MARGARET THATCHER. BIOGRAPHY

(an extract)

There can be little doubt that to the life and politics of Margaret Thatcher her husband Denis has been the longest-serving, most influential contributor.

Denis Thatcher was a better-breeched product of north Kent Conservatism than many others in the party when Margaret Roberts became the candidate at Dartford. They didn’t meet at a Young Conservatives’ dance but, in rarer and more earnest style, on the night of her adoption in 1949.

Denis had a family business, the Atlas Preservative Company, which was handed down to him from his father. Denis was the managing director and, with the break for the war, had worked there since 1934. He is described as being athletic and handsome at the time. He certainly seems to have been on the lookout for a wife. In the most devoted of the early biographies of Margaret, one of the few works in which Denis has allowed himself to be directly quoted, George Gardiner recreates a scene which gives one the impression that Denis had produced a number of potential spouses for the inspection of his business friends. After going out with Margaret for quite a while, Gardiner reports, he took her to the annual diner dance of his trade association. It was there that the romance received final approval. Gardiner writes, with a blush: «Towards the end of the evening, his company chairman leaned over to mutter in his ear, “That’s it, Denis – that’s the one!”»

This verdict, on which Denis in due course acted, is one which Margaret herself has never had any cause to regret. They always had quite a lot in common: an interest in economics, whether from the political or the business angle, and an abiding belief in the unchangeable virtues of the Conservative Party. Denis himself was never a politician but he was and always has been an utterly dependable upholder of all the things his wife believed in.

Denis's first service to her was as agent of her definite break with the past.. When she married him in December 1951, she broke with her home town, her class and her religion. From Grantham and its lower bourgeoisie she was already detached by her years at Oxford. Marriage marked and sealed the distance she had come. By marrying the successful inheritor of a medium-sized family business, she placed herself in the affluent rather than the struggling middle class. She married above herself, he, by conventional standards, below. Nobody who knows them denies that it has been a very happy match, which has flourished on the pressures of her life.

But the most jarring rupture marriage brought was with the Methodism of her youth. Denis had been married before, just as the war was starting. When he returned from the fighting, the pair found themselves to be strangers and got divorced. At that time the strict code of Methodism did not entirely approve of divorce and remarriage, and Margaret had been reared as a strict Methodist. However, this does not appear to have caused her to hesitate. Other factors did: this was no instant love-match, and the courtship took two years to mature. The injunctions of Methodism were set aside, and from now on, if there was any religious leaning in the Thatcher household, it was towards the more comfortable Tory solace, the Church of England.

Having married a man of means, Margaret didn't have to earn a living. This is what enabled her to read for the Bar. When she had children, he could afford a living-in nanny, thus enabling her to work. And she began to practice at the Bar not because of any driving economic need – he real ambition, after all, was for a career that was not at all well rewarded. Invited to contribute to a popular newspaper series about women and public life, young Mrs. Thatcher wrote in the Sunday Graphic in February 1952 that women should not feel obliged to stay at home but they should have careers. «In this way, gifts and talents that would otherwise be wasted are developed to the benefit of the community». She thought it nonsense to say that the family suffered. Women, indeed, should not merely work but strive to reach the top of their profession. And they should not be satisfied with lesser posts. «Should a woman arise equal to the task, I say let her have an equal chance with the men».

In 1952 these trenchant demands were being made by a woman without a job, who was in the early stages of reading for the Bar. It was Denis who afforded her the luxury of making them. He gave her the financial security she herself has never had to earn. Financially Margaret Thatcher belonged to the leisured classes, and this fortunate condition enabled her to pursue a political career with undistracted single-mindedness.

Denis had no political ambition himself, he has always been a prop, never a rival. From the beginning, self-effacement has been his lot. «I’ve always taken the view that my job comes first. After all, I’ve had a wife and two kids to keep», he said to George Gardiner. As it turned out, by marrying him, Margaret secured a like-minded consort for the post she had eventually to attain. He agreed with everything important she stood for, by the time this settled itself into the collection of ideas to which he gave his name – Thatcherism. He believed in them with decidedly fewer qualifications than she did. Publicly, one of his talents was to remain the soul of almost unfailing discretion, but privately, he was an influence of positive importance.

He retained during all these years the innocence of the non-politician, the plain man in the Home Counties saloon bar. Everything he felt and thought – from staunch hostility to socialists and trade unions to his inextinguishable affection for white South Africa – could be privately expressed without regard for the hesitations deemed prudent by public people. At home he did not shrink from expressing them. Coinciding as they usually did with the raw instincts of his wife, they played their part in the ceaseless struggle between gut instinct and political calculation which became so prominent among the motifs threading themselves through her prime-ministership. Denis, after all, saw her almost every day, and he was not a shrinking violet.

The caricature which immortalized him as a major satirical character in Private Eye1 was in some respects defective. In showing his love of golf and golf clubs, and his preference for businessmen over politicians, it was true to life, but the image of a man frightened of his wife or less than loyally affectionate was misleading. All the years after their marriage Denis remained an affectionate comrade-in-arms. “When I'm in a state I have no one to turn to except Denis,” his wife told a reporter shortly after becoming PM. The vows they made in Wesley's Chapel were put to the test far more severely than either can have expected, both for better and for worse. But the bond endured. When the values thus conjoined were put in charge of the country, they survived remarkably unimpaired.

(by Hugo Young)

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