He was Margaret Thatcher’s confidant and adviser for 30 years. In our latest revealing extract from his biography of her, ROBIN HARRIS describes how the spartan conditions and Methodist values of her Grantham home life shaped the future Prime Minister — and how ambition created a gulf between Margaret, her sister and her parent.
The four years that separated Margaret Hilda Roberts from her elder sister, Muriel, are perhaps one reason why, despite Margaret’s public protestations, they were never close.
But their photographs as little girls growing up in the somewhat dreary town of Grantham, Lincolnshire, already reveal something of their differences in character.
Margaret has a sweet smile, beautiful hair, flashing blue eyes. Muriel, too, is attractive, but in a solider, homelier manner.
The physical contrast would sharpen as the years passed — particularly when Margaret decided, almost certainly to please her husband Denis, that she would cease to be a brunette and become a blonde.
Frugal family: Margaret, left, aged four, with her older sister Muriel in 1929 - both would grow up to be contrasting charachters
The contrasts in character between the sisters mirrored their parents’ expectations. Margaret was, from an early age, destined by them for university; Muriel never.
Margaret was the ambitious one, intellectually curious, always anxious to be appreciated, ever keen to make an impact, certainly not above manipulative use of her very real charms.
Muriel was quite simply more normal — in her outlook, her aspirations, her capacities, her limits. She was the kind of girl who longs to settle down; and she did so, as Muriel Cullen, happily married to a Norfolk farmer.
Margaret Thatcher, by contrast, was incapable of settling anywhere. For her, marriage would be a place of departure, not a destination. The same restlessness helped make her Prime Minister, and a great one.
Muriel was closer to her mother, Beatie. By contrast, and it is perhaps the best-known fact about Margaret’s early life, the younger daughter was her father Alf’s favourite, and he hers.
Perhaps Alf had wanted a son. Certainly, the kind of attention he devoted to her and the values and ambitions he inculcated in her would suggest so.
Childhood: While Muriel, left, was close to her mother, it is well-known Margaret was her father Alf's favourite
Much has been made by practitioners of psychobabble of Margaret’s attitude towards Beatie. They draw attention to the daughter’s refusal to say anything notable about her mother at all.
Yet the assumption that this wall of near-silence concealed hostility seems wide of the mark. Margaret Thatcher would never be very interested in people’s personalities as such, only in their actions — and specifically those of their actions that directly concerned her.
When it came to psychology, on the individual level at least, she was profoundly unimaginative, and this applied in respect of her family just as much as it did in respect of her colleagues.
The truth is that when she was asked what she thought of Beatie, she simply did not know, for the very good reason that the two had no common tastes or interests, at least beyond Alf Roberts’s welfare.
THE SECRET ASSISTANCE SHE GAVE TO MANDELA
Lady Thatcher had an excellent rapport with the black African leader, Nelson Mandela, pictured right — to the fury of those on the Left, who considered him their political property.
Her views of South Africa were influenced by Denis, and were not what many people imagined. He knew and loved the country, but thought that apartheid was as stupid and cruel as the Boers who devised it.
She refused to impose economic sanctions on South Africa not because she was a racist and wanted to perpetuate white rule — though that is a charge still glibly and wrongly levelled at her — but because the hardest impact of sanctions would fall on the living standards of black people in the townships.
She wanted, above all, a peaceful transition of power and she consistently worked to secure it.
In private, she bullied the white South African government into secret negotiations with the ANC and pressed for Mandela to be freed from detention, believing he was the key to the process.
After his release, she had MI6 provide a safe house in which he could relax and recuperate.
Mandela himself knew perfectly well what he owed her. Once she left office, he could simply have ignored her. Instead, he visited her in London on several occasions and they also met when she spent Christmas with her son Mark in South Africa.
It has been suggested that Beatie starved her younger daughter of affection and that this explains Margaret’s apparent chilliness. But there is no evidence that this is so, nor did Margaret’s later private conversation ever hint at such a thing.
It is, indeed, most unlikely. Beatie was a kind and sweet-natured person, with a strong sense of duty to her husband and both her daughters. Margaret did not dislike her mother. Rather, she pitied her.
Beatie’s life seemed to her daughter an example of everything she intended in later life to avoid. ‘Drudgery’ was the word that most often came to her lips to describe it; ‘poor mother’ she murmured in unguarded moments, whenever the subject was raised.
If pressed, she would even express surprise at the idea that such a life as her mother had lived might actually be satisfying.
This says more about daughter than mother. And near the end of her life, Margaret seems to have felt a touch of remorse.
Coming across her mother’s old prayer book among some family papers, she wrote a little note inside recording her sorrow that she hadn’t thanked Beatie enough for all she had done for her.
