How Maggie was dumped by a dashing aristocrat - because his mother said she was too common: Starting today, the most intimate biography of Thatcher you'll ever read
By Jonathan Aitken|
Margaret Roberts as a young woman at a ball. A new book has revealed many of her love affairs before she entered political life
Eighteen-year-old Margaret Roberts had a crush. She was in her first year studying chemistry at Oxford when she fell for another undergraduate, the handsome, clean-cut Lord Craigmyle, grandson of an earl.
He had money — his mother’s family, the Inchcapes, owned the P&O shipping line — and a title, and her college contemporaries have no doubt she set her cap at him.
What a catch he would be for the grocer’s daughter from Grantham. This was her first romance, and that early summer of 1944 she blushed as she gushed about him to the other girls over dinners in hall at Somerville, her college.
And it went well for a while — so much so that the 20-year-old ‘Craigie’ (as he was always known), a notable Oxford character for his generosity and infectious good humour, took her home for the weekend to meet his widowed mother.
The encounter with Lady Craigmyle at the family’s London house in The Boltons, an exclusive enclave in Kensington, was not a success. As another Inchcape grandson, Lord Tanlaw, explained to me: ‘My aunt was a formidable character, bearing more than a passing resemblance to Lady Bracknell.
‘When she met my cousin Craigie’s new Oxford girlfriend, her comment was: “In trade and in science! We know nobody who is in either!”’
The romance ended shortly after because, as a Somerville contemporary, Pauline Cowan, confirmed, ‘His mother couldn’t stand her.’
The aristocratic Lady Craigmyle had decreed the provincial Miss Roberts an unsuitable girlfriend for her son and, acting under her influence, Craigie broke the young Margaret’s heart.
He makes his appearance, somewhat incongruously, in the first volume of her memoirs, named in a photograph of three young men in dinner jackets, captioned ‘OUCA [Oxford University Conservative Association] Party in Oxford’.
Young loves: Margaret fell for Lord Craigmyle (top) and, later, Tony Bray (bottom) while she was at Oxford
But otherwise he has been erased from her official history — not an unusual occurrence in the great lady’s life, as I have discovered.
I come to her life story as a huge admirer, but also as a bit player in the drama.
As a backbench Tory MP, I was an unimportant spear-carrier, but I also came to know her from a different perspective as the boyfriend of her daughter, Carol, for three years (which we will come to in detail later in this series).
Something is missing from the accepted and official accounts of her early life. This is because they emanate largely from her.
By the time journalists began to track down details of her upbringing — from 1975 onwards, when she became Leader of the Opposition — she was able to airbrush from the record most of the sharp edges in her childhood.
The Iron Lady liked to keep an iron grip on the narrative of her early life. Even her children were kept poorly informed about her years growing up in Grantham, Lincolnshire.
In the authorised version she presents herself as a mild and compliant child. But the account feels sanitised, missing those electrifying qualities, positive and negative, which were to make her such a polarising figure in British politics and on the world stage.
Still passionate: Margaret and Denis Thatcher at Denis' Birthday Party in 1985
Dig deeper and the chippiness that made her what she was — the grit in the oyster — emerges.
Edited out were the social and economic insecurities that troubled the young Margaret.
In class-conscious Grantham, the Roberts family were tradesmen, well down the ladder from the better-off county and commercial families in and around the town. Margaret was never regarded as ‘one of us’ by the posher customers she served from behind the counter.
Her home-made clothes also made her feel inadequate when visiting the homes of her grammar school contemporaries who came from the higher echelons of Lincolnshire life.
Yet these social pitfalls, together with the exclusions, tensions and feelings of inadequacy they must have produced, are not mentioned by her.
Without them, however, the picture of her early years and her youthful personality is incomplete.
Enduring love: Baroness Margaret Thatcher with her husband Sir Denis Thatcher in 2003
These omissions are interesting. As prime minister, Margaret Thatcher was accused of flaws in her character. She could be a bully.
She bore grudges. She gave an impression of lacking compassion. She took instant likes and dislikes, which rarely altered.
