Charles Moore

The stubborn courage of women in power

As Margaret Thatcher’s authorised biographer (one more volume to come…), I read a great deal about her. I don’t think it is a coincidence that the two books published since she died from which I have learnt the most about her are both by women.

Nor is it coincidental that they are written by women of a different generation from hers. Part of the fascination of Mrs Thatcher is the shock she brought to the system, not only because she was the first woman prime minister but also because she was a fervently, radically conservative one.

Millions of ordinary women admired her greatly. But for the intellectual, predominantly Left-leaning women writers of

Mrs Thatcher’s generation, the shock was too great to bear. If you believed that it was feminism that would bring women to power, how could you cope with the fact that a declaredly anti-feminist woman was the first to get to the top, and to stay there longer than any predecessor since the 19th century?

Younger women, whatever their views of Mrs Thatcher, are less likely to feel this sense of personal affront. They have more perspective. It is easier for them to see that, whatever she said, she was a sort of feminist, and can only be understood not as a pretend man, but as a very real woman.

The first of these two books is

God & Mrs Thatcher by Eliza Filby, published in 2015. As its title suggests, it discusses the links between those two omnipotent entities.

The second, just out, is People Like Us by Caroline Slocock. Ms Slocock was Mrs Thatcher’s first female private secretary (a private secretary being not a personal assistant but a youngish, top-flight civil servant in the minister’s private office). Politically, she was not close to her boss, and she later became the chief executive of the Equal Opportunities Commission. She was not “one of us”. Yet, in another sense, she was: she was a serious-minded, lower-middle-class, hard-working, ambitious, reformist woman in a man’s world. Hence much of the interest of her book.

Thus, while criticising Mrs Thatcher for not employing more women and not believing that women’s solidarity changes the world, Caroline Slocock can also say that “the No 10 I knew under Margaret Thatcher was the most feminine working environment I have ever known”. When she interviewed Caroline for her job, the prime minister brought along a bowl of hyacinths, because she thought she would like them. Ms Slocock found Mrs Thatcher “frightening” but, sitting at the back of the Cabinet Room at the famous meeting in which she resigned, she found herself weeping. By the end of that day, all the loo paper in the Downing Street women’s lavatories had gone because so many female staff had come in to wipe their tears.

This is more than just the story – quite familiar in powerful people – of a character who is much nicer in private than in public. It is part of a bigger narrative about a woman with a strong domestic sense, but an even stronger sense of mission. So her work was her home and her staff were her family: “It was the work… not the politics, that was the centre of interest in her life.” It was not joyless drudgery. It was a labour of love.

Only a woman would have run the country that way – minding so desperately, taking on too much, noticing both tiny things and big ones, disrespecting hierarchy, and fighting all the time because “there was only one thing to do in the battle of the sexes, and that was to win”. So when, after winning so often, she finally loses, there is true pathos.

The tale is illumined by nice vignettes. Mrs Thatcher usually stands on a footstool in No 10 to make a speech, because she is only 5ft 4in. Failing to gouge money out of the Treasury for a charity for lone mothers, she writes it a cheque for £1,000 herself. Her old science professor, the Nobel Prize winner Dorothy Hodgkin, comes to lunch at No 10. She has bad arthritis, so Mrs Thatcher cuts her meat up for her. The book makes the reader think about wider questions. Why is it that the three most striking characters in British public life in the past 50 years – Margaret Thatcher, Diana, Princess of Wales and the Queen – have been women? Is it mere rarity value? Or is because – though each is so different from the others – there is something about being female that touches reality more closely?

The rage at present is for “diversity”, but in practice this seems to mean uniformity. The change-bringing power of female leadership is being neutered by a compliance culture, where important but second-order issues about maternity leave, equal pay and flexible hours are exalted over the content of the job itself. Mrs Thatcher always argued that so long as women defined themselves by “women’s issues”, they would still be marginalised.

One watches the struggles of our present Prime Minister. Mrs May comes under all sorts of strains that a man would be spared – discussion of her childlessness, her appearance, her awkwardness. She suffers from the lack (which Mrs Thatcher also knew so well) of a club of chums to fall back on in tricky times. But against these handicaps, she has the compensating female virtues that go with the territory – a sense of duty and a stubborn courage.

READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/opinion