How Margaret Thatcher's strict upbringing shaped her views

School year 2018-2019
< Press File >
Margaret Thatcher
How can somebody be shaped by his or her early years?
CORREIA Kévin

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Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to DAPHNE YPSILANTI – my teaching assistant – who provided
me with much advice and helped me to realize this Press File.

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Table of Content
Synthesis........................................................................................................................................3
First document: Margaret Thatcher, Speech in Korea ("The Principles of Thatcherism"), September
1992.................................................................................................................................................6
Extracts (selected on my own) ............................................................................................................. 6
Commentary......................................................................................................................................... 8
Second Document: Antonio E. Weiss, The Religious Mind of Mrs Thatcher, June 2011, 62 pages......9
Extracts................................................................................................................................................. 9
Bonus: Alfred Roberts’ sermon notes ................................................................................................ 12
Commentary....................................................................................................................................... 13
Third Document: Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, HarperCollins, 914 pages, 18
October 1993.................................................................................................................................. 14
Extracts............................................................................................................................................... 14
Commentary....................................................................................................................................... 16
Fourth Document: Leo Abse, Margaret, Daughter of Beatrice, Jonathan Cape, London, First edition,
27 October 1989, 288 pages............................................................................................................ 17
Extract................................................................................................................................................. 17
Commentary....................................................................................................................................... 21
Bonus: Part removed from the extract .............................................................................................. 22
Fifth Document: Some pictures..................................................................................................... 24
Pictures............................................................................................................................................... 24
Analysis............................................................................................................................................... 27
Sixth Document: Brian Connell, Ruthlessly ambitious? When people say this they are wholly wrong,
(Interview for The Times), 19 May 1975 .......................................................................................... 28
Extracts............................................................................................................................................... 28
Commentary....................................................................................................................................... 31
Seventh Document: Jon Agar, “Thatcher, Scientist”, in Notes and Records of the Royal Society of
London, Vol. 65, No. 3 (20 September 2011), pp. 215-232................................................................ 32
Extracts............................................................................................................................................... 32
Commentary....................................................................................................................................... 37
Eighth Document: Michael Billington, “Margaret Thatcher casts a long shadow over theatre and the
arts”, in The Guardian, Mon 8 Apr 2013 .......................................................................................... 38
Extracts............................................................................................................................................... 38
Commentary....................................................................................................................................... 40

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Synthesis
Introduction and position of the problem
Margaret Thatcher, born in 1925, was the first woman to become Prime Minister of the United
Kingdom. Looking back at her past, she was not likely to succeed: her father was a grocer and her paternal
grandfather was a grocer too; two among her other ancestors were a shoemaker and a railway worker.
So, basically, if you strongly believe in social reproduction – and you should, given than the gap between
the poor and the rich is wide and widening -, you may be very befuddled. Praised for her obstinacy, she
climbed the social ladder through her own effort. Surprisingly, she became known for her harshness,
particularly against trade unions, and did not show pity for the poorest.
Therefore, her life and career may seem confusing; on the one hand, Thatcher challenged the work of
the best-known sociologists – Karl Marx and Bourdieu – and the inequality between men and women,
and, on the other hand, her family’s poor background did not make her a socialist – quite the contrary.
How can we explain that?
I am going to make sense of it by analysing her childhood to see what made Margaret Thatcher, also
known as “the Iron Lady”.
Thatcherism
To better understand how Margaret Thatcher adopted her ideas, there is nothing better than
explaining first what Thatcherism is. It is the belief in economic liberty and in the fact that the State
should neither burden people with taxes and economic rules, nor help them too much, because this
would reduce their freedom. According to Thatcherism, in order to succeed in life, you should use this
freedom to strive to improve your situation through perseverance and thanks to your convictions. That
is why “Thatcherists” also believe in “work ethic” which implies that if you are poor and you take to the
street, in simple words, you are just a whiner who does not work enough.
However, be conscious that Margaret Thatcher was not libertarian. She did not praise freedom to wear
what you want, to choose your sexual orientation or whatever. Keep in mind that she was also
conservative, and that Conservatism and Liberalism do not always get on well.
We can know understand this sentence said by MT in 1992 during a speech in Korea “we shall only live
in peace and freedom if we believe in our cause, nourish that belief in others — and defend it whenever
it is challenged.” (Text 1)
How did she become the famous Iron Lady?
It is a misconception to think that someone was determined by his or her DNA to become a specific
adult. Margaret Thatcher was obviously shaped by, among other things, her upbringing, her religion, her
relation with her parents, her scientific studies and the historical context.
Firstly, the way MT was brought up became a determining factor behind Thatcherism. Imagine if young
Margaret were born in a little community of miners! She would have been totally different. Quite the
contrary, Ms. Roberts was the daughter of a grocer (who was also a local politician and a preacher) and
of a dressmaker.
The family was very religious, and Margaret – as in any honourable family – would go to the Methodist
Church at least once a week. Plus, in her family, you could not do what you wanted: you were obliged to
work hard, to help father in his grocery store and of course, not to complain. Appearance was actually
substantial for MT’s parents. Even though her family was not rich, everyone looks really well dressed in
the photos.

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The consequences of this strict upbringing are threefold. First, this explains her support for the
Conservative Party, all the more as her father was a Conservative politician too. Plus, her tough
upbringing gave her the discipline that helped her climb up the social ladder, because she was accepted
in Oxford - a more or less famous school. Last but not least, her upbringing had a lasting effect on the
way she looked: during her whole life, she always looked serious and tidy, wearing conventional clothes,
(never trousers), and bearing her famous wig-like haircut. Margaret Thatcher even said during an
interview for The Times (Text 6): “It's expensive and I resent having to spend that amount on clothes.”
Another determining factor that shaped her ideas and actions was religion. As a preacher, her father
“preached” her a lot of ideas that affected her more than anyone could think. In her exercise books,
there were even sermons of her father, whose ideas were really close to Thatcherism. “Strength comes
from within,” “you must yourself, believe intensely and with total conviction if you are to persuade others
to believe. Strive to be utterly dedicated to your work,” he said. He also wrote some sermons about the
power of conviction and about politics.
However, her interpretation of the Bible was different from the others, because, rather than seeing a
praise of charity values, she saw in the Bible the importance of freedom, entrepreneurship and the
notion of responsibility – i.e. the idea that you are responsible for your situation. This explains her
loathing for Nanny States and leftist ideas.
Thirdly, Thatcher’s relation to her parents also influenced her behaviour. In fact, she did not want to
be like her mother. Their relationship was complicated not only because her mother was very strict but
also because it seems like she had desired a son instead of a daughter. Imagine the consequences of this
difficult relationship! Perhaps this is why Margaret Thatcher was against the idea of being a housewife
as her mother was. The psychoanalyst Leo Abse explains in his book Margaret, Daughter of Beatrice (Text
4) that her mother’s lack of love resulted in Thatcher’s harshness as a politician. For example, she decided
to remove free-milk programs for children – hence her famous nickname: “milk-snatcher”. On the
contrary, MT praised her father, often quoting him. The Oedipus complex made her want to follow her
father’s footsteps: becoming a conservative politician.
Fourthly, her scientific studies also left a mark on her. They made her very rational. Therefore, she
denigrated feelings and almost rejected them as useless and hazardous, considering, for example, that
they lead to demonstrations for example. Moreover, as she decided to accept the marketization of
science, whereas she was a scientist, she could only be outright in favour of the privatisation of
companies. “If markets could work for science policy, they could work anywhere,” said Jon Agar, trying
to explain MT’s political behaviour through her scientist studies (Text 7).
Fifthly, the context of WWII should not be undervalued. “My life, like those of most people on the
planet, was transformed by the Second World War,” said MT in her memoir The Downing Street Years
(1993, text 3). In the same way as nation-states triumphed over the Nazis through perseverance, she was
tough in front of opponents and had a friend-enemy vision of relations.
Finally, even though she was told to be tough, harsh, and she was criticized for behind inhumane, do
not forget that she had a strong supporter by her side. Her Husband, Denis Thatcher, helped her to
overcome any hurdle and to keep strong. She even wrote in her memoir The Downing Street Years (1993,
text 3) “I could never have been Prime Minister for more than eleven years without Denis at my side.”

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This document does not mean to praise MT’s ideas
I would like to question Thatcherism because, even though she vindicated her ideas by using her
childhood, this does not mean that they were right.
Actually, on the one hand, she thought everyone could individually climb the social ladder, but on the
other hand, she said she owed everything to her father. This is inconsistent. In fact, I think she improved
her situation thanks to her strict upbringing. Consequently, you could not blame someone for being poor,
because you do not know what he or she lived.
On the other hand, praising traditional family values as well as individualism is also weird, because
individualism can deconstruct a family. Alan Ayckbourn brilliantly depicted this issue in his play A Small
Family Business (1987) (cited in Text 8).
Conclusion
As a conclusion, we can know seize the numerous things that shaped Margaret Thatcher’s ideas.
But this process that made her an adult with her own ideas and convictions is not something that only
occurred for the Iron Lady. Everyone, even you, can, through a deep self-analysis, understand why you
are who you are, with your own ideas, with your behaviour, with your qualities, so that you can seize
what make you special.

