She was not a brilliant lawyer. In the two years she practised under her own name she impressed everyone who worked with her as highly competent, thorough and meticulous; but as soon as she got into Parliament she was happy to give it up. ‘You can do two things,’ she explained to Miriam Stoppard in 1985.‘You cannot do three things.’24 The law, like chemistry, was part of her apprenticeship: its discipline shaped her mental equipment, but she never joined the legal tribe. She retained an elevated, almost mystical, reverence for the rule of law as the foundation of English liberty. But she had seen enough of the profession from the inside not to be in awe of its pretensions. As Prime Minister she treated lawyers as just another professional conspiracy to be brought to heel in the public interest; appeals to her professional solidarity fell on deaf ears. Her experience between 1953 and 1959 valuably inoculated her against the claims of legal protectionism.
In 1957, when the twins were three, Mrs Thatcher began again actively seeking a winnable constituency. Despite her record at Dartford and glowing references from Central Office, she did not find it easy. Conservative Associations, frequently dominated by women, are notoriously reluctant, even today, to select women candidates; that they were reluctant in the mid-1950s to adopt a young mother of twins is scarcely surprising. In truth it is more remarkable that she did, at only the fourth attempt, manage to persuade a safe London constituency that she could handle the double burden.
Before that she was shortlisted for two Kentish seats and one in Hertfordshire. The next safe seat where the sitting Member announced his intention to stand down was Finchley, a prosperous slice of north-west London which eventually turned out to be ideal for her. But here again she had a struggle initially against powerful prejudice. She was helped by the fact that the local Association was in bad shape. Despite a comfortable Conservative majority of nearly 13,000 in 1955, the Liberals had been making a big effort – specifically targeting the large Jewish vote – and had captured several council seats.
Sir John Crowder announced that he was stepping down in March 1958. By 15 May Central Office had sent the Association the names of some eighty hopefuls to consider. In June this long list was reduced to twenty, including Margaret Thatcher. Then the seventeen members of the selection committee voted for a shortlist of three: Mrs Thatcher was on everyone’s list, coming top with seventeen votes. ‘It will be interesting’, the deputy area agent minuted, ‘to see whether the 100 per cent vote for Mrs Thatcher contained some people who were willing merely to include one woman in the list of four, but there is no doubt that she completely outshone everyone we interviewed.’25
The selection was a close-run thing, but on the second ballot Mrs Thatcher squeezed home by 46 votes to 43. She had won the vote, but she had still to win the acceptance of the whole Association. ‘Woman Chosen as Conservative Prospective Candidate’, the Finchley Press reported. ‘Barrister, Housewife, Mother of Twins.’26 The London Evening Standard featured the same angle. ‘Tories Choose Beauty’ ran its headline.27 Her sex remained a contentious issue. Sir John Crowder made no secret of his disgust at being succeeded by a woman; and Central Office feared trouble at the formal adoption meeting on 31 July. In the event she had a triumph:
We had anticipated that there might have been some volume of opposition to Mrs Thatcher as a clique in the constituency were known to be opposed to a woman candidate. In fact the Chairman handled the meeting extremely well and Mrs Thatcher gave a most excellent speech and altogether went down splendidly. When the resolution proposing her adoption was put, it was carried with about five descensions [sic] who looked extremely red-faced and stupid.28
Over the next fifteen months she threw herself into the task of getting to know the constituency with her usual thoroughness, holding meetings in each of the ward branches, leading canvassing parties and conducting ‘an intensive campaign to meet as many of the electors as possible’.29 Her pace was perhaps not quite so hectic as it had been in Dartford nine years earlier. There she had been a single woman with no obligations outside her work; now she was married with children and a home to run. Moreover, though she took nothing for granted, Finchley was in fact a safe seat. She had not the urgent sense of being a missionary in enemy territory; she was among friends – once she had overcome initial reservations – securing her base for a long parliamentary career. For that purpose Finchley suited her admirably. The only drawback was that she had just gone to live in Kent, and the constituency was the wrong side of London.
Affluent middle-class homeowners, relatively highly educated and concerned for the education of their children, with a strong Jewish element – this was to be Mrs Thatcher’s personal electorate. These were ‘her people’, who embodied her cultural values and whose instincts and aspirations she in turn reflected and promoted for the next thirty years. One can only speculate how differently her career might have developed if she had become Member for Maidstone or Oxford or Grantham; as it was she became perfectly typecast as Mrs Finchley.
The Thatcher family was on holiday on the Isle of Wight in early September 1959 when Macmillan called the election. Margaret hurried back to throw herself into what the Finchley Press hyperbolically dubbed ‘the political struggle of all time’.30 Her election address spelled out in conventional terms how eight years of Conservative Government had made life better for the voters of Finchley. She fought an energetic but courteous campaign, sharing platforms with both her Labour and Liberal opponents. The result was never in doubt. The Liberals’ effort was enough to gain them some 4,000 votes from Labour but not quite enough to put them into second place: they made almost no impact on the Tory vote. Mrs Thatcher thus increased the Tory majority from 12,825 to 16,260.
Though she held the seat without serious alarm through various boundary changes for the next thirty-two years, her majority was never so large again. The lowest it ever fell was in October 1974, when it dipped below 4,000; but even in her years of dominating the national stage her majority in Finchley never again hit five figures.
Finchley was a microcosm of the national result. Macmillan increased his overall majority to exactly 100.This was the high point of Tory fortunes in the post-war period, a zenith of confidence not to be touched again until Mrs Thatcher’s own unprecedented run of three consecutive victories in the 1980s. The party she joined at Westminster in October 1959 was riding high; political analysts wondered if Labour would ever hold office again. But within a few years the pendulum had swung, and the first fifteen years of Margaret Thatcher’s parliamentary career were served against a background of increasing uncertainty and loss of confidence within the party – from which it fell to her, eventually, to lead an astonishing recovery.
3
First Steps