The Maggie we never knew

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

MARGARET THATCHER: THE AUTHORISED BIOGRAPHY VOLUME I: NOT FOR TURNING BY CHARLES MOORE (Allen Lane £30)

Back in May 1951, the then Margaret Roberts took her driving test - and passed on the first attempt. But having paid for another two lessons in advance, she went ahead and had them all the same. ‘This,’ writes Charles Moore, ‘shows a virtually inhuman determination to get value for money.’
One of the delights of Moore’s book is that it’s full of moments like this - little dabs of colour that help give it a richness and bounce that other political biographies invariably lack. As he admits in his preface, Moore is not a great fan of political biographies, often finding them deathly dull. But it’s hard to imagine anyone, even the most rabid anti-Thatcherite, finding this dull. Rather it sparkles with insight, drama and wit. Above all, though, it constantly reminds you just how remarkable - and peculiar - Thatcher’s life story was.
The house where she grew up in Grantham had an outside loo, no garden or hot water and a darkly oppressive atmosphere. Religion and work dominated everything. Her father, Alderman Roberts, was a successful grocer and Methodist preacher whose simple moral precepts became the basis of his younger daughter’s political creed. But not all was what it seemed. Whenever Roberts put his Bible and his bacon-slicer aside, his hands were apt to stray - ‘If he had half a chance, he’d have his hand up my skirt,’ one of his neighbours recalled.

Family portrait: Margaret Thatcher (right) with her mother and father and sister Muriel

 

As for Thatcher’s mother, she was a watery, unhappy woman who barely impinged on his daughter’s life - ‘Mother didn’t exist in Margaret’s mind,’ as her sister, Muriel, chillingly puts it. Margaret may have been a tremendous swot and bossy boots, but she wasn’t a particularly promising pupil at school. Her early letters reveal she was an erratic speller who always got in a muddle about whether to use ‘I’ or ‘me’ - in later life, of course, she got round this problem by referring to herself as ‘we’.
She was, however, very keen on clothes. There’s something extremely odd about reading the young Margaret banging ecstatically on about her new undies - ‘a nice undie-set is essential to go away with,’ she writes to Muriel. But behind the girlish trilling, it’s noticeable that she always noted down how her chosen outfits were received - ‘I was wearing my blue frock and hat and wine coat and accessories. I think I won the day.’ From the word go, she knew the importance of making an impression.
At Oxford, where she read chemistry, her carefully groomed exterior and air of ‘smug perfection’ attracted admiration and ridicule in roughly equal measure. Once, the President of the Union poked her in the chest and chortlingly inquired, “Is it marble, Margaret?’
You might think that anyone trying this sort of thing on would themselves be turned to stone. But Moore has learned that Margaret’s heart wasn’t wholly fixed on political advancement. He’s unearthed two early boyfriends, one of whom, Tony Bray, bursts into tears recalling how he bought her some carnations 60 years earlier.

'Everything it took in politics except brains': Margaret Thatcher's view of Michael Heseltine

 

As for Dennis Thatcher, he seems to have made her distinctly queasy when they first met. ‘Not an attractive creature,’ she noted dismissively. Soon afterwards there’s another reference to his ‘unprepossessing personality’. Yet within a matter of months they were engaged. So what happened?
Moore suggests that for both of them - to begin with at least - this was a long way from being a love match. Denis was on the rebound - his first wife had dumped him for a baronet - while his wealth offered Margaret a passport to something she craved: ‘Home Counties respectability’.
By now, she had given up chemistry, qualified as a barrister and was hellbent on becoming an MP. In order to look her best for the electorate of Dartford, she went to see a milliner in Colchester - incredibly, the woman was called Mrs Prole - ‘who made me a smaller black velvet hat with a white ostrich feather on it and it looks very charming.’
After three failed attempts to win Dartford, Thatcher got picked as the Tory candidate for Finchley. The outgoing MP grumbled that the local party was having to choose between ‘a bloody Jew and a bloody woman.’
Soon after Thatcher became an MP, her mother died. As far as one can tell, this made no impression on her at all; she seems to have been far more concerned about her defective central heating. But while she could clearly be cold and brusque - she memorably dismissed Michael Heseltine as having ‘everything it took in politics except brains’ - it’s striking how flirtatious Thatcher was in her early speeches.
‘I have got a red-hot figure,’ she announced to the Commons, supposedly referring to some statistic about pensions. ‘Hear Hear!’ cried her male colleagues as Thatcher beamed coquettishly at them.
Ted Heath, who never liked her, piled her with more and more work, confident that sooner or later she would crack. Instead, Thatcher wolfed down the lot. She had an astonishing ability to absorb information on a broad range of topics - she once told the novelist Jilly Cooper that on one of her very rare holidays she’d read Kipling’s Collected Poems, all 845 pages of it.

Victorious: Margaret Thatcher visiting troops on the Falkland Islands in 1983

 

Towards her staff, she was considerate, even indulgent. That said, there were limits. When one of her advisors, considerably the worse for wear, was sick over her shoes - with Thatcher inside them, so legend has it - he found himself swiftly being shown the door. Although never the worse for wear herself, she did knock back industrial quantities of whisky as she ploughed through her red boxes deep into the night.
Perhaps Thatcher’s greatest attribute as a politician was sincerity. Nigel Lawson noted that she actually said what she believed. Yet while this went down well with the electorate, it proved less popular with her own party. After she became Prime Minister in 1979, disgruntled Tories confidently predicted her imminent downfall. They soon found they’d hopelessly underestimated her. They learned too that her wrath was a fearful thing to behold - at moments of high excitement, her earlobes would become engorged and her earrings pop off.
However, the Iron Lady could be surprisingly bendy and irresolute. During the Falklands Crisis, she gave serious consideration to a Peruvian plan which involved removing the islands from British administration and taking away the islanders rights to self-determination. No one outside her immediate circle knew this, of course, and when the Argentines surrendered and the war was over - the point at which this volume ends - Thatcher had become the living embodiment of strong leadership.
As a former editor of the Spectator and the Daily Telegraph - as well as Mrs Thatcher’s chosen biographer - Moore might be expected to have given her a determinedly unbumpy ride. In fact, he’s scrupulously fair, doling out criticism just as readily as praise.
But even-handedness is the least of this book’s attributes. Elegant yet colourful, dramatic yet thorough, deeply serious yet often wildly funny, it’s a triumph which all future Thatcher biographies will be measured against - and found wanting.