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First document: Margaret Thatcher, Speech in Korea ("The Principles of Thatcherism"),
September 1992
Extracts (selected on my own)
To read the whole speech, use this link: https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/108302 (or this
shortened link: https://goo.gl/WiypNY).
ANOTHER ‘ISM’?
You have asked me to speak about Thatcherism.
And that is a great honour.
But it has to be said that large numbers of less desirable ‘isms’ have come and gone — Fascism and
Communism among them: they will not be missed.
And if Socialism and European Federalism joined them soon I would be even more pleased. There is
only one other ‘ism’ attached to a personal name for which I have much affection — Gaullism.
Though General de Gaulle and I would, I think, have had our differences he was a great man with
large ideas, a leader and a patriot who revived his country's morale as well as defended her interests.
If I were to be remembered in the same way I would be pleased.
Yet, with all respect to the General, I would claim that ‘Thatcherism’ goes even further to the heart of
what politics and economics are — or ought to be — about.
This is because I didn't invent it: I and my colleagues rediscovered it.
The values, ideas and beliefs which I was privileged to be able to put into effect in Britain in the
eleven and a half years of my Prime Ministership were rooted in the experience of the past and
reinforced by events in my lifetime.
MY BELIEFS
My ideals, like those of most people, were first shaped by my family — a Christian family believing in
the sanctity of the individual and that each of us is responsible and accountable for his own actions.
The only life worth living, we were taught, was a life of effort.
We were instilled with the belief that it was not right merely to protest about what was wrong but we
must do something about it ourselves.
Old fashioned as it sounds in much of the West today, perhaps — though not I think here in South
Korea — we had a sense of duty.
But my outlook was also shaped by my country itself and its history — above all its political history.
How could it not be?
For I was always fascinated by politics.
For me the name of Britain was synonymous with freedom, justice and democracy.
We were especially proud of our system of common law based on fairness and equity and developed
through the ages by wise decisions by great judges who bowed to no-one.

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And when I became a barrister, I became even more convinced that liberty, prosperity, in fact all good
things, were impossible without a rule of law.
The main reason for describing these matters to you is to show that I and most of my generation
were equipped with a compass of values by which to steer our lives.
They were values which were generally accepted as right — morally right — by the great majority of
our people.
Of course, there is always a risk of hypocrisy if you make no secret that principles guide your actions.
And none of us — not even saints — fully live up to principles.
But let me just say that the British culture in which I was raised avoided one thing worse, more
corrosive and destructive than hypocrisy — it avoided cynicism.
And in politics cynicism — the feeling that nothing really matters — is the cause of most of what has
ever gone wrong in Western politics: for when principles don't matter, human life itself is devalued.
It is one of the great paradoxes of history that Socialism, which has done so much harm — was born
of a great humanitarian urge — the desire to give people dignity and security.
The trouble is that too much security removes a man's dignity by attenuating his freedom.
The possibilities for disintegration and decline when the State becomes more powerful and the
individual less responsible are truly legion. And so it proved in Britain.
No-one could say we were not warned.
The great philosopher economist Friedrich Hayek had written of Socialism that it was “The Road to
Serfdom” — the serfdom from which only a few decades before, the Russian people thought they had
escaped. […]
The philosophy of Thatcherism, then, was born of all this personal and collective experience.
And it was almost as much a matter of the heart as of the intellect.
For we believed passionately that decline and surrender were just not good enough for Britain. We
were confident that the values of the British people, their work ethic, their love of freedom and sense
of natural justice could once more be harnessed to promote liberty and make Britain more prosperous
and more influential.
By 1979 when we won the election, the new Conservative Government were ready with principles,
policies and resolve to roll back the frontiers of Socialism and advance the frontiers of freedom, the
first nation to attempt the task.
If we succeeded, others would follow.
We did succeed. […]
BRITAIN IN 1979 […]
In Britain in the 1980s we put enterprise to work.
It was not easy.
And among other things it required becoming very unpopular with a lot of powerful interest groups.
I had to begin by giving that best and least popular monosyllabic reply ever invented, “no”.

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“No” to printing money as a way of cushioning business from the impact of excessive wage awards.
“No” to demands to intervene to stop uncompetitive firms and factories closing.
“No” to calls for ever higher public spending and borrowing on any number of excellent causes. […]
CONCLUSION […]
There is a lesson for us too in this: we shall only live in peace and freedom if we believe in our cause,
nourish that belief in others — and defend it whenever it is challenged.
For the battle of ideas must be fought and refought every day. In South Korea you know this. So do I.
Let us remind the world of it.
Commentary
To understand what the principles of Thatcherism are and what created it, there is no better way
than reading this insightful explanation by the famous Iron Lady in person.
Her values were “work ethic, love of freedom and sense of natural justice”. The first word – work
ethic - is very interesting: typically British, it consists in thinking that those who have succeeded
deserve it because they were hardworking contrary to those who take to the streets and whine.
As she says, these values take roots in her “personal and collective experience”. Her parents were
actually very individualistic and Christians: they believed in the importance of acting freely but greatly
as an individual because each action can have a substantial impact.
However, to become Margaret Thatcher, you need conviction. Instead of complaining about her
situation, she was taught to take action to get things moving. And she did it. Helping during her
childhood her father who was a low-income grocer, she became chemist in Oxford, barrister and the
first female Prime Minister in Britain’s history. As a barrister, she was able to defend her ideal of
justice. As a Prime Minister, she was able to say “no” to take the decision she wanted to implement.
That is why she praises General De Gaulle for his way of being – and not his political opinions: he was
steered by an ideal and upheld it strongly and bravely.

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Second Document: Antonio E. Weiss, The Religious Mind of Mrs Thatcher, June 2011, 62
pages
Extracts
“Introduction
Every British Prime Minister since the sixties has claimed belief in God. This paper will focus on just one
– Margaret Thatcher. […] Thatcher was a deeply religious politician who took many of her moral and
religious beliefs from her upbringing.
[…] This is where Thatcher marked such a discontinuity with Prime Ministers of the past (and future).
She felt no hesitation in addressing the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland as a ‘Christian, as
well as a politician’. [Margaret Thatcher, Speech to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, 21 May 1988]
[…] Whereas TDSY is more focussed on Thatcher’s political career, TPTP [The Path to Power (Margaret
Thatcher, 1995] offers a clearer exposition of her political and moral formation. Recalling her ‘intensely
religious’ family home, Thatcher claimed how the sermons she heard in the Methodist chapel every
Sunday ‘made a great impact’ on her. Indeed the Methodist values she was brought up with as a child
did not diminish once she left home. Thatcher noted that ‘religion also figured large in my Oxford life’,
but perhaps more importantly, when she made the switch to Anglicanism that some saw as a
repudiation of her. […] Writing in 1995, Thatcher felt that ‘we still have to find some way of combining
Christian charity with sensible social policy’.
[…] Russell Lewis’ early biography of Margaret Thatcher (1975) is a perfect example. There is mention
of her father, Alfred Roberts, as ‘a staunch Methodist, lay preacher [and] a three-times-on-Sunday
chapel attender’, but nothing else regarding the then Conservative leader’s moral and religious
formation. […]
PART I: FORMATION
However, much stress has been placed specifically on Thatcher’s relationship with her father, to the
extent that Peter Hennessy once claimed that the country was being ruled ‘from beyond the grave’ by
Alderman Roberts. Standing at 6ft 2in with distinctive pebble glasses, striking blond hair and light blue
eyes, Alfred Roberts was an impressive figure of the Grantham community. Engaged in the circles of
business, politics and religion, he was shopkeeper of the greengrocers on 1 North Parade (and later
bought another outlet half a mile away on Hungtingtower Road), a prominent local politician, and
popular Methodist lay preacher. Thatcher attached great significance to her relationship with Alderman
Roberts. On the steps of Downing Street when entering for the first time as Prime Minister, she turned
to the cameras and announced (before her infamous cribbing of St Francis of Assisi’s prayer): ‘I owe
almost everything to my father’.
Thatcher’s claim that the Roberts’ family life ‘revolved around Methodism’ is well substantiated. She
and her sister would usually attend Sunday school in the morning and afternoon, as well as the Sunday

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service and occasionally the evening service too. Thatcher recounted to the Tory MP George Gardiner
how on Sunday evenings ‘the church would have a visiting preacher, and after the service he would
generally return with other church people to the household for supper and for further religious
discussions.’ […] When compared with other children being brought up in Methodist households in the
same era, it becomes apparent that such strict religiosity and adherence of the Sabbath was
commonplace. Margaret Penn recalled the ‘two sessions of Sunday school plus a chapel meal and
worship’ in thirties Manchester and Don Howarth reminisced of his Sundays in a forties Wesleyan chapel
in Lancashire as being ‘familiar, welcoming and solid’.
[…] Regardless, it is clear that Thatcher’s upbringing had a profound impact on her. In her
autobiography she recalled the ‘sermon voice’ her father adopted when preaching, and how the
‘sermons we heard every Sunday made a great impact on me’. Throughout her political career, Thatcher
would frequently use examples from her past with reference to political issues; as junior minister in the
late fifties she wanted to scrap the earnings rule for widows because she recalled the ‘heartbreaking
sight of a recently widowed mother eking out her tiny income by buying bruised fruits at my father’s
shop at Grantham’. […] As such, Margaret Roberts’ school exercise books did not just contain her
jottings from her last chemistry lesson, but also her father’s sermon notes.
[…] From the sermon notes it becomes evident from where Thatcher gained the intensity of her moral
convictions. When Alfred Roberts preached to his daughter ‘never do things just because other people
do them’ and ‘make up your own mind what you are going to do and persuade people to go your way’,
he did so to his congregation too: ‘you must yourself, believe intensely and with total conviction if you
are to persuade others to believe. Strive to be utterly dedicated to your work’. For Roberts the ability to
attain salvation was immanent to the individual, and it was the duty of each person to find it. Years later
Thatcherism’s unique brand of individualism would paraphrase and manipulate these sentiments with
reference to the welfare state.
[…] Regardless, spatial distance from one’s upbringing does not necessitate emotional, moral or
intellectual distance too. Indeed, the doctrinal liberalism of her father meant that the core principles of
‘Thatcherism’ – minimal state intervention buttressed by a drive for social improvement through
individual betterment (to be encouraged by the Churches) – could be summarised by the following
passage:
Render unto to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s
And unto God the things that are God’s […]
PART II: APPLICATION
[…] For Thatcher, the Bible advocated two fundamental ideals: personal responsibility and people’s
freedom to choose. From this vantage point she sought to justify her political convictions. Wealth
creation and philanthropy went hand-in-hand with personal responsibility which validated a curtailment
of welfare expenditure, and freedom of choice necessitated strong moral leadership from the Churches
– which Thatcher frequently felt was lacking.