And what of her father? Alf Roberts was tall, blond and blue-eyed and had a certain presence. Born poor, yet intellectually precocious, he had once wanted to be a teacher, but his family could not raise the money to keep him long enough at school.
Formative years: Margaret Thatcher brought much of her later political conviction from frugal upbringing. 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, pictured in the late1930's
So he had to take jobs where he could find them. Being extremely industrious — and very thrifty — he saved enough money to buy that now celebrated Grantham grocery store. Margaret was born in the flat above the shop.
More than any other British premier, she was made what she was by her early life, and she knew it. She never forgot her origins and often alluded to episodes in her childhood.
The deeper truth, however, was that she reacted against her background more than she reflected it. Once she had the chance to leave, she rarely returned. She escaped to a better life than the one she knew as a child — and in her heart she rejoiced in it.
One of the qualities that made escape possible was her extraordinary strength of purpose. From the time she went to school to the time she left Downing Street, people were astonished at Margaret’s unrelenting drive to impose her will, to attain her goals. She learned this from her father.
The key to his philosophy, and later hers, was hard work. For both of them, work was a ‘virtue’, not just a means to an end. Alf’s motto was ‘never waste a minute’ and he applied it to everyone around him.
From an early age, Margaret was weighing out goods in the shop, taking orders from customers and accompanying her father on deliveries.
The store was open from early morning until late into the evening; to ensure the business never faltered, Alf and Beatie always took separate holidays, albeit usually in the same place, Skegness.
The spirit of enterprise as such — which she would later come to exalt — was not so much appreciated at home. Alf even disapproved of investment in the stock exchange as a form of gambling, and some of these attitudes remained with his daughter, despite her intellectual commitment to capitalism.
Strength of purpose: Margaret Thatcher possess an astonishing and unrelenting drive to impose her will
It was effort that father and daughter prized, not risk. She grew up during the Depression of the Thirties, but Grantham as a whole was never poor.
She saw long dole queues, but this was not the industrialised North and the town’s economy was resilient.
Margaret Roberts’s heart did not perhaps bleed easily, at least for collective ills; but then, it had no reason to bleed in Grantham. This fact has some political importance.
She never acquired from real or imagined experience of the Depression either the rage that activated socialist radicals or the social guilt that affected so many of the Tory grandees who would later figure in her political life.
Instead, what struck her during those hard economic times was the way in which the poor kept their self-respect, while those with the money to help out did so quietly and voluntarily. That was the Grantham way, and she followed it all her life, both in her political principles and in her personal behaviour.
Although she could on occasion be absurdly mean, usually about small sums and when she suspected wastefulness, she could also be extremely personally generous, even a soft touch, the cheque book opened and alarming quantities of noughts written down before anyone could stop her.
Sacrifices: Despite holding to top political job in the country, as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's personal bank account was often in the red
As Prime Minister, she found herself extremely short of cash. Her personal bank account was often in the red. But she insisted on giving.
The broader outlook she gained from Grantham and from her father was a strong sense of individualism. She remembered vividly his scorn for following the crowd. ‘Don’t do something just because everyone else does’ he imbued in her. Think for yourself. Rely on yourself. Strive harder than anyone else. And make no excuses.
Yet, for all that she admired him and was inspired by him, life under his roof could be remarkably grim. Alf Roberts may have had a healthy income and high status in the town — he served as a councillor for 25 years, including a term as mayor — but he was extremely mean.
The family lived in uncomfortably constricted accommodation, which could possibly be excused by the demands of living over the shop. Even the outside lavatory was not unusual at that time. But the failure to install running hot water and the meagreness and dullness of the food they ate were her father’s choice, not necessity.
Alf prided himself on selling quality produce, but the quality was enjoyed by his customers, not by his loved ones.
Conspicuous consumption was frowned upon, too, by the family’s severe brand of religion. Among Methodists like the Robertses there was a kind of competition to avoid waste.
Even the cotton used to tack up the hems of the girls’ dresses was re-used and to say that someone ‘lived up to the hilt’, that they spent everything they earned and more, was a deadly insult.
Mrs Thatcher later applied the same frugal philosophy in Downing Street, to a sometimes ludicrous extent. She refused to have the carpet under her desk repaired though her feet had worn a hole in it. She had a patch inserted instead.
Another stifling feature of life among the Grantham Methodists was strict observance of the sabbath. On Sunday, the young Margaret had to attend church four times and all levity was outlawed. She was not allowed to go swimming. Even snakes-and- ladders or cards were banned.
In later life, Margaret Thatcher retained no sabbatarian instincts whatsoever. She worked as much on Sundays as she did on weekdays. And restrictions on trade were, in her view, no more acceptable then than at any other time.
