There is No Alternative (5 page)

Hers was a lower-middle-class, piously Methodist family of no distinction. During her time in power, rumors circulated persistently that somehow, through some ancestral illegitimate dalliance, nobility had slipped into her bloodline. No evidence for it at all. The rumors themselves are significant, though, for they suggest the depth of Britain's obsession with breeding and class. Never were there rumors, by contrast, that Bill Clinton's grandmother had trysted with a Kennedy; no one in America believed it
literally
impossible for a leader of his stature to have surfaced from an Arkansas trailer park milieu. Americans don't think that way.

Her father, Alfred Roberts, was a town alderman and for a short time Grantham's mayor, so she was exposed to politics from her earliest childhood, but he earned his living as a grocer. He was a Wesleyan lay preacher. This is a significant point. Lay preaching was one of the few ways a man of his epoch and class background could acquire ease and fluency as a public speaker. He thereby inherited a famously eloquent oratorical tradition and passed it on to his daughter. Margaret Thatcher's speaking career began in childhood, on Sundays, when she read from the high pulpit.

Her mother was a dressmaker. Thatcher revered her father and spoke of him often; she almost never spoke of her mother. No one knows why she didn't, but everyone thinks it significant. It is a clue, it is said, albeit an opaque one, to understanding her ambition and the nature of her interactions with men.

Margaret Roberts spent her youth, according to the legend she later assiduously promoted, carefully weighing flour and counting change in the family shop, learning the housewifely principles of
industry and thrift that subsequently informed her economic policy. Clearly this legend is not the whole story; there is no obvious path between measuring flour and championing monetarism. But like many legends it contains elements of truth. Even if her political philosophy clearly emerged from other influences as well, her class background—that frugal, industrious, Methodist upbringing—was crucially important to informing her worldview.

Britain's aristocracy tends to be educated at public schools, such as Eton and Harrow, which are not public schools in the American sense, but rather exclusive private ones. Margaret Roberts went to the local grammar school, a public school in the American sense. She was an exceptionally hardworking student and self-righteous, even as a child, about her unnatural discipline. At the age of nine, she was congratulated by her school headmistress for her luck in winning a poetry-reading contest. “I wasn't lucky,” she replied. “I deserved it.”

Through her diligence she earned a place at Somerville College at Oxford University. Oxford's self-governing colleges, of which there are now thirty-nine, are united in something like a federal system. At that time only a small number of these colleges admitted women; Somerville was an all-women's college.

By the time I arrived at Oxford, roughly half a century later, all of its colleges admitted women. My college, Balliol, had done so for only a decade, however, and the ratio of men to women at the graduate level was still about five to one. It is commonly assumed that being a woman in this largely male environment must have been a terrible disadvantage for her, and I am sure that at times this was so. She was unable to join the Oxford Union, for example, the debating club that is the traditional first step to a parliamentary career. But from personal experience I can say that for a woman of the right temperament, this environment was a huge advantage. “Largely male” need not mean “male-dominated.” If you were one of only a handful of women among a group of young men who have barely seen a woman before in their lives—sex-segregated
schools were and still are common in Britain—it was almost trivially easy to stand out from the crowd, terrify your peers, receive special attention from your tutors, and be the cynosure of any social gathering. It was a clearly observable law that the more bitterly a woman could be heard complaining of the university's institutional sexism, the more likely it was that she was ugly, hopelessly passive, or not all that bright. If Thatcher subsequently had no patience with feminists—“Some of us were making it before Women's Lib was even thought of,” she once snapped—I would wager it was because she made precisely the same observation.