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[…] Similarly, the American philosopher and theologian Michael Novak (who had studied for the
Roman Catholic priesthood) deeply impressed Thatcher with his pronouncements on moral and
social issues […] Novak defended the capitalist free market on the grounds that ‘given the propensity of
humans to sin, it is better to have many employers rather than only one or a few’; claimed that
Christianity did not profess to have claims of equality because ‘even the angels in Heaven are said to be
created by God in ascending hierarchies’; and placed emphasis on the individual over the collective.
[…] Politically, Thatcher’s beliefs meant she could justify minimal state intervention on religious
grounds. She did this explicitly in her 1978 address to the St Lawrence Jewry: “It is one thing to say that
the relief of poverty and suffering is a duty and quite another to say that this duty can always be most
efficiently and humanely performed by the State. Indeed, there are grave moral dangers and serious
practical ones in letting people get away with the idea that they can delegate all their responsibilities to
public officials and institutions.”
In practice, the logical end of Thatcher’s religious beliefs was twofold. Firstly, wealth creation (rather
than the welfare state) – inspired by personal responsibility – was crucial in fostering greater
philanthropy in order to combat poverty.

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Bonus: Alfred Roberts’ sermon notes
1925-43 (Grantham): Alfred Roberts (sermon notes c)
1925-43 (Grantham): Alfred Roberts (extract from
sermon notes) ("Snail & cherry tree")
1925-43 (Grantham): Alfred Roberts (extract from
sermon notes) ("Strength comes from within")
1925-43 (Grantham): Margaret Roberts (school exercise book)
("Qualitative Chemistry")

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Commentary
In this study, Antonio Weiss brilliantly describes how religion shaped Mrs. Thatcher’s mind. Whereas
Christian seems to praise such a behaviour, the Iron Lady was not if favour of helping directly the
poorest. Is Individualism contrary to the Iron Lady’s religion?
Thatcher was deeply religious because her family was ardently faithful, particularly her father who
would go every Sunday to the Methodist chapel. The sermons of her father – a preacher -, that we can
even read in her exercise book, dramatically affected Thatcher.
Her childhood shaped her to act in a specific way. The perfect example is her desire to remove earning
rules for widows as she remembered some widows purchasing food in her father’s grocery in spite of
their low salary. She acquired her conviction thanks to her father’s sermons, which preached for
example that “strength comes from within”.
However, her government did not share Christian charity’s values. After 1995, Thatcher wrote “we still
have to find some way of combining Christian charity with sensible social policy”. In fact, she thought
the Bible was upholding the idea of freedom and responsibility. As a result, everyone should strive to get
what they need without a nanny state removing their liberty. The idea of equality is not even religious:
“the angels were not equal either” said Novak, who MT admired.

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Third Document: Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, HarperCollins, 914
pages, 18 October 1993
Extracts
My background and experience were not those of a traditional Conservative prime minister. I was less
able to depend on automatic deference, but I was also perhaps less intimidated by the risks of change.
My senior colleagues, growing to political maturity in the slump of the 1930s, had a more resigned and
pessimistic view of political possibilities. They were perhaps too ready to accept the Labour Party and
union leaders as authentic interpreters of the wishes of the people. I did not feel I needed an interpreter
to address people who spoke the same language. And I felt it was a real advantage that we had lived the
same sort of life. I felt that the experiences I had lived through had fitted me curiously well for the
coming struggle.
I had grown up in a household that was neither poor nor rich. We rad to economize each day in order
to enjoy the occasional luxury.
My father’s background as a grocer is societies cites as the basis for my economic philosophy. So it was
- and is – but, his original philosophy encompassed more than simply ensuring that incomings showed a
small surplus over outgoing at the end of the week. My father was both a practical man and a man of
theory. He liked to connect the progress of our corner shop with the great complex romance of
international trade which recruited people all over the world to ensure that a family in Grantham could
have on its table rice from India, spices from Kenya, sugar from the West Indies and spices from five
continents. Before I read a line from the great liberal economists, I knew from my father's accounts that
the free market was like a vast sensitive nervous system, responding to events and signals all over the
world to meet the ever-changing needs of peoples in different countries, from different classes, of
different religions, with a kind of benign indifference to their status. Governments acted on a much
smaller store of conscious information and, by contrast, were themselves 'blind forces' blundering about
in the dark, and obstructing the operations of markets rather than improving them. The economic
history of Britain for the next forty years confirmed and amplified almost every item of my father's
practical economics. In effect, I had been equipped at an early age with the ideal mental outlook and
tools of analysis for reconstructing an economy ravaged by state socialism.
My life, like those of most people on the planet, was transformed by the Second World War. In my
case, because I was at school and university for its duration, the transformation was an intellectual
rather than a physical one. I drew from the failure of appeasement the lesson that aggression must
always be firmly resisted. But how? The ultimate victory of the Allies persuaded me that nations must
co-operate -in defence of agreed international rules if they are either to resist great evils or to achieve
great benefits. That is merely a platitude, however, if political leaders lack the courage and
farsightedness, or - what is equally important - if nations lack strong bonds of common loyalty. Weak
nations could not have resisted Hitler effectively. Indeed, those nations that were weak did not stand up

15
to him. So I drew from the Second World War a lesson very different from the hostility towards the
nation-state evinced by some post-war European statesmen. My view was - and is - that an effective
internationalism can only be built by strong nations which are able to call upon the loyalty of their
citizens to defend and enforce civilized rules of international conduct. An internationalism which seeks
to supersede the nation-state, however, will founder quickly upon the reality that very few people are
prepared to make genuine sacrifices for it. It is likely to degenerate, therefore, into a formula for endless
discussion and hand-writing.
I held these conclusions very tentatively at the war’s end. But they hardened into firm convictions in
the 1940s and ‘50s when, in the face of the Soviet threat, those institutions like NATO which
represented international co-operation between strong nation-states proved far more effective in
resisting that threat than bodies like the United Nations. […] To resist the Soviet Union effectively, it
would be necessary to restore our own self-confidence (and, of course, our military strength)
beforehand.
[…]
I could never have been Prime Minister for more than eleven years without Denis at my side. Always a
powerful personality, he had very definite ideas about what should and should not be done. He was a
fund of shrewd advice and penetrating comment. And he very sensibly saved these for me rather than
the outside world, always refusing to give interviews. He never had a secretary or public relations
adviser but answered between thirty and fifty letters every week on his own hand. With the appearance
of the 'Dear Bill' letters in Private Eye he seemed to become half the nation's favourite correspondent.
[…]
The desire to win is born in most of us. The will to win is a matter of training. The manner of winning is
a matter of honour.
Although Denis had a deep interest in everything military and by choice would have stayed in the army
at the end of the Second World War, the unexpected death of _his father left him with no option but to
return to run the family business, a paint and chemicals company,
[…]
But we were aware that there was a long road ahead. As my father used to say:
It's easy to be a starter, but are you a sticker too?
It's easy enough to begin a job, it's harder to see it through.

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Commentary
Every politician has a background – consisted of his or her family’s recollections, their studies, the
political events, their spouses ... – which have influenced them to act in a specific way. In her thoughtful
memoir, Margaret Thatcher undertakes to do a self-analysis proving the consistence of her political
actions.
As the Iron Lady was not brought up in the same environment as her fellow politicians, she thought
differently. Saving up money and struggling was common in her family, as well as, as consequence, in
her policies.
Against all odds, being a grocer’s daughter did not jeopardize her future but emboldened her. The very
basis of her economic stance derived from this experience. In fact, she defined the free market as “a
vast sensitive nervous system, responding to events and signals all over the world to meet the ever-
changing needs of peoples”. Concretely, her idea of economics made her think that government should
never interfere in the market.
Furthermore, WWII left an intellectual mark on her. Perhaps her rigidity in politics was rooted in the
fact that she saw every hardship in her life as a war to win. In the same way as the Allies defeated the
Axis through perseverance and cooperation, M.T. was tough in front of opponents – e.g. trade unions -
and cooperated with NATO.
But even though we see Margaret Thatcher as a very insensitive and solitary person, her memoir is
explaining the opposite. Her husband was actually imperturbably supporting her. This fervent defender
of her ideas helped her emotionally to face up to each and every hardship.

