This was not, in fact, as difficult as it might sound. The flat at Swan Court was large enough, even though it was not ideaclass="underline" being on the sixth floor, we had to have bars put on all the windows. Without a garden, the twins had to be taken out twice a day to Ranelagh Gardens. But this turned out to be good for them because they became used to meeting and playing with other children — though early on, when we did not know the rules, we had our ball confiscated by the Park Superintendent. Usually, however, it was the nanny, Barbara, who took Mark and Carol to the park, except at weekends when I took over. Barbara had been trained at Dr Barnardo’s and turned out to be a marvellous friend to the children.
The fifties marked the start of a major change in the role of women. Until then they tended to be well into middle age when the last child of an often large family fled the nest; work within the house, without the benefit of labour-saving devices, took much longer; and home was also a more social place, visited throughout the day by a wide range of tradesmen, from the milkman to the window cleaner, each perhaps stopping off for a chat or cup of tea. Consequently, fewer women had the opportunity or felt the need to go out to work. The fifties marked the beginning of the end of this world, and by the eighties it had changed out of recognition. Women were younger when the children left home because families were smaller; domestic work was lighter owing to new home appliances; and home deliveries were replaced by a weekly visit to the mall or supermarket. And the 1980s saw yet another twist: the trend whereby women started to remain at work in the early years of marriage, but to leave the workforce to have children for a time in their thirties.
These changes led to a powerful and largely middle-class lobby for tax allowances for child care — either nannies or play groups or, in educational disguise, nursery provision. As Prime Minister I resisted this pressure. I did not believe that working wives, who would presumably be bringing more money into the family anyway, should in effect be subsidized by the taxes paid by couples where the woman looked after the children at home and there was only one income. This was a straightforward matter of fairness.
Of course, these general arguments were not ones which affected my own decisions as a young mother. I was especially fortunate in being able to rely on Denis’s income to hire a nanny to look after the children in my absences. I could combine being a good mother with being an effective professional woman, as long as I organized everything intelligently down to the last detail. It was not enough to have someone in to mind the children; I had to arrange my own time to ensure that I could spend a good deal of it with them. As regards being a barrister after I had become qualified, I would have a certain amount of latitude in the cases I took on, so I could to some extent adjust my workload in line with the demands of family. As regards politics, we lived in London, my husband worked in the London area, Parliament was in London — clearly, I must seek a constituency which was also in or near London. It was only this unusual combination of circumstances which enabled me to consider becoming an MP while I had young children.
Not long after I had the twins, John Hare wrote to me from Central Office:
I was delighted to hear that you had had twins. How very clever of you. How is this going to affect your position as a candidate? I have gaily been putting your name forward; if you would like me to desist, please say so.
I replied thanking him and noting:
Having unexpectedly produced twins — we had no idea there were two of them until the day they were born — I think I had better not consider a candidature for at least six months. The household needs considerable reorganization and a reliable nurse must be found before I can feel free to pursue such other activities with the necessary fervour.
So my name was, as John Hare put it, kept ‘in cold storage for the time being’. It was incumbent on me to say when I would like to come onto the active list of candidates again.
My self-prescribed six months of political limbo were quickly over. I duly passed my Bar finals. I had begun by considering specializing in patent law because I thought I would be able to make use of my industrial and scientific knowledge. But it seemed that the opportunities there were very limited and so perhaps tax law would be a better bet. In any case, I would need a foundation in the criminal law first. So in December 1953 I joined Frederick Lawton’s Chambers in the Inner Temple for a six months’ pupillage. Fred Lawton’s was a common law Chambers. He was, indeed, one of the most brilliant criminal lawyers I ever knew. He was witty, with no illusions about human nature or his own profession, extraordinarily lucid in exposition, and a kind guide to me.
In fact, I was to go through no fewer than four sets of Chambers, partly because I had to gain a grounding in several fields before I was competent to specialize in tax. So I witnessed the rhetorical fireworks of the Criminal Bar, admired the precise draftsmanship of the Chancery Bar and then delved into the details of company law. But I became increasingly confident that tax law could be my forte. It was a meeting point with my interest in politics; it offered the right mixture of theory and practical substance; and of one thing we could all be sure — there would never be a shortage of clients desperate to cut their way out of the jungle of over-complex and constantly changing tax law.
Studying, observing, discussing and eventually practising law had a profound effect on my political outlook. In this I was probably unusual. Familiarity with the law usually breeds if not contempt, at least a large measure of cynicism. For me, however, it gave a richer significance to that expression ‘the rule of law’ which so easily tripped off the Conservative tongue.
From my reading at university and earlier I had gained a clear idea that what distinguished free from un-free regimes was that law ruled in the first and force in the second. But what was the essence of this ‘law’? By what process had it evolved? And why did it have such deep roots in Britain and, as recent history showed, such shallow ones elsewhere? The legal textbooks that I now studied were not by and large intended to provide answers to such points. But the principles of law which they expounded continually raised in my mind these questions. Similarly, as I read about the great judges of the formative periods of English law, I was increasingly fascinated by the mysterious and cumulative process by which the courts of England had laid the foundations for English freedom.
But it was A.V. Dicey whose writing — above all his classic textbook The Law of the Constitution — had most impact on me. It had long been fashionable to attack Dicey for his doctrinaire opposition to the new administrative state, and there are plenty of learned commentators still inclined to do so. But I found myself immediately at home with what he said — it is not perhaps without significance that though Dicey’s was a great legal mind, he was at heart a classical liberal. The ‘law of the constitution’ was, in Dicey’s words, the result of two ‘guiding principles, which had been gradually worked out by the more or less conscious efforts of generations of English statesmen and lawyers’. The first of these principles was the sovereignty of Parliament. The second was the rule of law, which I will summarize briefly and inadequately as the principle that no authority is above the law of the land.[6] For Dicey, writing in 1885, and for me reading him some seventy years later, the rule of law still had a very English, or at least Anglo-Saxon, feel to it. It was later, through reading Hayek’s masterpieces The Constitution of Liberty and Law, Legislation and Liberty that I really came to think of this principle as having wider application.
6
A.V. Dicey, Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (8th edition, 1915), pp. 465-6.