The Invincible Mrs. Thatcher

Britain’s most recognizable and individual peacetime prime minister was also the first to be known by someone else’s name

By Charles Moore

Not long after she resigned as prime minister, in 1990, Margaret Thatcher began to write her memoirs. I met her at a dinner party and asked her what she would call them. The famous blue eyes flashed at me: “Undefeated!” she declared.

This expressed a sober arithmetical fact. Uniquely at that time in British politics, Margaret Thatcher had won three general elections in a row as party leader and had never lost any. Before she had the chance to contest her fourth, she was deposed by members of Parliament from her own party in a coup. Yet, even in that contest, the pure numbers were on her side. In 1990, when the Conservative Party staged a challenge to her leadership, she won more legislators’ votes than her main rival, but not enough to avoid a second ballot. Her Cabinet colleagues convinced her that she would be humiliated in the runoff, and she resigned.

In the end, those memoirs were given a more boring title (The Downing Street Years), but that one-word exclamation succinctly expressed the great Thatcher myth of invincibility. And in a sense it was true. Much more than any other modern British politician—particularly Conservative politicians accustomed to swimming against a leftish cultural tide—Margaret Thatcher fought, and Margaret Thatcher won. Her victory was so great that it changed her political opponents—the Labour Party—as much as it changed her own party. Her defeat of the left made Tony Blair possible. And today, with David Cameron having finally led the Conservatives back to No. 10 Downing Street and wrestling with a massive inherited government deficit, as Mrs. Thatcher did 30 years earlier, all the old debates have become relevant once more.

As well as elections, Margaret Thatcher won wars. When Argentina invaded the British colony of the Falkland Islands, in the South Atlantic, in April 1982, she sent a task force of 27,000 across the world and recaptured them by June. As the force set sail, she paraphrased Queen Victoria: “Failure—the possibilities do not exist!” With Ronald Reagan in the White House for most of her time as prime minister, she was able to re-forge a mighty defensive alliance that outpaced the Soviet Union and hastened the end of the Cold War. After Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, in September 1990, she attended a conference with Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush, who was undecided about how best to act. She told him, “Look, George, this is no time to go wobbly!”

Perhaps more important still, she won the big arguments. She argued that inflation was a disease of money that could be cured by controlling the growth of the money supply alone, without suppressing incomes. During her premiership, inflation fell from a high of 27 percent in 1975 to 2.5 percent by 1986. She believed that the political power of British labor unions had strangled enterprise and placed the country at the mercy of unelected barons. When she removed the legal immunities that protected unions from the financial consequences of their actions and overcame a yearlong strike organized by the hard-left leadership of the coal miners’ union, the employee days lost to strikes each year fell from 29.5 million in 1979 to 1.9 million in 1986. She said that taxes were too high and brought the top rate down from 98 percent to 40 percent. She declared that the state should not be running British business and led the world in “privatization”—a word she found ugly but a concept she loved—selling off airlines, airports, utilities, and phone and oil companies to the private sector. In every case, her critics said that it could not be done. Yet, for better and for worse, she did it.

To find out why, we must go back to Grantham, where Margaret Hilda Roberts was born on October 13, 1925. Grantham was, and remains, a small market town in the county of Lincolnshire, in the East Midlands of England. Neither rich nor poor, neither remote nor metropolitan, it is an ordinary place, and hers was, at least in appearance, an ordinary family.

Margaret Thatcher’s father was the single biggest influence on her life. Alfred Roberts was a grocer who ran two fairly successful shops in Grantham. He was also a Methodist lay preacher, well known for the quality of his sermons, and an alderman, a type of local politician now obsolete. Alderman Roberts had no sons and appears to have harbored for Margaret, the second of his two daughters, many of the ambitions which, had he been born to a higher level of society, he might have been able to fulfill for himself.

Roberts impressed upon young Margaret the importance of knowledge, duty, and hard work, the power of both the spoken and the written word, and the value of public service. The Roberts girls had to borrow and read two books from the library every week, at least one of them nonfiction. They attended church twice on Sundays (where Margaret sang notably well), and Margaret often accompanied her father to political meetings. Because the family lived above one of the shops, Alderman Roberts usually came home for meals with the girls. He and Margaret discussed public events, including the coming war with Germany. Of her mother, Beatrice, Margaret Thatcher said, “Oh, Mother. Mother was marvelous—she helped Father.”

Life above the grocer’s shop was not glamorous or cosmopolitan, but Margaret Roberts’s upbringing was unusual for a woman of her background. She seems always to have been encouraged to acquire her own knowledge, form her own views, and make her own way. “Never do things just because other people do them,” her father told her, and she didn’t. “I knew that I would have to earn my own living,” she wrote. How did she know? This was an unusual approach at a time when most women were groomed for marriage rather than for a career. No member of Margaret’s family had ever been to a university, let alone to Oxford, yet Margaret won a place there when such a thing was rare in her class, and rarer still—especially as she was a chemist—for her sex. Her father drove her to it. He may have been a Victorian patriarch, but he was no sexist.

Perhaps because her first and greatest hero was her father, Margaret benefited from the emancipation of women without showing the slightest interest in it. “I owe nothing to women’s lib,” she said in an interview in 1982, and she never, in theory, rejected the idea that a woman’s place is in the home. Indeed, she made great play with the notion that the housewife knows best. Seeking to paint her as a crude homebody, her opponents in the Tory leadership contest of 1975 played up the story, based on an interview that she had given, that she hoarded goods in her larder against the possibility (quite real at that time) of shortages. Mrs. Thatcher had the sense to be unashamed, knowing that many women voters would sympathize, and invited reporters to come and have a look at her larder. In the general-election campaign of 1979, which brought her to power for the first time, she explained that “any woman who understands the problems of running a home will be nearer to understanding the problems of running the country.” In every election campaign, she would charge into a supermarket, grab a shopping cart, and start off down the aisles at a fearful pace, chased by cameras as she piled goods—almost always British goods—into the basket.

The very name “Mrs. Thatcher” showed her ease with the traditional role. Not for her the ambiguous nomenclature of Hillary Rodham Clinton or Tony Blair’s wife, who is sometimes known as Cherie Booth and sometimes Cherie Blair. Britain’s most recognizable and individual peacetime prime minister was also the first to be known by someone else’s name. While she might have been the first science graduate to become prime minister, one of a tiny handful of women who became tax barristers, and a member of Parliament at age 33, not to mention the first woman prime minister, she never wanted to appear to upset the outward appearances of the old order.

When she married Denis Thatcher, in 1951, he was a well-established (and previously married) businessman and decorated war veteran, 10 years older than she and of a rather higher social class. She quickly and dutifully bore him twins, Mark and Carol, and set up a comfortable and orderly home in Chelsea. She always deferred to him in the conventional male areas—money, sports, the choice of a school for their son—and made much of producing his dinner, even though the meals were usually purchased ready-made at Marks & Spencer. Her bossiness toward him was the bossiness of traditional wife to traditional husband. I once sat next to him at a dinner where he was pushing his food around the plate, clearly trying to avoid eating it. “Don’t draw attention to it,” he told me, “or it will be cosmic obloquy from her.”