17
Fourth Document: Leo Abse, Margaret, Daughter of Beatrice, Jonathan Cape, London,
First edition, 27 October 1989, 288 pages
Extract
This essay seeks to establish that there is no shortage of material in Thatcher’s adult life to point
unerringly as the pathogen she is carrying, of her aetiolated affectional bond with her mother, and
which in so many of her political stances is torridly displayed.
This, therefore, is not intended as a personal attack on Thatcher –although it will be so interpreted. It
is intended to draw attention to the unconscious forces which provide the dynamic, the pathology and
the distortions of her political policies. Nietzsche […] once declared: ‘I never attack persons; I merely
avail myself of the person as of a strong magnifying glass that allows one to make visible a general but
creeping and elusive calamity.’
2. Phallic Woman
BEFORE adult man discovers the vagina as a place of shelter for the penis, before he enters into the
heritage of the womb, he has to traverse a myriad obstacles. Often he misleads himself, become as a
fool to the signposts directing him only to a mythological places where terror, but no real solace,
prevails. Then he may meet Medusa upon whose head the snakes writhe: he has come to a land under
the sovereignty of the phallic mother, where, if he is to become: protected citizen, he must renounce his
manhood and become as a child.
And when political man on his public journey cannot advance further on his road and is suffering the
narcissistic injury of the voters' rejection, then the loss of an election evokes all the prototypes of his
earliest losses: the loss at birth of his mother's womb, the loss of her breast, withdrawn by his mother,
the regular loss of his faeces under encouragement or threat. All these losses are but premonitions of
what is to be the loss which he fears most, the loss of his penis. It is that fear of castration which the
little boy must overcome to reach manhood. On that route he falters, some fatally, never to reach
heterosexuality, but for most the faltering is but a hiatus, albeit one that can only be overcome by
disavowal of all the possibilities of the consummation of incestuous wishes which would, as punishment,
provoke the penis loss. The corroboration buried in the Greek myths, which caused Freud to name the
conflict burdened wishes of the child wanting to possess his mother and slay his father as the Oedipus
complex, also tells of the existence of the fantasy of the phallic mother: Medusa is but one of the phallic
women to be found in the Greek mythology. […]
Endowing the mother with a penis and renouncing the desired consummation, proffering submission
in return for protection, creates a pause giving an infant time to breathe before taking the next
courageous leap forward that will bring him nearer to manhood. But it is a faulty stratagem when used
unconsciously in adult life, for the fantasy is an illusion and can be sustained only by denying or blotting
our painful realities. In political terms, the incapacity of the Tory MPs to emancipate themselves from
the thraldom has left the nation for a longer period than ever before in this century at the mercy of a
prime minister unchecked by the operation of a genuine Cabinet and collective decision-making. The

18
sight of the terrible Medusa made a man stiff with terror and froze him, and thus has Thatcher
terrorised the Tories in the House. The extraordinary and total domination by Thatcher - up to the rime
of the defiance of Michael Heseltine - of the male, down-market Tory Cabinet, chasteningly illustrates
how decision-making, guiding the destinies of a nation, can be determined by the interplay, at an
unconscious level, between the residual infantile needs of a group of men and a commanding woman
who refuses, through disability, to accept her full femininity.
[..] In 1975, they were experiencing their defeats as a threat of political emasculation and to ward off
that threat, they selected Thatcher in a desperate feint to keep their intactness.
3. Margaret at the Breast
MARGARET Thatcher, the lady who is not for turning, makes no concessions. In her bizarre entry to
Who's Who - which she herself composes – she brutally repudiates her mother by suppressing her very
existence. In it, she simply describes herself as the daughter of Alfred. She does not concede she was
born of woman; she fantasises herself as an autochthonous Adam. 'Well of course,' she has said, 'I just
owe everything to my father ... ' No acknowledgment of indebtedness is ever made to her mother. On
one rare occasion when close questioning about her mother forced her to give some reply, Thatcher's
response was most revealing: in the same sentence that she protested her love, she also denied she had
any relationship with the mother. 'I loved my mother dearly but after I was fifteen we had nothing more
to say to each other.' […] 'It was not her fault. She was always weighed down by the home. Always being
in the home.' Since the home was most certainly not poverty stricken and consisted of some rooms
above a shop, where two daughters and an active grandmother lived, the notion that household duties
and chores weighed down the mother does not bear the slightest scrutiny. […]
The ablation of a parent, the denial of a biological past and an insistence upon being self-made with no
umbilical link to a mother's womb is a phenomenon not unknown to psychoanalysis. Such denials of
one's ontology have been elegantly delineated and their private consequences explored. The social
consequences are more brazenly seen in the counterculture underground where the repudiation of the
parent is expressed by insistence upon a-historicity and a blotting out of any debt to the past. […]
In Thatcher’s case, she has attempted to expel only one parent; the mother, Beatrice, has been sent
into exile. But the affection of psychological discontinuity is, of course, an illusion and is achieved only
by massive self-deception and an inauthentic philosophy. Thatcher’s selective caesura in her personal
biography is part of the same condition that precipitated her ‘radical’ assault upon the past – upon the
historic Tory Party. Under Thatcher, the traditions of pragmatism and the domination of the Party by the
aristocracy have been swept aside; she wanted no lineage. […] She emerges from no womb, even the
womb of time. Visiting Paris for the first time as prime minister, Mrs Thatcher flabbergasted a senior
foreign minister, Alain Peyrefite, by announcing she was the first post-war Conservative prime minister.
Peyrefite […] was sharply told they [other P.M.] allowed socialism to be extended in Britain, whereas she
was going to reverse it. Since she acknowledges no legacy she favours the self-made man.

19
[…] Heinz Kohut, the psychoanalyst whose emendations to classical Freudian theory have caused so
much turbulence in the American psychoanalytical world, marshalled compelling clinical material
showing that those whose psychic structure bears disproportionately the impress of an idealised father
image, do so to compensate for their lack of a sufficiently empathetic mother. We must not, however,
be blinded by Thatcher's constant public recall of Alderman Roberts's virtues.
[…]
It is my belief that the deep wound the shadowy mother inflicted upon Margaret Thatcher’s narcissism
has never healed. […] She is happy – indeed she seems only to exist – when she is furious: only then
does she regain the self-esteem she was not granted in her cradle.
Margaret was Beatrice's second child, born five years after her sister Muriel. When a second daughter
is born to a woman without a son, it is often experienced as a disappointment and this may have
contributed to the mother’s lack of a positive relationship with her child, but more firmly established is
the consequence of Margaret Thatcher’s living-in maternal grandmother, Phoebe Stephenson, who
evidently ruled the crowded household even if downstairs Alderman Roberts ruled his shop. She was,
Thatch has told us, ‘Very, very Victorian and very, very strict.’ Margaret Thatcher’s mother could not
give her the warm responses which she in turn had never received.
The narcissistic deprivation Thatcher endured and her consequent ceaseless fury has reverberated
around our domestic politics and has been dangerously injected into her conduct of Britain's foreign
affairs. Too often the babe, denied the reassurance that her mother belongs to her, and the needed
omnipotent control over the mother becomes chronically and traumatically frustrated. Then chronic
narcissistic rages with all their deleterious consequences will be established and will herald their later
ideational companion - the conviction that the environment is essentially inimical. […] Thatcher asks, 'Is
he one of us?' If enemies are not in existence, they will be created. No area of consensus politics can be
permitted - the split between her side and the other must be total. Those accused of accommodation
like Francis Pym, Norman St John Stevas and James Prior, are ruthlessly expelled from her Cabinet.
[…] While some ambivalence in all human relationships is natural and unavoidable, Thatcher’s
relationships that early polarity remains. While some ambivalence in all human relationships is natural
and unavoidable, Thatcher will not tolerate it; persons philosophies and institutions are all perceived as
either friend of foe. Under no circumstances can she tolerate consensus. […] she once told a rally ‘The
Old Testament prophets did not say “Brothers I want consensus”’.
[…] Their denials [of her mother and grandmother] and their imposed frustations have left our premier
with no affection for any legislative action that may recall the qualities with which mothers less atypical
than Beatrice Roberts are so bountifully endowed: to nurse and nourish, to care and tolerate, improve
and preserve.
[…] Significantly the issue related to milk; the deprivation she felt at the breast was one which she in
revenge and in return was now driven to impose upon the children in our primary schools. They were
not to have what she always lacked. Punitively and irrationally she decided to end the £8 million a year
free milk programme for primary school children.

20
[…] Her compulsive response to the threat of food shortage had no real rationale: it sprung from her
primal fears of her unresponsive mother.
[…]
Her conduct in the House reflects her inner depressiveness. When an eloquent rapier thrust or some
droll gaffe is made in the Commons, the whole House laughs but Thatcher rarely joins in the fun. The
mothering smile was never bestowed upon her, and although she can jeer the spontaneous laugh is not
part of her equipment. The frown not the genuine smile is her emblem. The sophisticated raillery of St
John Stevas could not be tolerated, self-mockery could not be endured, and he had to be expunged
from the Cabinet. Even her admired Reagan has been miffed by her total incapacity to appreciate his
jokes. […]
3. On the pot
[…] As Elvio Fachinelli, the Italian psychoanalyst, has emphasised, 'Within the nexus, a significant
relationship of mutual tension and desire is gradually developed between the child and its mother.
Moved by love for her and by the fear of losing her, by the pleasure of gratifying its desire or the
pleasure of being compensated for not doing so, the child slowly renounces total control over its new-
found power and agrees to produce the golden eggs only when and where she demands. […]’ Yet with
sensitivity and love, a happy armistice can be achieved. The baby gives his great gift, the precursor of all
gifts, and the mother's former prohibitions are now felt as wondrous approvals.
I believe no such peace treaty was ever signed between Thatcher and her mother and grandmother.
[…]
Yet, at least the gambling was furtive, and the public stance taken by enough of us ensured that the
Betting and Claiming Act of 196o contained many of the needed restrictions upon betting shops. […]
Thatcher's protestation of a primary allegiance to her father should not deceive us. In her adult life it is
woman's inexorable destiny, as Freud gradually learned, to hear and hearken to the echoes that come
from a woman's first relationship with her mother, a determinate relationship which comes into
existence before the father, within the confusions and resolutions of the girl's Oedipal stage, attains
significance.

