COME BACK MAGGIE, ALL IS FORGIVEN
Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography ★★★★ ★
Charles Moore (Penguin, R335)
ALL my life I have been dogged by self-righteous lefties who blamed Margaret Thatcher for everything, from the collapse of the economy to their failing to get a university place. I was one of them myself. I became properly acquainted with her through the TV series Spitting Image, where her middleclass face morphed easily into a turnip with a badger snout, forehead as shiny as a peeled potato.
Did this woman really live through the ’60s in swinging London? How was it possible that she was still wearing a tweed suit and pearls, and like the Queen was addicted to lavender frock coats and big hats? Here was someone who said she didn’t believe in socialism when épater la bourgeoisie was tattooed on all our stupid hearts.
In his authorised biography, Charles Moore describes her “as a combination of a headgirl and a nurse”. Friends from Oxford remember her as being a “rather brown girl”.
She was born in a house with no garden, no hot water and an outside lavatory (please note). Her father was an unbending Methodist; her sister said: “In our house it was church, church, church.” Margaret was more attached to him than her mother. “I learnt everything I knew from my father but after the age of 15 I had nothing to say to my mother,” she once said.
Mrs T was inclined to think of Africa as the dark continent. When she went to the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Lusaka in 1979, she insisted on wearing dark glasses because, as she told Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington, she was certain “they were going to throw acid in her face”. But she fell for Kenneth Kaunda, president of Zambia, dancing the night away in his arms.
When she became prime minister in 1979, free enterprise was still a shaky concept and the shadows of communism and Stalin still slouched roughly forward.
Thatcher’s desire was to dynamite old concepts and reshape society. Standing up to the coal miners’ strike despite mass picketing was the first big coup.
All through her career her big desire was to join the carefree, charm-filled world of the aristocrats; but she tried too hard. The dated honey-coloured shampoo and set, the garish jewellery, her over-elocuted voice and her bad clothes imprisoned her forever.
But after reading two books on Mrs T — the other was The Iron Lady by Hugo Young — my overall feeling is one of respectful sadness for the lack of love she seemed to endure. Denis, whom the media depicted as a stood-upon shrimp, was selfish, rich and far from helpful. Before going to work she would cook him breakfast. When he first saw the twins, he said: “They look like rabbits, can’t you put them back?”
She did her best at motherhood but her children were awful. Mark was often in trouble with the law and the charmless loud-mouthed Carol, when asked about her mother on a TV show, said: “I don’t even have her telephone number.”
She was far from perfect but she understood fair play and human need in a duty-bound manner, opening charity bazaars, attending Rotary dinners and being a heroic housewife.
On the whole she had a pretty grim time, supporting commonsense ideas that never got popular support. She was bullied by the men in the cabinet, particularly former prime minister Edward Heath, a sexually ambivalent despot.
Her end was sudden and terrible. The day after she was driven away with her sad, surviving face she rang her private secretary and asked about a plumber. “Try the Yellow Pages,” he said carelessly. Aides, secretaries, chauffeurs and power, gone in a twinkle. —