Politically, she did well for herself at Oxford, becoming president of the university's Conservative Association. Academically, she did less well; she took a Second Class degree in chemistry. Oxford degrees are classified into Firsts, Seconds, and Thirds; they are awarded based on a student's performance in a single set of exams at the end of a three- or four-year study period. That she received a Second might be seen as evidence for a claim commonly made about her, to wit, that she was a woman of relatively modest intellectual gifts. On the other hand, when she subsequently decided to become a lawyer, she qualified after only two years of part-time study, all the while working full-time as a research chemist
and
assiduously seeking election to Parliament
and
getting pregnant—with twins, no less. She passed the bar exam only weeks after giving birth. However hardworking you are, I doubt you can do that without being quite fast on the draw.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. After graduating from Oxford, she worked in an Essex plastics factory while immersing herself in politics. She ran for a seat in Parliament twice, in 1950 and 1951, both times unsuccessfully. She had not been expected to win. The contested constituency was a Labour safe seat; running an inherently doomed campaign or two is a political rite of passage in Britain. But she gave her opponent an unexpectedly vigorous workout. Her uncommon energy in campaigning was widely remarked.

She was only twenty-three when she made her second attempt. In the same year she became engaged to Denis Thatcher, whom she met while campaigning. He was the heir to a prosperous chemicals business. Here the story of Margaret Roberts, the middle-class girl from a background of no special privilege, comes to an end. She believed in earning money the old-fashioned way, she always averred, and she earned hers in the most old-fashioned way of all: She married it. Her subsequent career
might
have been possible without her husband's money, but it wouldn't have been easier. This marriage was one of her shrewdest political decisions. It appears to have been a genuine love match, too; by all accounts the Thatchers were utterly devoted to each other. As mothers the world around have traditionally reminded their daughters, it is just as easy to love a rich man as a poor one.

Let us take a detour within a detour and return to Sir Bernard Ingham, to whom we have been speaking at the Institute of Directors. Ingham is the man who, more than anyone except Thatcher herself, invented the Margaret Thatcher legend. As her press secretary, Ingham was responsible for managing her image in the media, and in Thatcher's own words, “He never let me down.”
¹¹

Ingham is a convert, and like many converts, uncommonly devout. He was a member of the Labour Party and in his youth ran, unsuccessfully, as a Labour candidate for the city council in Leeds. Before joining the civil service in 1967, he worked as a journalist for the
Guardian,
Britain's leading organ of socialist sanctimony. After winning the 1979 general election, Thatcher met him, took an instant liking to him, and plucked him from his obscure position as a civil service under-secretary. It was a curious decision,
particularly because she was later known for sniffing out and at the soonest feasible opportunity extirpating the ideologically suspect from her inner circle. But as usual, her political instincts proved shrewd. Ingham became the truest of the blue believers, serving her faithfully until her downfall.

His views about Thatcher are important. Why? Because they represent the Party line. This is how Thatcher wanted herself to be understood. And because her press secretary was good at his job, this is widely how she
was
understood.

He describes the background from which she emerged thus:

She did what was
right,
she did what was
right,
she did what was
right.
She did it because her father told her to. She repeated those words over and over until through the hypnotic power of repetition they appeared at last to blaze from her forehead. If it is also true that she did what was practical and politically expedient—in fact, she was a master of the art of the possible, particularly gifted at fighting only the battles she could win—this was not the part of her personality she showcased.

Alderman Roberts's “son” won a seat in the House of Commons in 1959. The Conservatives were in power under Harold Macmillan. At thirty-four, she was the youngest woman in the House. In 1961, she became parliamentary under-secretary for pensions and national insurance. She was known in this position for her extraordinary mastery of economic statistics and for her good looks. “I have the latest red hot figure,” she once announced to the House, inadvertently parodying herself on both scores. She was momentarily baffled by the ensuing hilarity.

The Tories were ousted in 1964 and spent the next six years in opposition. Thatcher served in a number of shadow cabinet posts, and again her reputation was for diligence and a remarkable memory for statistics. I have neither heard anyone say nor read anywhere that during this period anyone recognized in her the leader she was to become. Said one colleague: “We all smiled benignly as we looked into those blue eyes and at the tilt of the golden head.
We, and all the world, had no idea what we were in for.”
¹²