21
Commentary
In my hopeless attempt to accept that people talking about faeces, pee and penis are adult, I took an
interest in the Leo Abse’s psychoanalysis book studying MT’s life. What can psychoanalysis reveal about
the Iron Lady?
For Abse, she felt a little disdain against her mother. In fact, she did not say one word about her in her
memoir, and, being the second child of a family with two daughters, her mother was likely to be
disappointed. According to Abse, this scorn has three underlying consequences. Firstly, because of her
Oedipus complex, the Iron Lady desired to seem like her father, for example to be a politician, and she
was disgusted by the idea of being a housewife. Secondly, as she herself considered having no mother,
she also behaved as if she had no lineage in the party, saying that she was the first real Conservative PM
after WWII. Thirdly, the strict behaviour of her mother made her think that the world was unfriendly.
That is why she hated consensus.
A psychological viewpoint could explain some policies of the Iron Lady. She stopped programs giving
free milk to children as a revenge of her childhood. She did not feel empathy since her mother did not
passed it down to her. And her desire for liberty was the result of her mother’s strictness, pushing her to
ease the rules against gambling.

22
Bonus: Part removed from the extract
Vexatiously, Freud gave his derivation of the character trait of ambition almost in throwaway lines
rather than in a developed hypothesis. He attributed its source to urethral eroticism: the pleasure
accompanying the function of urinating. Some understanding that such an unlikely source may promote
dreams of boundless ambition is available to all of us with recollections of our boyhood, for we will have
played games, alone or with others, when enjoyment of our urethral eroticism accompanied fantasies of
omnipotence as we threw into the air our triumphant jets of urine. Freud, however, seems to have
wrested his conclusion from his treatment of women patients, noting the intense, 'burning' ambition of
women who had earlier suffered from enuresis. […] We find earlier, sources being suggested to us by
both Heinz Kohut and Melanie Klein. Kohut tells us of the consequence of the unempathic mother
brusquely negating the baby's need for corroboration of her healthy assertiveness and exhibitionism,
and how a desperate and often pathological assertiveness then sets in in order to gain the recognition
never voluntarily accorded by the mother: the baby cannot accept passively a world of unmirrored
ambitions, and the self of the child - injured by the lack of the responsiveness of the cold mother -
becomes dominated by unassimilated hostility. The enhancement of self-esteem never originally freely
and warmly given may, in the adult, as Kohut richly illustrates in his case histories, lead to a way of life of
sadistic domination forcing continuous acknowledgments of superiority.
3. On the pot
Few of us could claim that we can totally regulate our relationship to money according to the demands
of reality. In all of us an interest in money can in part be traced to the early excretory pleasures of
defaecation, but those early libidinal influences can be so overwhelming for some that their -
relationship to money is leeched away from rationality. Thatcher's deprivation of her defaecatory
pleasures made her an easy lay for Milton Friedman - her overvaluation of money - led her to be an
enthusiastic disciple of that monetarist guru – but - although her monetarism may have given her
supporter vicarious, sensuous delights, its infantile origin has meant, by its very irrationality, that it has
destroyed much of Britain's manufacturing industry.
[…]
As Elvio Fachinelli, the Italian psychoanalyst, has emphasised, 'Within the nexus, a significant
relationship of mutual tension and desire is gradually developed between the child and its mother. 8
Moved by love for her and by the fear of losing her, by the pleasure of gratifying its desire or the
pleasure of being compensated for not doing so, the child slowly renounces total control over its new-
found power and agrees to produce the golden eggs only when and where she demands. But in order to
re-exert some authority- over her in turn, to win her recognition and some revenge for all the wrongs
inflicted on it, it learns at the same time to postpone, to disappoint her, to make her wait ... ' Yet with
sensitivity and love, a happy armistice can be achieved. The baby gives his great gift, the precursor of all
gifts, and the mother's former prohibitions are now felt as wondrous approvals.

23
I believe no such peace treaty was ever signed between Thatcher and her mother and grandmother.
The rumblings of the war continue; unconsciously she still strives to regain her denied earliest sphincter
thrills_ by condemning the prohibitions which thwarted her. The 1 restraints and regulations m the
public sphere which she would now ( end are but displacements of the private prohibitions which once
so profoundly, irked her, and her coprophilous is but flimsily covered when she gives freedom to those
who dabble deep into money.
Yet, at least the gambling was furtive, and the public stance taken by enough of us ensured that the
Betting and Claiming Act of 196o contained many of the needed restrictions upon betting shops. How
profoundly Thatcher – propelled, I believe, by her unconscious need to raise the prohibitions against her
infantile coprophilia - had changed the ethos was chasteningly illustrated in 1986 when, to the
satisfaction of the national bookmakers supporting the Tory party, all the restrictions were, by way of a
Statutory Instrument, swept away.
[…]
Thatcher's protestation of a primary allegiance to her father should not deceive us. In her adult life it is
woman's inexorable destiny, as Freud gradually learned, to hear and hearken to the echoes that come
from a woman's first relationship with her mother, a determinate relationship which comes into
existence before the father, within the confusions and resolutions of the girl's Oedipal stage, attains
significance. Juliet Mitchell has succinctly emphasised its primacy:
Preceding any rivalry the little girl might feel for the mother in her demands for the father in the
positive Oedipal stage, there is already considerable hostility to be found in her attitude. A generalised
rivalry with siblings and father certainly causes a good deal of the jealousy and resentment, but this
primary hostility is something else again. It would seem to arise from the fact that there is no bottom,
none, to a child's boundless love and demand for love, there is no satisfaction possible and the
inevitable frustration can cause violent feelings. The mother simply cannot give the baby enough. And
then, of course, finally, there is the situation in which the girl blames her mother for the fact that she is
a girl and therefore without a penis …

24
Fifth Document: Some pictures
Pictures
Please note that the descriptions of the pictures were note written by me (they mainly come from the Guardian).
Margaret Thatcher and her father, Alfred Roberts
1930s: Margaret Roberts in a school
photograph
Photograph: Rex Features
In the late 1930’s: A young
Lady Thatcher is pictured on the right of the picture, with (L-
R) her sister, Muriel, her father, Alfred Roberts, and her
mother, Beatrice
1948: Margaret Roberts plays the piano and sings with a group of
voters, at the Bull Inn, in her constituency of Dartford, Kent

25
1950: Conservative Party candidate, Margaret Roberts, the
youngest candidate for any party in the 1950 General Election,
at work in a laboratory where she is a research chemist
1951: Margaret Roberts on
her wedding day, with
husband Denis (1915 - 2003). The dress was in royal blue velvet, the
halo-styled hat was trimmed with ostrich feathers
1962: Margaret Thatcher,
Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Pensions, waves as she
leaves Euston Station on the start of her journey to Llandudno where
she will be attending the Annual Conservative Party Conference
Photograph: Barratts/PA Photos

26
September 1983s: Margaret Thatcher with Ruud
Lubbers, Prime Minister of the Netherlands,
Thatcher with United States President Ronald Reagan in
November 1988

27
Analysis
Photographs can sometimes be a good tool to analyse the evolution of someone’s mind and
behaviour, given that the way the picture is taken, the expression of the person, can help us understand
his or her personality. This is why I have selected some pictures and analysed them.
I find the family picture very telling: the gathered family is not laughing, they are all serious. The way
the family members are dressed and are posing make me feel the solemn atmosphere in the family.
Look at Margaret Thatcher on the right: her back is straight, she keeps her head up and her shoulders
are back. We cannot see even a trace of a smile. The parents must be wearing religious clothes, given
the numerous symbols such as the father’s cane and the Bible that he is probably carrying. The photo
was cautiously prepared, and all was calculated.
She was taught to be a neat citizen: the relaxed attitude she had during her childhood disappeared.
She even played the piano (4th picture), the instrument of every “honourable” family.
Surprisingly, during her early years, Margaret did not seem like the famous Iron Lady she became.
Whether it be during her wedding day, or in the picture taken eleven years later, she looked kind and
sensitive. The more time passed, the harsher she looked. Of course, this was not simply an unconscious
process; she worked on it to avoid seeming vulnerable.

28
Sixth Document: Brian Connell, Ruthlessly ambitious? When people say this they are
wholly wrong, (Interview for The Times), 19 May 1975
Extracts
“It might have put me on the back benches for life, or out, I did not know. But the one thing which I
seemed to have was the power to make a decision when a decision had to be made. That is how it came
out. I ran alone, regardless of the consequences. Curiously enough, you have no hesitation about the big
things in life.
“It seemed as if life was going to be very difficult for us the moment we had announced we were going
to run. The press come in on you, you have no privacy. And I well remember saying to my family, ‘Now
look, that's the way they want it to happen.
They want this kind of badgering to make us retreat. They are not going to win. I am not going to be
beaten by these tactics. We'll go through with it whatever happens. We'll ride it.’ I'd had very good
training at the Department of Education for this. They were not going to wear me down.”
Her family clearly provides a solid ballast of normality in her life. The twins, Carol and Mark, in their
early twenties now, sass [sic] their mother affectionately, totally unaffected by her new eminence. She
is up at half-past-six every morning to get her husband Denis his breakfast before he leaves for his job as
a working executive with Burmah Oil at Swindon. There is a daily help who comes in later in the day.
Mrs Thatcher gets to her hairdresser for a set once a week about half-past-eight, and unless she has
outside engagements, is in her office by half-past-nine, staying until the House goes home. She can
make do with four or five hours' sleep a night and bones up on her briefs through the small hours. The
gift of concentration is something she has always had. “I have to master a problem because I haven't got
enough self-confidence in dealing with it until I have mastered it. I remember doing School Certificate in
wartime. I went in and looked at the paper with the sort of relief you had when you realized you could
do it and you just got down to it. At the end of the paper someone said ‘What a terrible thunder-storm
that was in the middle’. I had no idea there had even been a thunderstorm, no idea at all. So the
concentration must have come reasonably naturally.
[…]
How does she react to the criticism that she has too little experience of foreign affairs for a party
leader and putative Prime Minister? “In politics you can't have experience of every single department.
My main experience has been in education, science and social security, the welfare, spending and caring
departments. As a matter of fact, certainly in science and in education, those two subjects took one
abroad because they are of universal interest, both to developing and developed nations. So I have been
around quite a lot, but on the specific point that I had not made a special study of foreign affairs,
agreed.
She has remarkable clarity of thought and expression. The sentences come out fully turned, logical and
consequential. There are few repetitions or pauses. The more she gets into her subject, the straighter
she sits up, hands clasped in her lap, with the occasional downward glance in search of the exact phrase.