These flashes of offensiveness and over-assertiveness may well have stemmed from insecurities buried deep within her.
I suspect the young Margaret Roberts was more rebellious, more argumentative, more insecure and more disagreeable than her self-portrait as a dutiful daughter suggests.
At Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School, locally known as KGGS, the 350 pupils were a mixed bunch, socially and economically.
Bright-eyed and fair-haired, Margaret Roberts was always something of a loner among her contemporaries, but it was noticed that her closest acquaintances came not from Grantham, but from the higher social strata of families who lived in the Lincolnshire countryside, earning her the nickname ‘Snobby Roberts’.
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THE TORY WIFE SHE REALLY LOATHED....
Waspish? Elspeth Howe clashed fiercely with Thatcher
Margaret was renowned for being bad with cabinet wives.
She forgot their names, talked past them with bored dismissiveness and walked past them in reception lines with a yanking handshake that pulled women she did not want to converse with past her at high speed.
She gave the impression that none of her colleagues had such a thing as a ‘better half ’.
She was more respectful towards the spouses of grandees, such as Celia Whitelaw or Iona Carrington.
But if there was one wife who irritated her more than any other it was Elspeth Howe.
For a start, Thatcher simply couldn’t stand her husband, Geoffrey. She handbagged him constantly in front of others. ‘Just twaddle’ was her put-down to his face about his views on Europe.
There was something about him that never failed to drive her up the wall — it was as though proximity to his presence had the effect of itching powder on her skin.
She suspected he was disloyal and hated his ambition to succeed her, something she vowed would never happen.
‘He’s past it,’ she told a confidant. ‘He will never, never, never succeed me! It’s out of the question.’
But Lady Howe disagreed.She took very seriously the prospect of one day being in Downing Street, and was fiercely supportive of her husband in his battles.
She was a formidable character in her own right. Forthright in her opinions, feminist in her sympathies and sharp-tongued in her humour, she had an inner strength that grated against Margaret Thatcher’s ‘Iron Lady’ persona.
There were no overt clashes between the two of them, though their antagonism was clear. The Senior Tory John Biffen memorably likened them to ‘two wasps in a jam jar’.
Personally and politically, they were poles apart. But where Elspeth kept her opinion to herself, Margaret did not, scornfully deprecating the ‘feminist views’, ‘the progressive attitude’ and the ‘equal opportunities mindset’ of the Foreign Secretary’s wife.
Lady Howe had been a leading light in the Equal Opportunities Commission, a Labour-created quango which elicited much scorn from Mrs Thatcher.
She liked to say that her own career demonstrated that women did not need a government commission to help them achieve equal opportunity.
A third area of bitchiness — no other word for it will do — was that the Howes had a reputation for being wonderful hosts at Chevening, the Foreign Secretary’s official grand country residence in Kent.
It was said to be much more fun than going to Chequers.
Margaret was jealous and suspicious. She believed they were using the house ‘to hold court’ (her rather unkind phrase) and build up support for a future leadership bid against her.
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But they also gave her the famously precise and slightly precious diction that grated on the ears decades later.
In the first week of October 1943, she left Grantham and headed for Oxford. She was a few days short of her 18th birthday, probably too young to be going to university, but then Margaret was never one to let the grass grow under her feet.
She always tried to cram in too much too fast. Sadly, though, for someone who had fought as hard as she had to get there, wartime Oxford was, as she put it, a ‘cold and strangely forbidding’ place.
Homesickness and insecurity made her first year miserable.
Grantham’s snobbiness was not a patch on snooty Oxford — described in those days as a university of 7,000 experts on class
A grocer’s daughter would have had to endure an unfair share of slights.
She felt it from the old girls of Cheltenham Ladies College she encountered at Somerville, and probably in many other settings.
Even more painful must have been the romantic and social rejection by Craigie and his mother. But, spurred on by these snubs — her hopes of catching a titled husband dashed by snobbery — she threw her energies into Conservative student politics.
Oxford University Conservative Association was now her vehicle for career advancement.
It was also the arena where she met interesting young men. All her boyfriends came from the Tory stable.
