Guesses at Thatcher's past

MARGARET THATCHER: Volume I, The Grocer's Daughter by John Campbell (Cape, 25)

THIS is an unofficial biography. The writer has not had access to Lady Thatcher's private papers.

These are reserved for the authorised biographer, Charles Moore, editor of The Daily Telegraph, whose book will not appear in her lifetime. John Campbell has had no hindrance but also no help from his subject or her family.

This must make his work an interim study. But there is an enormous amount of public information available, including the Oxford University Press CD-ROM, some 14 million words of her public utterances on disk. For wading through all this John Campbell would deserve a Nobel Prize for Assiduity - if such a thing existed.

Campbell takes the story to 1979 when Thatcher became Prime Minister. As one would expect from his highly efficient biography (also unofficial) of Ted Heath, he shows a masterly command of the politics of the period. His account of the formation of the Tory shadow cabinet and the leadership election in 1975 could not be better. He also shows how late a convert Thatcher herself was to "Thatcherism". This is less surprising than he seems to think. Her mentor, Keith Joseph, was one of my closest Oxford friends. We would have shared a flat in 1939 but for the war. He was then, like me, a left-of-centre Conservative - a Baldwinite believer in One Nation just as Thatcher was when she came up to Oxford four years later and as she remained until long afterwards. For example, she supported entry into the EEC.

Thatcherism was the later result of many converging doubts about post-war Conservatism. Few Tories thought in those terms before the early Seventies.

Margaret Thatcher may have privately welcomed, but did not publicly endorse, Joseph's famous speech at Preston in September 1974 when he put the case for destroying inflation above that for reducing unemployment, a theme which shook Conservative orthodoxy to its foundations. The weakest part of the book is about her early years. That "the child is father to the man" is, with suitable gender amendments, a widespread belief among biographers of eminent persons. There may be much truth in it.

The difficulty is that even the most doting parents, relations and nannies, can seldom predict the future eminence of the child or have any reason to record its actions or utterances. The exception is royalty, where, by the laws of succession, a high position is inevitable. We know far more about the childhood of Queen Victoria than of Disraeli or Gladstone. No one could have foreseen that Margaret Thatcher would be the first woman prime minister.

So information about her youth is inevitably scarce, apart from her own memoirs, which are bound to be somewhat distorted through the prism of time.

The one person who might have been able to throw some light is her sister, Muriel Cullen, four years older and married to an Essex farmer. But she has understandably preferred not to talk.

In these circumstances a biographer might be wise to say as little as possible beyond the bare bones of recorded fact. John Campbell prefers to speculate. On little evidence, he argues that she was rejected by her mother and had none of the rapport with her father that she later claimed. Alderman Roberts, the grocer, town councillor and mayor, only became an icon after his death and when she decided that the virtues of a prudent shopkeeper were what was needed to restore the economy of a Britain sunk in cosy corporatism and choked by union obstruction.

Certainly, after the age of 18 she was seldom in her family home, and even less often after her marriage.

But this seems natural enough for a hardworking young woman with a career to make. There is no reason to think that either she or her father harboured any resentment. After all, Alderman Roberts did appear on her platform when she was a candidate for Dartford. There is no evidence at all for the theory that he had wanted a son, that she knew it, and felt a deep sense of insecurity which fuelled her ambition. His political outlook was different from what became hers later. But to see her rebellion against paternalistic Tory-ism as "a guilty, perhaps unconscious compensation for the fact that she was striking at much that he held dear", or "a delayed and displaced revenge upon her father", seems absurd. Even the most capable biographers stray when they dabble in Freudian psycho-waffle.

That apart, Campbell has written an admirable first volume of the life of an extraordinary political figure.

Copyright 2000
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