29
The sheer quickness and organization of her mind is impressive and she can look back to her childhood
as Margaret Hilda Roberts, born above a grocer's shop in Grantham, with total recall: My [Muriel
Roberts] sister and I were brought up in the atmosphere that you work hard to get on. [Alfred Roberts]
My father and Beatrice Robertsmother set that atmosphere. They both worked very, very hard. To start
up your own business from nothing implies that while you have been working for someone else you
have saved. You have saved when you weren't earning very much and you have saved with an objective
in mind. Both my father and mother saved.
“Although you wanted a lot more things in the house, you didn't live beyond your means. They
embedded in us very strongly that work and cleanliness were next to godliness. Our house was spotless.
There was not a speck of dust anywhere. It was always beautifully polished, the grate black leaded.
Although we hadn't got all mod. cons. it was as bright as a new pin. We painted our own walls and we
painted regularly, we distempered and scrubbed everything else.
“We were brought up in a very religious background. There was more than just having to work to live,
there was work as a duty. Caring for others ran very, very strongly, so there was a tremendous amount
of voluntary work. If you knew someone was in difficulties you quietly helped. My mother used to bake
twice a week. Always there would be something baked for someone else and we ran round with it—
‘Mummy sent this. She has just baked and she thought you might like this.’ She was a very good cook
incidentally.”
Young Margaret won a scholarship to the Kesteven and Grantham High School at the age of 10 and
was top of her class every year but one. […]
“By this time politics was in my bloodstream—an interest much as theatre is, or music. It isn't that you
consciously say you will be a musician, you are naturally interested in music. My interest came from a
family life in which education was very highly valued. When you haven't had a good start, self-education
counts for much more than the education which you receive at school. But there was no question of my
thinking I had a political future. We could not have afforded it. In those days if you went into politics you
had an income or you were sponsored by a union.
She won a bursary to Somerville College, Oxford, where she became President of the University
Conservative Association and chose to read chemistry. “I had a marvellous Miss Kaychemistry teacher at
school who got the best out of her pupils. So often you go the way where you have a good start. We had
been brought up against the background of uncertainty in the rest of the world. If you had a
qualification you were more likely to be able to get a stable job than if you hadn't. So my sister became
a physiotherapist and I took chemistry.”
After a spell as a research chemist, 1951 was the year everything happened. She stood for Parliament
unsuccessfully for the second time at Dartford, married Denis Thatcher, whose family had a paint firm at
Erith and changed her profession. “My father had sat on a Justice's Bench at one time, at Quarter
Sessions with the then Recorder, a man called Norman Winning. I used to go along as soon as I was old
enough and sit and watch in court in our local town hall. I would go and have lunch with them after. I
liked the law from my first contact. By that time I was 16 or 17 and I used to have talks with Norman

30
Winning and say that I wished somehow I hadn't taken up chemistry. As a barrister you need to join an
Inn, to go to London. We couldn't afford it. Everything we had was ploughed back into the business, or
given to the church, or saved up for the house that we wanted.
“Norman Winning said, ‘finish your chemistry degree and go into the law afterwards. The way to do it
is to go to the Patents Bar for which you need scientific degrees and law. So complete your science
degree, then get a job near London which will give you an income and do law the hard way’. So that
gave me something to work for, but this is before I ever went to university. So again, so many of my
ideas were influenced by early contacts. I only hope I did as good a job for my children as my father and
mother did for me.”
“But then a person is a member of a family. The father and mother are primarily responsible for their
children and for their family, for teaching them the right things and for setting some kind of example in
life. You can't really shift this responsibility on to anyone else, nor should you try, because the main lines
are probably laid down long before the child ever goes to school.
“Then you have larger responsibilities, because you are also part of a community. You just can't cut
yourself off as a family or isolate yourself from the community. I don't believe that you should leave all
the help to be done through the state. […]
What personal characteristics does she look for in the people around her? — “Some people are
obviously trying to sell themselves to you and you recoil from that completely. There are others who are
very much better talkers than they are doers and you are very well aware of that. […]
She is a trim and comely woman, quintessentially English in her features and manner. Her face is fine-
boned, her eyes grey-blue, frank and alive. She was wearing a pinhead black and white Donegal tweed
dress and jacket, the lapels and pockets braided, with black leather buttons and sensible black shoes.
She wears all the jewelry she has—every piece her husband's gift—two modest rows of pearls ( “a
present when the twins were born” ); a sapphire and diamond engagement ring and a small diamond
half-hoop ring; a slim gold watch; a marble-sized amethyst ring on her right hand and a jangle of
cairngorms on the wrist; a nice pearl and diamond display brooch on her right lapel, pearl and gold
filigree earrings and an aquamarine brooch on the dress under the jacket. Her foulard scarf matched it.
How much of a help or hindrance has it been to be a good-looking woman?
[…] “By the time I've been writing a speech at three o'clock in the morning, my hair is looking
dishevelled. I haven't even got a mirror in this room, I must get one. You look in the glass of a bookcase
or something, but you make up before you go out in the morning, you put on something reasonably tidy
and you hope it remains reasonably tidy. When the recess comes around you have to repair zips, hems,
buttons and seams. Sometimes I have to say to my office staff ‘You mustn't give me too many tours in
quick succession, because I've got to see that my clothes are properly ready and in good condition. It has
got to be done, there's no one else to do it.’ It is difficult and it gets more difficult, because I need more
clothes than I have ever had before. You come off one tour and you have to go and do something the
next day. It's expensive and I resent having to spend that amount on clothes.” […]
Brian Connell

31
Commentary
When we were children, we were told to behave correctly. What were the instructions that were given
to Margaret Thatcher during her childhood? As we have seen in the previous document, MT’s family
looked so well dressed in its pictures whereas they were supposedly poor. Why? Did this affect the way
she was dressing during her adulthood?
MT was brought up in a very strict environment. So, although she promoted the idea of liberty, or
individualism, MT was forced her to act in a specific way in society: she was taught to work hard, to go
regularly to church. Even though her family was not rich, she always looked neat. And her life was neat
too: for instance, she worked hard to have a qualification and earn a good living.
Plus, when she ran for office, as she said, MT had “no privacy”, the pressure to appear well dressed
was even higher. As a result, she was always checking whether her haircut was right. She wore so much
jewellery! She did not want to spend so much on clothes but she felt obliged to.
As a consequence, I think MT would roll over in her grave if you connected Thatcherism to Liberty. She
decided against the relaxation of divorce for example. This is why we should know what her version of
Freedom was: it was just limited to the concept of free-market and the fact that individuals should not
be burdened by the state.

32
Seventh Document: Jon Agar, “Thatcher, Scientist”, in Notes and Records of the Royal
Society of London, Vol. 65, No. 3 (20 September 2011), pp. 215-232
Extracts
Did it matter that Margaret Thatcher, three times British prime minister, staunch opponent of
socialism, fervid proponent of markets rather than governments as the agents of choice and change,
had trained and worked as a research scientist? In the immense literature on Thatcher and Thatcherism,
no author emphasizes, or even discusses in any depth, the connection between Thatcher, scientist, and
Thatcher, politician. […] An early commentary on Thatcherism remarked that the ‘great mystery’ was
‘how and when the transformation [of Thatcher into a Thatcherite] took place’. Commentators since
then have substantially explained the transformation by appealing to the extraordinary and sudden
salience of neo-liberal economic ideas in the context of the political upheavals of the early 1970s.3 […]
Biographers of Margaret Thatcher sing in unison on the topic of Thatcher, scientist: while she studied
chemistry for four years at Oxford University, completing a research dissertation under an exceptionally
gifted scientist, followed by three years of research in innovative industrial laboratories, the chemistry
always came a distant second to her political ambition. The years spent over the laboratory desk are
hastily sketched, even in the longest, multi-volume biographies, in the biographers’ hurry to reach the
‘real’ politics. […] Young draws on the judgement of Dorothy Hodgkin, Thatcher’s Oxford tutor, to
suggest two ways in which a training in science shaped Thatcher the politician:
[…] This blueprint for the practical mind, a marriage between speculative and empirical habits, is one which as
a politician Mrs. Thatcher consistently made much of. She retained a genuine interest in science, which Dorothy
Hodgkin concedes. It equipped her, says the professor, to take serious decisions on scientific matters and ‘to see
what scientists are doing’. In the politician, her lack of any outstanding scientific talent was less significant than
her rare capacity to understand the scientific mind at all.
[Hugo Young, One of us: a biography of Margaret Thatcher (Macmillan, London, 1989, p.16]
While I am agnostic over whether training in chemistry did indeed give students a peculiarly ‘practical
mind’, I do find Hodgkin’s second insight highly suggestive. By living the mundane, material, practical life
of the working researcher, Thatcher’s view of science was as an insider, who knew, as ethnographers of
the laboratory have confirmed, that nothing extraordinary was going on. […]
THE EDUCATION OF MISS MARGARET ROBERTS
[….] Margaret attended the local grammar school, Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School. In her sixth
form she elected to narrow her studies to chemistry, biology and mathematics. Her biographers record
that she chose chemistry because it ‘suited her practical bent of mind’ and had ‘good employment
prospects’, but mostly because she was ‘inspired by the excellent teaching of the chemistry mistress at
Kesteven, Miss Kay’. […]
Margaret Roberts applied to Oxford to read chemistry. Her earliest biographer, the Daily Mail
journalist Russell Lewis, suggests that because ‘there were few women’s colleges and therefore fewer