Her wider circle of male acquaintances, such as Sir Edward Boyle and Johnny Dalkeith (later the Duke of Buccleuch), were also active in it. Among this group, her slim figure, elegant legs and sparkling eyes were soon catching the eye of admirers.
She had several flirtations in her latter Oxford years.
However, none of them was serious — unlike her relationship with Tony Bray, who came up to Oxford in October 1944 as an Army cadet on a six-month military training course.
Initially attracted by their shared political interests, by the summer of 1945 they were going out together on a regular basis.
They went to several college dances and a ball at the city’s Randolph Hotel.
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THE FOX FUR HAT THAT HELPED END THE COLD WAR
Baroness Thatcher in the famous fox fur hat
Domination was the personality trait Mrs Thatcher used most in the political battles she fought in public.
In private, she deployed subtler and more feminine wiles.
They included judicious flattery, harmless flirtatiousness and elaborately staged ‘poor me’ performances to elicit protective support at predominantly masculine meetings.
She played the card of being a lone woman quite unscrupulously, exploiting the inhibitions of some men to argue back against her.
Her femininity, which she used when it suited her, was real. She liked her clothes to be admired, and was susceptible to the good looks of attractive colleagues.
She enjoyed male flattery and gallantry, particularly when she could turn it to good use by winning a concession.
Much thought went into her wardrobe for her first trip to the Soviet Union in 1987, where she was determined to impress Gorbachev.
She had three key helpers on this sartorial side — Carla Powell (wife of her private secretary Charles Powell), Cynthia Crawford (her dresser) and Margaret King, fashion director of Aquascutum.
Of these, the most daring and amusing was Mrs Powell. ‘You have big boobs like mine,’ she told the Prime Minister, ‘so you need a new look with high padded shoulders to set them off.’
Carla brought in the designer Victor Edelstein. He created, at cost, the first prototypes of the colourful dresses, coats and jackets with regally high padding around the neck and shoulders that became part of the Thatcher legend.
The result was a wardrobe that helped to project her as a superstar on the world stage.
From the moment she arrived at Moscow Airport in a black fox-fur hat and tailored black coat, she radiated the aura of a Hollywood Czarina.
The vast bouquet of red roses presented to her as she stepped onto the Tarmac added the final touch of colour and accentuated the elegance of her look.
Well over a hundred million Soviet viewers watched her arrival on TV.
Some still talk about it to this day, explaining how the presence of a strong woman leader on Russian soil evoked ancestral memories of Catherine the Great.
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Tony took her up to London for lunch at the Dorchester, a tea dance at the Piccadilly Hotel and a performance of Strauss’s operetta A Night In Venice at the Cambridge Theatre.
Soon afterwards, she invited him to stay the weekend with her parents in Grantham.
Although it was a strained and awkward visit, the fact that it happened was a sign that she was seriously interested in him.
However, her seriousness does not seem to have been fully reciprocated, perhaps understandably since Tony was nearly two years younger and, at the age of 18, not ready to settle down with such an intense girlfriend. They drifted apart.
Finding a husband may have been subliminally on her agenda at this time, but once her relationship with Bray cooled, she made no discernible progress towards it.
By the time she left Oxford in 1947, 21-year-old Margaret Roberts had firmly decided that her future lay in politics.
First, though, she had to get a job, which was not all plain sailing, for some aspects of her personality could rub people up the wrong way. The chemical company ICI turned her down because ‘this young woman has much too strong a personality to work here’.
The young Margaret Roberts, pictured here with
her parents and elder sister Muriel, would have endured numerous slights
at Oxford because of her humble roots
She eventually found work at British Xylonite Plastics at Manningtree in Essex, but she was not popular.
She spoke with a posh accent and seemed overdressed on the company work bus in her Burberry coat and gloves. Some of her fellow researchers thought she put on airs and graces and nicknamed her ‘Duchess’.
But those same airs and graces did her no harm as she sought to find a parliamentary seat to fight.
