Saturday night’s TV was a real eye-opener. The story of Young Margaret: Love, Life and Letters on BBC2 casts a new and highly revealing insight into Thatcher’s early life. It shows clearly her burning ambition from the start, her delight at boasting of her successes emphasised by highlighting alongside the failures of others, her determination to achieve money and wealth. It comes through, unwittingly, as she recalls a male friend in her early adulthood whose name she can’t remember, but she does recall “his farm is worth £25,000, he has 3,000 shares in ICI, now standing at 47 shillings”. She meets Denis whom she describes as “not a frightfully attractive creature”, but his redeeming feature was that he had wealth. She needed someone to bankroll her political career, and he fitted the bill, so she married him. At her honeymoon in Madeira she writes back to her sister noting that “some (of the people here) are rather tatty tourists, Jews and novo (sic) riche” – snobbish as well as a bit racist.
But what is really revealing is her attitude to her father. Just after his wife died, Margaret’s mother, he stayed with his daughter and Denis. Her letters to her elder sister, Muriel, record her feelings: “He is eating the most enormous meals and doing absolutely nothing except reading…..I shall have to shunt Pop off on Saturday 14 January at the outside….otherwise he will just hang on and on and not take any hints”. One of her father’s letters to Muriel later exposes heedlessness of her father; he writes “I’m sorry to say I never hear anything from Margaret. In fact I don’t think I know their new phone number”. He died two months later.
Mrs. Thatcher won the leadership partly because of her overweening ambition and indomitable resolution, but also because she so totally fulfilled the values of the Tory Right. She was domineering, ruthless, class-ridden, viscerally aggressive, besotted with wealth, and utterly devoid of compassion. Her relations with her father, whom she referred to honorifically in public, reveal another side to her character – her coldness and meanness towards anything that got in the way of her ambition. Even the individualism she championed had no soft edges, it was about the resilience to succeed and make money. The Good Samaritan in the biblical story was transmuted from a symbol of mercy into a convenient moneybags. May she rest in peace.