33
places ... she seems to have decided rather coolly and calculatingly that for a girl Chemistry was the best
examination bet.’ […] Lewis speculates, too, with no evidence, that there ‘was also the attraction of
invading and succeeding in what was considered a man’s domain.
She arrived at Somerville College, Oxford, in autumn 1943. […]
All of her biographers agree that the future Mrs Thatcher devoted her free time to politics rather than
science, and even regretted her choice of undergraduate study. One repeated anecdote has her walking
with a friend at graduation in 1947 saying, ‘You know, I oughtn’t to have read chemistry. I should have
read law. That’s what I need for politics. I shall have to go and read law now.’ […] All these anecdotes
serve to prepare the narrative for the next stage in Thatcher’s career, her training and employment as a
lawyer in the later 1950s.
[…] The Oxford University Appointments Committee, a clearing-house or agency for industrial firms to
find Oxford graduates, set up a series of interviews for Margaret in 1947. She was interviewed by British
Xylonite (BX) Plastics early in the year, and was offered a post.
[…] The details of her work at BX are unclear, beyond the ironic knowledge that she joined a union, the
Association for Scientific Workers, and that her work had a focus on the development of methods of
attaching polyvinyl chloride to metals.
[…] In 1949 Margaret Roberts had her first big political break: she was adopted as a parliamentary
candidate for the constituency of Dartford. Although only across the Thames estuary as the crow flies,
the journey from Essex through central London and out along the Kentish coast was too far to make
employment at BX compatible with political campaigning. She sought and found a second science job: as
a food research chemist at the Cadby Hall, Hammersmith, London, headquarters of the cakes and
teashop business J. Lyons & Co. […]
Thatcher herself records that the work had ‘a stronger theoretical side ... which made it more
satisfying than my position at BX had been’, which suggests more than mere quality control. An oft-told
anecdote in British left circles associates Thatcher with the invention of soft ice cream, which added air,
lowered quality and raised profits. Lyons certainly worked on this new product, but there is no firm
evidence that Thatcher directly assisted in its invention.
[…] By the end of 1951 she was married to Denis Thatcher, a manager of a paints business (the
chemistry in this romance was literally, although only partly, chemistry). Photographs of her in a white
coat were produced as part of the 1951 campaign, and they illustrate how her professional life as a
working scientist was seen by her political agent as providing a positive image.
Nevertheless, Young’s main point is that these jobs were incidental; or, in other words, Thatcher the
politician owed nothing to Thatcher, scientist.
In 1951, Thatcher resigned from Lyons, starting a family with Denis and revising for her bar
examinations. In her own words she chose tax law rather than patent law because the ‘opportunities [in
the latter] were very limited’. [Thatcher, The path to power, op. cit. (note 26), p. 83.] […]

34
MARKETS AND SCIENCE
In the twentieth century, most science, including most UK science, was done in firms that were
responding to market forces. (Margaret Thatcher, an industrial food chemist, is a more ‘typical’
twentieth-century scientific figure than Albert Einstein.) So the reforms proposed in 1971 by Victor, Lord
Rothschild, which called for market forces—government patrons as ‘customers’, research communities
as ‘contractors’—to shape government-funded science policy, were in one sense a matter of mere
emphasis. […] By 1959 the case for state funding of basic research was being vigorously promoted by
sometime RAND Corporation consultant Richard Nelson. […]
In this sense, the Rothschild reforms were an argument about where the boundary between research
governed primarily by market forces and research governed primarily by wise expert guidance should
lie. Nevertheless, it was precisely because this boundary was a fault line between the two regimes that it
generated such seismic controversy.
Both sides could view the controversy as a slippery slope. Opponents of Rothschild could see the
argument as the first step towards a more general marketization of science policy. Likewise, proponents
of the reforms might agree. […] I will suggest that intervention of Thatcher, minuted by some of the
subtlest professional documenters of their time, can be interpreted thus. Before we get there, however,
we need a grasp of the Rothschild controversy.
When the conservatives returned to power in 1970, the new prime minister, Edward Heath, appointed
Margaret Thatcher his Secretary of State for Education and Science. […]
The name of Victor, third Baron Rothschild, had been suggested by the Cabinet Secretary, Burke Trend,
‘who had long been worried about ministers’ abilities to take complicated decisions on science policy.’
[…]
Rothschild’s formally started work on 1 February 1971. The proposed research had ten items, from the
very general (‘definition of major Government objectives’) to the specific (‘Concorde’). Item seven read:
What are the objectives of Government Research and Development? What resources should be devoted to achieving
each objective? How should these resources be divided intramurally and extramurally? Is the present system, including the
Research Councils, the best one for achieving the Government’s R&D objectives; and, if not, what improvements, could be
made?
There is one final piece of the puzzle that we need before continuing. To understand Thatcher’s role in
the move towards greater marketization of science, as well as the relevance of Rothschild’s background
and think tank to this shift, we need a sense of how the UK research council system operated in general,
and the peculiar position of the ARC in particular. The system dated from around the time of World War
I, as an institutional innovation that resolved some of the tensions arising as science sought an increased
flow of state patronage. In its ideal form, approached by the Medical Research Council and—to a much
smaller extent—parts of the Department for Scientific and Industrial Research, research councils were
supposedly autonomous: the guidance of science policy was to be kept separate from the politicians
responsible for the administration of, say, health or industrial matters. The ARC, however, was set up
later (1931) and had only limited autonomy; its recommendations to the Ministry of Agriculture,
Fisheries and Food (MAFF), for example, were merely advisory. Furthermore, the policies of the

35
agricultural department, for much of the twentieth century, strongly reflected the interests of wealthy
farmers and growing agri-business.
In the summer of 1970, the Minister of Agriculture was complaining that there was a ‘real problem
about marrying together the pure research’ performed by the ARC with the ‘applied research’ that was
done on the ministry’s experimental farms. The minister, although ‘not personally seeking to empire
build’, wanted the ‘ARC under the Ministry of Agriculture’. Soon, sides were taken. Not only the
agriculture department but even the chief scientific adviser to the government and the chair of the
Medical Research Council supported putting the ARC under MAFF’s control. Opposing them, the Royal
Society insisted on no change without ‘consultation with the scientific profession’—that is to say, no
change without Royal Society approval. Thatcher, in late December 1970, relayed the Royal Society’s
view to the prime minister. At this stage, then, Thatcher was comfortable merely acting as established
science’s representative. She trod the departmental line: the ‘Secretary of State for Education and
Science and her officials … believe that responsibility for research councils should continue [as before]
as part of “Science” ’, a view shared, thought Heath’s adviser, ‘by the great majority of scientists’.
[…] The decisive meeting took place on 20 April 1971. […]
Gathered at 10 Downing Street on 20 April to discuss the future of the ARC, along with the prime
minister, were Lord Rothschild, two senior civil servants (Sir William Armstrong, the head of the home
civil service, and Robert Armstrong, Heath’s Principal Private Secretary), and Margaret Thatcher. The
new chief scientific adviser was not invited.
Thatcher began by channelling the pure voice of established science:
A decision on the future of the ARC was urgently needed. .. . Her Council on Scientific Policy had expressed concern on
this matter, and she had undertaken to report to them before any decision was implemented. The subject had recently
flared up again, because the [Council on Scientific Policy] and the Royal Society had represented that the Research Council
system had been thoroughly reviewed by the Trend Committee in 1963, in the course of which the Royal Society had been
consulted. The outcome ... had enjoyed [the] general agreement of the scientific world, and it was felt that the system was
now working better than it had ever worked before.
In other words, at this stage of the meeting, Thatcher held strongly to the line that no major change
was necessary. […] Rothschild now stepped in, taking the cue to talk of ‘consumers’ as a proxy for his
more forthright ‘customers’: 90% of research council research should be contracted applied research.
[…] However, the next line in the minute indicates a momentous shift in Thatcher’s position, recorded
in typically restrained Whitehall style:
The Secretary of State said that she did not object to a fundamental change, so long as its implications were worked out
and appreciated before decisions were taken. The logical conclusion appeared to be that the Agricultural Research Council,
the Medical Research Council and the Natural Environment Research Council would become organizations primarily dealing
with applied research [and therefore research shaped decisively by customer – contractor market language… It was
suggested that for tactical reasons it might be better to stop short of the logical conclusion, and there would be no
objection to doing so, so long as the primary objective was achieved.74
There are two broad ways of interpreting the note for the record. Either Thatcher, a relatively junior
minister, had been called before her prime minister and senior civil servants and advisers, and had been
told to change her mind. Or, rejecting this rather passive scenario, she herself had made the creative

