When Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, she crisply observed: “Any woman who understands the problems of running a home will be nearer to understanding the problems of running a country.” Behind the black door of 10 Downing Street, in her private life Margaret Thatcher was a housewife mother of sometimes troubled twins, supported by her ever-loyal husband Denis.
In her autobiography she wrote: “I could never have been prime minister for more than 11 years without Denis by my side.”
The prime minister dubbed the “Iron Lady” applied her relentless work ethic to home life, overseeing the rearing of her children Mark and Carol and performing domestic duties — with Denis’ help.
She saw no shame in making mention of her roles as wife and mother as well as leader; there are precious few leaders today whose first television interview would be conducted with their six-year-old twins sitting on the arm of the chair. But while her incontrovertible legacy as prime minister lasted, her family life was more opaque.
Certainly, her marriage was a happy one. She met and married her husband Denis, a wealthy, divorced businessman, in 1951. From the outset, he was aware of her fierce ambition and, easygoing by nature, was happy to pursue his business interests under the media radar.
Asked whether Margaret fell in love at first sight, Denis said: “No; there were two elections to fight first. She stood for Dartford twice and lost twice and the second time she cried on my shoulder I married her.” They got married in London on December 13, 1951.
Carol and her twin, Mark, were born in 1953, when their mother was 27. Having studied Chemistry at Oxford, she was training to be a barrister when she became pregnant, but with typical resoluteness, posted off her examination application from the hospital ward so as to ensure that she would qualify for the Bar. The family lived in Chelsea and the twins were installed in the nanny’s room – something that wasn’t unusual, given their wealth and status.
The future prime minister’s work ethic applied to the family home in Chelsea, west London, where she juggled her job, studying for her examinations to become a lawyer, organising the household, shopping, sewing, cooking and ironing.
Their nanny Barbera recalled: “She did everything — she was so ultra-efficient that it was very difficult to fault her.
“Mrs Thatcher always got her own way because Mr Thatcher allowed her to. She’d say, ‘We’ve got to go to this, this and this.’ And he said, ‘Oh well,’ and accepted it.”
Within six years, Margaret had, by dint of talent and determination, entered an exceedingly male-dominated parliament. After her barnstorming maiden speech in 1960, the aforementioned BBC interview took place with her twins. When her suitability for a front-bench career was mooted, she demurred. “Certainly until these two are a little older and I cannot take on any more political responsibilities,” she said, and it was a decade before she became Education Secretary in the Heath government.
In her book A Swim-On Part in the Goldfish Bowl, she depicts a traditional, even-handed childhood; her mother filling rolls for picnics and taking pains to personally wallpaper her children’s rooms. There were riding lessons and ski trips. Lady Thatcher’s press secretary, Bernard Ingham, recalls: “She’d often say ‘weekends are for the family’”, and while he concedes that she was not a conventional parent, “she was certainly a caring and loving mother”.
But Carol has written: “As a child I was frightened of her. I always felt I came second of the two. Unloved is not the right word, but I never felt I made the grade. She recently revealed in a BBC documentary that: “All my childhood memories of my mother were just someone who was superwoman before the phrase had been invented. She was always flat out, she never relaxed, household chores were done at breakneck speed in order to get back to the parliamentary correspondence or get on with making up a speech.
“You couldn’t distract her… she had tunnel vision in term of whatever she was doing.”
Former Cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken had a relationship with Carol when he was a fledgling MP and she was in her early twenties. He remembers that once, when the couple’s planned holiday was jeopardised by a three-line whip, requiring all Tory MPs to vote, Mrs Thatcher (then leader of the Opposition) quietly rearranged parliamentary business so as not to disappoint her daughter.
Perhaps it was this ongoing iciness that prompted Lady Thatcher to comment at a meeting with Tory grandee Lord Spicer in April 1995: “If I had my time again, I wouldn’t go into politics because of what it does to your family.” This shocking admission was revealed in a set of diaries by Lord Spicer published in The Sunday Telegraph last year, but whether it was an off-the-cuff comment or a sincerely held belief isn’t known.