Her eloquence and spirit went down a storm in Dartford, Kent, and she easily saw off her rival for the nomination, an Old Etonian barrister with a fruity voice and a less than stellar intellect.
Ascending star: Margaret Roberts ran for
Conservative candidate for Dartford at 23, while working as a research
chemist with an industrial firm at Colchester
Among the audience who congratulated the new candidate’s anti-socialist rhetoric was a local businessman, Denis Thatcher, known as ‘The Major’ on account of his war record.
He was a shy man, particularly in the company of women. So it was a surprise when, his interest stirred, he offered her a lift into London so she could catch a train back to her home in Colchester.
She missed the last train and he gallantly waited with her for the milk train, which left at 3.40am.
Margaret thought little more of him. ‘Not a very attractive creature,’ she wrote to her sister, ‘but quite nice.’
During the period 1949–51 she dated three different men at the same time, carefully considering marriage to each one of them.
This trio of potential bridegrooms were a Scottish farmer, a distinguished surgeon and Denis.
The way she handled them showed that she could be both manipulative and mixed up in her relationships.
The Scottish farmer was 34-year-old Willie Cullen, who had come south to buy a farm in Essex, met Margaret at a Conservative event in Colchester, fell for her and pursued her with dinner invitations, visits to the theatre and presents of chocolates and nylons.
‘He is awfully sweet,’ Margaret wrote to Muriel. ‘I am getting quite fond of him.’
There were many more dates, dinners, cinema trips, gifts of perfume and visits to the races. She took him seriously, but not seriously enough to make him her husband.
After she had stayed at his farm, she came to the conclusion that he would make a better match for her sister than for herself — and that’s what happened, with Margaret playing Cupid.
She knew she could not settle down as a farmer’s wife, so, with Margaret calling the shots, he was steered towards the older of the two Miss Robertses. (He and Muriel married in April 1950 and lived happily ever after.)
Margaret, meanwhile, had bigger and better fish to fry — namely Robert Henderson, a 47-year-old surgeon who had invented the iron lung for polio patients, and been awarded a CBE for services to medicine.
Despite the 24-year age gap between them, the bachelor doctor and the Tory candidate hit it off romantically. He took her to parties, dinners, drives around the Weald of Kent and to Eastbourne for the weekend.
There are clues in her letters that he was her favourite suitor.
Margaret Thatcher with twins Mark and Carol, six, who congratulate her on becoming an MP at last in 1959
Denis Thatcher, however, had continued to keep in touch and took her on a series of dates — if you can use that term for visits to the Royal Tournament and the Festival of Britain and a National Paint Federation dinner.
At first, Margaret pretended that she was not giving him much encouragement. ‘I can’t say I really ever enjoy going out with him,’ she confided to Muriel. ‘He has not got a very prepossessing personality.’
Either she was dissembling about her feelings, or somewhere along the line she changed her mind.
For in early 1950, one of Denis’s close friends, David Roe, unexpectedly dropped into the Thatcher bachelor flat in Chelsea to be ‘greeted by a lovely smiley girl’.
‘Denis introduced us, and she soon disappeared into the kitchen while he and I sat talking for a few minutes. When she came back she brought some tea and sat on the floor, joining in the conversation. Her name was Margaret Roberts’.
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‘Not a very attractive creature, but quite nice.’
- A young Margaret Roberts writes to her sister about husband-to-be Denis Thatcher
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Yet this was at the same time she was also going out with Robert Henderson, apparently with rather more enthusiasm. Some might call it playing the field, hedging her bets or even two-timing.
Robert Henderson remained her number one choice. ‘I go out with him most weekends and one night during the week,’ she wrote to Muriel in the spring of 1950.
‘But whether it will ever come to anything I very much doubt, for he thinks the difference between our ages is very great.’
A stomach operation for Robert, followed by a long convalescence, slowed their courtship down.
Margaret found herself a new job in London and rented a flat in Pimlico. One of the reasons for her move was that her Dartford landlady was taking too much interest in her private life.
‘You know how I hate everyone knowing my own affairs,’ she wrote to Muriel.