36
jump to market language. Either way, Thatcher had changed her mind. She now embraced the relevance
of the market in shaping key areas of government science, and had already moved into ‘tactical’
considerations of how to sell the conclusion. The lady had turned. She had recognized a ‘primary
objective’.
REVERSING THE TREND
There is no doubt that the parties to the Downing Street meeting felt that a fundamental change in
policy had been decided. The meeting had ended on a conspiratorial note.
[…] Although her 1972 anniversary speech at the Royal Society contained some mollifying pieties about
the continuing place for ‘fundamental research’, other documents from the time show that any concern
for pure science was secondary to acceptance of the Rothschild principles.
Furthermore, once departments were buying research services from an internal market, it was a
natural extension to ask for those internal suppliers to compete against external suppliers under the
model of market testing. In the British context, the Rothschild report made a significant contribution
towards a market turn in the sciences, directly in the case of the UK.
[…] But when did Thatcher start believing in Thatcherism? If by Thatcherism we mean economic
liberalism, then biographers such as Young trace a flow of ideas that had its recent source in Hayek’s
Road to Serfdom, that continued as a trickle in the small Institute for Economic Affairs in the 1950s, and
London School of Economics economist Alan Walters and Alfred Sherman’s Centre for Policy Studies
(CPS) in the 1960s, and that became significant on the main political stage only in 1974, with the
conversions of Keith Joseph and Thatcher. However, the problem with accounting for neoliberalism as a
triumph of ideas is that very few economists accepted them. Even when Thatcher, as prime minister,
introduced the monetarist budget of 1981, the bulk of academic economists (numbering 364) signed a
letter advising against it. As Prasad writes, ‘the ideas of supply-side economics never convinced more
than a handful of people in the 1970s and early 1980s ... the real question is why this small number of
people acquired such disproportionate power.’ However, if we add to this picture the real choices made
in policy settings by politicians, then the 1971 reversal of science policy stands out as a concrete and
early moment when Thatcher chose the market as an alternative to established models of resource
allocation. I suggest that we look to this and other concrete decision-making moments: we might find a
train of episodes within which Thatcher became a Thatcherite.
Furthermore, science had a peculiarly significant strategic position for Thatcher, for two reasons. First,
science represented the best of the public economy, and the research councils (at least the science and
medical variants, not the environmental and certainly not the Social Science Research Council),
alongside grammar schools and Oxbridge, as places where the public economy worked. Her esteem for
elite scientists, recorded in her memoirs, seems genuine and unforced. Thatcher enjoyed repeating an
anecdote about a great scientist and a great politician: ‘When Gladstone met Michael Faraday, he asked

37
him whether his work on electricity would be of any use. “Yes, sir”, remarked Faraday with prescience.
“One day you will tax it.” ’
She viewed science as a source of wealth, and therefore as a justified expenditure from the public
purse. Yet this elevation made science even more of a test case for her developing views on economic
liberalism. If markets could work for science policy, they could work anywhere.
The second effect worked in the opposite direction. Margaret Thatcher had lived the life of the
working research scientist, as a final-year chemistry student in Dorothy Hodgkin’s X-ray crystallography
laboratory, as an investigator of glues for BX and as a food chemist for Lyons & Co. Perhaps the most
important effect of this experience was a negative one: it was precisely because Thatcher knew what
scientific research was like that made her impervious to claims that science was a special case, with
special features and incapable of being understood by outsiders, and therefore that science policy
should be left in the hands of scientists. […] The right to consultation, it was felt, was justified in the
same way that the autonomy of research councils over political direction was justified, because the
success of science depended on its independence and separation. Thatcher, who lived both worlds, saw
no separation, in principle and in practice.
Commentary
In his highly original paper, Joh Agar argues that Thatcher’s scientific studies were a determining factor
in her political ethos. How can somebody’s studies affect his or her action?
Firstly, according to Agar, scientific studies made MT more rational, which brought about two
consequences. One the one hand, since she thought that everything was the result of an effort, she
strongly believed in work ethic, which consists in promoting work as a virtue. On the other hand, she
adopted an analytical way of thinking: for each decision, she analysed the opportunity. For example,
when she studied law, she preferred tax law, because it was a thriving field.
Secondly, according to Lewis, the choice of Chemistry was not insignificant: it was a “man’s domain”
and so, it probably helped MT to be able to work in politics, a man’s world.
However, “Thatcher Scientist” finally submitted to “Thatcher neo-liberal” during a specific event. In the
early 1970s, while MT was the Secretary of State for Education and Science, the Rothschild reforms were
going to marry pure research and applied research, in such a way that marketization of science would be
promoted. At first, as a scientist, Thatcher refused this reform. But she fast changed her mind during a
decisive meeting on 20 April 1971. As a result, given that she had even accepted the marketization of a
field she considered the best public business, she accepted this for every sector of the economy,
prompting her to privatize dozens of companies.

38
Eighth Document: Michael Billington, “Margaret Thatcher casts a long shadow over
theatre and the arts”, in The Guardian, Mon 8 Apr 2013
Extracts
Mon 8 Apr 2013 16.44 BST
She had little time for culture – and once hailed Andrew Lloyd Webber as a great British export. But
Thatcher dominated playwrights' imaginations, along with so much else.
Margaret Thatcher may not have cared passionately
about the arts, but she left her emphatic mark upon
them. Under her watch from 1979 to 1990 we saw a shift
away from public subsidy to corporate sponsorship, a
transformation of the Arts Council from an independent
agency to an instrument of government, and the growth
of a siege mentality in arts organisations. While a lot of
ground was retrieved after her departure, the sad fact is
that we are currently having to fight many of the battles
of the 1980s all over again.
What always struck me about Thatcher was the gulf between rhetoric and reality. When she came into
office, her arts minister, Norman St John-Stevas, endlessly repeated the Thatcherite mantra that there
would be no "candle-end economies in the arts." Yet what actually happened? Her tenure began with a
4.8% cut to Arts Council grants and ended with one of 2.9%. In 1987 her arts minister, Richard Luce,
announced that "the only test of our ability to succeed is whether we can attract enough customers."
And, on one of the many occasions when she took Peter Hall to task for complaining, as director of the
National Theatre, about arts underfunding, she pointed to the popularity of British theatre the world
over. "Look," she said with menacing, jabbing finger, "at Andrew Lloyd Webber".
It is no accident that Thatcher seized on Lloyd Webber as a symbol of what theatre should be. He
embodied everything of which she approved: entreprenuerial skill, a world-famous brand-name, the
ability to make money. I enjoy a lot of Lloyd Webber's work but, as I argued in my book State of the
Nation, it seemed apt that the musical should become the dominant form of the 1980s since it
represented Thatcherism in action: what it celebrated was the triumph of individualism and profitability.
Where British theatre in previous decades had been famed for its writers, actors and directors, in the
1980s it became identified with its musicals – Cats, Starlight Express, Les Miserables, The Phantom of
the Opera, Miss Saigon. Even the big national companies were seduced into believing that a popular
musical was a passport to survival.
Ball-breaking ... Haydn Gwynne as Margaret
Thatcher in The Audience.
Photograph: Johan Persson

39
Part of Thatcher's legacy is the lasting effect she had on our culture. But it's only fair to point out that
there was a fightback, and that her values eventually came to be challenged by our more resilient
dramatists. As early as 1980 Howard Brenton and Tony Howard wrote a satirical attack on Thatcherism,
A Short Sharp Shock, which was produced at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East. It was broad, agitprop
fun, but it says a lot about the times that St John-Stevas was forced to apologise in the Commons for its
presentation in a subsidised theatre. The work was also prophetic in that, although Mrs Thatcher was its
prime target, she was the most dynamic figure on stage. As in drama, so in life. She dominated every
scene she was in.
Other dramatists were subtler and more circuitous in their attack on Thatcherite values. Caryl
Churchill's still-potent Top Girls, first seen in 1982, showed its heroine running her own London
employment agency; but part of Churchill's point was that society will never change as long as career-
driven women feel obliged to behave like surrogate men (a point reinforced on TV's Spitting Image,
where Thatcher was always portrayed as a balls-buster in a striped suit). In Serious Money (1987)
Churchill also went on to nail the spirit of an age in which greed was good and virtually any amoral
action was vindicated by profit.
As the 1980s progressed, more and more dramatists explored the psychology and consequences of
Thatcherism. In The Secret Rapture (1988), David Hare suggested that the anger that fuelled a figure like
Thatcher stemmed not just from fury at the vaccillating "wetness" of their colleagues but from some
perceived deficiency within themselves. But, for me, the play that offered the sharpest attack on
Thatcherite values came from the supposedly apolitical Alan Ayckbourn. In A Small Family Business
(1987), without ever mentioning Mrs Thatcher but to devastatingly comic effect, Ayckbourn pinned
down the essential contradiction in her beliefs: that you cannot simultaneously sanctify traditional
family values and individual greed. If you do, implies Ayckbourn, you end up with a family that owes
more to the Mafia than morality.
And Thatcher continues to fascinate British dramatists. In Little Madam (2007) James Graham explored
the imaginative poverty of her Grantham upbringing, and she is also a peripheral presence in his play,
This House, which focuses on parliamentary politics in the years immediately she came to power. In
Peter Morgan's The Audience she is portrayed by Haydn Gwynne – who will, presumably, be going on
stage tonight – as a woman in a tearing temper prepared to queen it over her monarch.
But, while I suspect her battering-ram persona and apparent lack of hinterland will long continue to
haunt writers, her real legacy is to be found elsewhere: in the frightening fact that we are still having to
argue that subsidy of the arts is a fruitful investment rather than a frivolous expenditure.

40
Commentary
In this article, Michael Billington brilliantly describes MT’s impact on the arts. How did she affect the
arts in the UK and how did artists depict the inherent inconsistence of her ideas?
Politically, although her government promised the contrary, Margaret Thatcher did not really act in
favour of Art. During her first term of office, she dropped the investment in this field by around 5%.
Perhaps MT was not convinced to invest in something just for its beauty.
In addition, in the UK, artists were divided in the same way as politicians during the 1980’s. In fact, on
the one hand, some artists praised the values of individualism and entrepreneurship, as the composer
and the theatre producer Andrew Lloyd Webber did. On the other hand, some artists challenged this
outlook by creating works censuring Thatcher’s ideas. For instance, in A Small Family Business, the
playwright Alan Ayckbourn stages a family in which each member is trying to become wealthy. In the
play, a husband is happy about sacrificing her wife to earn money. His work illustrates that
entrepreneurship do not go hand in hand with traditional values and show how horrible it is horrible to
justify an action by its economic profitability.
The Iron Lady left a huge mark on Art but it was not really in her favour.

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