Lady Thatcher was devastated in 2003 by the death of Denis after 52 years of marriage. And in recent years, as her health deteriorated, friends observed that her children did not visit as often as they might.
Indeed the simultaneous roles of mother and prime minister had never been attempted in Britain, nor have they since. As any parent knows, children are a high-pressure, full-time job.
Mrs Thatcher managed her dual responsibilities well but at times one had to take precedence. Often, understandably and admirably, running the country came first.
Carol, now a journalist, author and media personality, has been open about her relationship with her mother “My mum worked and that was that and to my dying day I will admire how hard she did work.”
Mrs Thatcher spoke tenderly of her family, letting the world see she was liable to emotion just like the rest of us.
“Was the prime minister a better person because she had a stable home life?”, she was asked in 1980, one year in to office.
“Of course I am,” was her reply.
Mark attracted controversy but that could not dent Mrs. Thatcher’s love for him as he got lost in 1982 for six days in the Sahara desert while competing in the Paris-Dakar rally. His mother was distraught and – so rare for her – broke down in public. A rescue mission to find Mark, then 28, cost an estimated £300,000
Margaret Thatcher was imbued with her economic and political outlook by her grocer father Alfred, a Methodist preacher, grocer and local councilor in the eastern English town of Grantham.
But she also had the housewife instincts of her mother Beatrice and would think nothing of immersing herself in domestic duties while political storms raged around her.
However, in her 1996 biography of her father, Carol Thatcher shed light on how the family operated behind closed doors, with Denis letting Margaret get on with her career while he continued with his.
The Thatchers were not the type to lounge around on holiday either, preferring sight-seeing rather than relaxing by the pool. She reportedly slept for only four hours a night and her husband was the only one who could order her to bed and relieve her exhausted staff.
Fiercely anti-socialist, Denis agreed with her on everything politically except her support for capital punishment. However, he never strayed into her political life.
Margaret Thatcher oversaw the twins’ upbringing, but let them make up their own minds on how they wanted to live their lives.
Her personal assistant Cynthia Crawford recalled “At Christmas 1988, my husband was knocked down in the road. I had to come straight home. The next day was the Lockerbie disaster. It was a horrific day. Even that night she phoned me to see how my husband was. She was always very sympathetic. I said: “Look, you mustn’t ring me because you have had such a terrible day yourself but she said, ‘No, I wanted to know how things were’.” I don’t think it ever came across during her premiership that she had this soft, sympathetic side. It was always that she was the Iron Lady.
She was very interested in the garden at Chequers and Downing Street. She put in some lovely rose beds. She didn’t do it physically herself, but she took a great interest in it. And the art. When she became PM she brought in a lot of traditional art: Turners and a Henry Moore. She has always been a very neat person, so she would always spend a little time tidying her wardrobes and cleaning her shoes. That would be relaxation for her.
“I would defend her to the last because she was a complete star in my life. I learned a lot from her, and I tried to do all I could for her. She taught me lots of things, including that you should only do one job at a time and concentrate completely. Whether she was writing a speech or tidying a drawer, it had her total concentration. She taught me that.
I think she did a lot for the women of this country and I know that she worked her socks off for the country. She did her utmost for Britain. I don’t think she ever got over the way in which she was deposed by her own party and her own colleagues. It still rankled, and there is no doubt that with the possible exception of Churchill, she was the greatest prime minister of the last century. In my book, she was the greatest prime minister”.
It was a shock for the twins when their mother was diagnosed with dementia in 2000 at the age of 75.
“My mother was born with a brilliant memory,” said Carol.
“She did chemistry. She did law. So I remember the shock when she asked me the same thing twice or couldn’t remember something.
“I was like, ‘Hey, snap out of it’.
Source: Tribune
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