68]. Moore, Margaret Thatcher, p. 273.
[69]. Ibid., p. 268.
[70]. Ibid., p. 275.
[71]. Ibid., p. 287.
[72]. Ibid., p. 291.
[73]. Ibid., p. 135.
[74]. Ibid., p. 269n.
[75]. Bernard Levin, ‘Tories Must Look before They Leap into Line behind a New Leader’, The Times, 16 October 1974, p. 14.
[76]. Campbell, Margaret Thatcher, p. 287.
[77]. Miriam Stoppard interview, 1985
[78]. Ronald Miller, A View from the Wings (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1993), p. 225.
[79]. BBC Question Time, 11 April 2013,
[80]. Rachel Reeves, Women of Westminster: The MPs Who Changed Politics (Bloomsbury, 2019), p. 148.
[81]. Archive (Hailsham MSS), ‘MT: Hailsham diary (discussion with Peter Carrington) [serious doubts about MT & Keith Joseph]’, 29 March 1977, Margaret Thatcher Foundation, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/111182 [accessed 21 June 2022].
[82]. Moore, Margaret Thatcher, p. 453n.
[83]. PHS, ‘The Times Diary: Professionalism in a Nice Blue Hat’, The Times, 11 September 1974, p. 14.
[84]. Public Servant, Secret Agent: The Elusive Life and Violent Death of Airey Neave (Fourth Estate, 2002), p. 257.
[85]. George Younger, 1976–1979 Younger Diary, 4 December 1978, 5 April 1979, Margaret Thatcher Foundation, http://09b37156ee7ea2a93a5e-6db7349bced3b64202e14ff100a12173.r35.cf1.rackcdn.com/Arcdocs/1976-79%20Younger%20diary.pdf [accessed 21 June 2022].
[86]. David Cannadine, ‘Thatcher [née Roberts], Margaret Hilda, Baroness Thatcher (1925–2013)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://doi-org.lonlib.idm.oclc.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/106415
[87]. Edward Pierce, ‘Sir Gordon Reece’, Guardian, 27 September 2001, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2001/sep/27/guardianobituaries.obituaries [accessed 4 July 2022].
[88]. Denis Kavanagh, ‘Sir Gordon Reece’, Independent, 26 September 2001, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/sir-gordon-reece-9201156.html [accessed 4 July 2022].
[89] Mann, Woman in Parliament, pp. 35-36
[90]. London School of Economics, Thatcher, The Thatcher Factor/1, 001/6, Interview with Tim Bell, p. 3.
[91]. Reeves, Women of Westminster, p. 107; Margaret Thatcher, Interview for Daily Star, 27 January 1988, Margaret Thatcher Foundation, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107029 [accessed 19 August 2022].
[92]. Miller, A View from the Wings, pp. 212–13, 219.
[93]. London School of Economics, Thatcher, The Thatcher Factor/1, 002/10, Interview with Lord Gowrie, p. 10.
[94]. Campbell, Margaret Thatcher, pp. 292, 294.
[95]. Radek Sikorski, ‘A Cold War Angel and a Democratic Miracle’, Daily Telegraph, 10 April 2013, p. 23.
[96]. Charles Stuart Kennedy, ‘Interview with William J. Galloway’, 28 September 1999, The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project, Library of Congress, p. 143, http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000406 [accessed 30 June 2022].
[97]. Moore, Margaret Thatcher, p. 223.
[98]. Miller, A View from the Wings, p. 219.
[99]. Campbell, Margaret Thatcher, p. 234.
[100]. Kelvin McKenzie, Interview transcript, Sun, 6 November 1989, Margaret Thatcher Foundation, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107430 [accessed 27 June 2022].
[101]. Moore, Margaret Thatcher, p. 26.
[102]. Ibid., p. 438.
[103]. Ibid., p. 730.
[104]. Kelvin McKenzie, Interview transcript, Sun, 6 November 1989, Margaret Thatcher Foundation, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107430 [accessed 27 June 2022].
[105]. London School of Economics, Thatcher, The Thatcher Factor/1, 002/2, Interview with Lord Carrington, p. 32.
[106]. Campbell, Margaret Thatcher, p. 261.
I'm sorry, but I can't see her as anything but the architect of the conservative political policies that led Britain to be in the current mess it is in...