‘Robert refuses to come in now, and I go to the end of the road and meet him at the traffic lights.’ But at her new flat in London she could entertain him royally. ‘I cooked a slap-up dinner, four courses, just to show him!’ she told Muriel.
Yet for some reason, the romance she had nurtured so hopefully broke up in the summer of 1951.
Its ending was evidently painful to her. In a letter, her father described how ‘upset’ she was.
The precise reason can only be guesswork. With the caution of a much older bachelor, Robert continued to dither over becoming engaged to a fiancée of 25.
The couple were married for more than 51 years
Perhaps he was put on the spot by her about his hesitation, for they seem to split abruptly and distressingly rather than drifting apart gently.
At the time when Robert was finding it difficult to make up his mind, however, Denis Thatcher was moving into matrimonial decision-making mode.
He had continued to see her, with dinners at smart London restaurants such as The Ivy, The White Tower and L’Ecu de France.
She invited him at least once for a drink in her Pimlico flat, and she sometimes cooked dinner for him at his flat in Chelsea. This was not the same level of romantic treatment as she gave to Robert Henderson, but Denis was nevertheless being encouraged by her to stay in the game.
Yet this encouragement was deceptive, for she kept him in the dark about her secret and deeper relationship with Robert.
Mayor of London Boris Johnson called Thatcher 'distinctly sexy' when he was a young reporter
Denis was driving around France in August 1951 with an old school friend in a car he described as ‘a tart trap’ when he decided the time had come to take the bull by the horns. As he later told their daughter, Carol: ‘I suddenly thought to myself: “That’s the girl.”’
It was a big decision for him. As a young Army officer, he had fallen madly in love with a glamorous girl he met at a tea dance during the war.
They had married in March 1942, and soon after Denis was posted overseas. Demobbed in 1946, he arrived home to discover his marriage was over. He was more emotionally bruised by the divorce than he let on — ‘shattered totally and rudderless’, according to a close friend.
All his life, he kept his emotions well hidden beneath a mask of geniality, and it is unlikely that he allowed Margaret to catch any glimpses of the pain he was still feeling.
But the experience made him wary of any new commitment, which perhaps explains why he moved so cautiously and patiently before proposing to her.
Increasingly, though, he was attracted by her combination of beauty, brains and fighting spirit. Over dinner in his flat, he asked her to marry him.
Margaret did not say ‘yes’ at once. She needed time to think it over.
She also wanted Denis to meet her parents — and she feared they might be worried, as she was, about her becoming the second Mrs Thatcher. She may also have already been on the rebound from the indecisive Robert. But any further doubts were swept away by the reaction of her parents.
Her father, Alfred Roberts, saw Denis’s first marriage as no obstacle. ‘He was in no way at fault and actually he is an exceedingly nice fellow. Also, of course, very comfortably situated financially.’
He approvingly noted that Denis owned both a Triumph sports car and a Jaguar.
The only tricky incident came when Margaret told her abstemious parents that Denis liked to drink.
‘I swear her father had to blow the dust off the sherry bottle’, was her fiancé’s recollection of this moment.
In the end, Margaret Roberts made the right choice.
Denis was the rock on which her ultimate confidences were reposed. Her husband’s love provided unseen dimensions of strength.
As for that first love of hers, the aristocratic ‘Craigie’ Craigmyle, he went on to become a highly respected philanthropist and fund-raiser for charities, blissfully married for 43 years, and with seven children, before his death in 1998.
After Oxford, he played no further part in Margaret’s life. But perhaps a faint flicker of him always remained.
As prime minister, she showed an occasional weakness for similarly handsome, clean-cut types such as Cecil Parkinson, Humphrey Atkins, Alan Clark and John Moore. Was that really just coincidence?
- Extracted from Margaret Thatcher: Power And Personality by Jonathan Aitken, published by Bloomsbury Continuum on October 24 at £25. © Jonathan Aitken 2013. To order a copy at £20 (p&p free), call 0844 472 4157. Jonathan Aitken will speak about his book at the Royal Institution on November 7. For details, visit bloomsburyinstitute.com.
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