But there is no evidence that, as a child, she had a thwarted desire to kick over the traces. She was always a serious girl.
It was widely remarked of her as an adult that she had no sense of humour. That is not strictly true — she could enjoy a joke, but unless it was obvious it had to be explained to her.
She also had a capacity for mimicry, and liked on occasion to imitate the upper-class accents of men she thought feeble.
Humour: It was widely thought Margaret Thatcher - pictured smiling while listening to United Nations Director General Peres De Cueller - had no sense of humour, but this was not strictly true
But she distrusted frivolity and thought prolonged bouts of humour a distraction: she would cut them short by telling people to get back to serious matters.
That said, as she grew into her teens, it must have been increasingly galling to live at such close quarters with the family in such spartan conditions, with such an excess of religion and such a dearth of fun.
That is why the prospect of Oxford, rather than nearby Nottingham University, proved so attractive to her. It is why in her 20s she so quickly and so thoroughly cut herself off from Grantham and most of those she had known there.
SHE went on a scholarship to the fee-paying Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School.
A hard-working pupil, considerate and generous, she was also perhaps a bit too eager and intense, inclined to be a know-it-all, her hand always up first in class, but not so outstanding as to inspire jealousy. An inspiring science mistress, Miss Kay, was instrumental in her decision to specialise in chemistry. It was an unusual choice for a girl, but Margaret, determined not to end up like her mother, knew she wanted to pursue a career, and chemistry offered the prospect of a job in industry.
She narrowly failed on her first attempt to get into Somerville College, but then a vacancy unexpectedly arose and she went up to Oxford in October 1943. She was barely 18 and had no real idea of what to expect.
Initially, life there was thoroughly uncongenial. The college was a cold, austere place and many of the people she met seem to have been prigs who looked down on her.
Miss Roberts was regarded as a bore, and worse still a Tory bore. She was ridiculous and quite incomprehensible to those at ease with the prevailing self-satisfied, socialistic atmosphere.
Her chemistry tutor at Somerville, the Nobel-Prize-winning scientist Dorothy Hodgkin, thought her competent though uninspired. Nonetheless, Hodgkin was helpful in obtaining for her various grants — in later years Mrs Thatcher did not like to admit that she had needed them.
The truth is that without such help she would have been in some financial difficulty. She received little help from home. Her mother sent cakes, but her father, true to his principles and his prejudices, does not seem to have sent much money.
In her last two years at university, she shared lodgings with two other girls rather than living in college, and was better able to appreciate Oxford’s social life. She proved an excellent ballroom dancer.
If there were no boyfriends in the usual sense of the term, let alone any sexual liaisons, there were certainly men friends — and not surprisingly, for, though slightly plump, she was undeniably pretty.
Beyond work, the main focus of her university life was Conservative politics.
Fired by her father’s principles, she became a member of the Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA) as soon as she arrived, and in her final year became its president. At home during the vacation in that last year, she made a momentous decision.
As she was holding forth on some political topic, someone remarked to her that she ought to go into Parliament. The monologue stopped, because suddenly she knew that this was indeed exactly what she wanted.
Disapproval: Margaret Thatcher's parents disapproved of Denis Thatcher, a divorcee businessman and relations cooled after her marriage to him in 1951
By then she was looking to a future that did not include Grantham. She was in the process of leaving her home town behind — including even, finally, her father.
Alf, for his part, campaigned and even spoke for her when she was a Tory candidate in Dartford a few years later in 1950. But her parents disapproved of Denis Thatcher, the businessman she met there, who was a divorcee. Relations cooled after her marriage to him in 1951, and Margaret Thatcher’s children barely knew their grandparents.
Alf remained proud of his daughter’s political success and was listening to her speaking on the radio when he died in 1970. Significantly, though, he left her nothing in his will. The old magic of their bond had vanished long before. She had outgrown him, and she had outgrown Grantham.
When she left, she was quick to lose her Lincolnshire accent, adopting a tone that the uncharitable described as posh. But her roots were not so readily denied.
In particular, the impact of the Methodism she grew up with remained very deep, though not perhaps in the way that might have been expected.
It did not leave her an obviously spiritual person, and she did not feel any obligation to forgive, for example, Michael Heseltine for what he had done to her. But it did make her extremely moral, by giving her a set of rules by which to live.
At home in Grantham she had as a child a religious publication called Bibby’s Annual, which had been given to her by her parents. Its improving verses remained a favourite of hers, and there was one in particular she liked to recite:
One ship drives east, and another west,
By the self-same gale that blows;
’Tis the set of the sail, and not the gale,
That determines the way she goes.
The conclusion was clear: we make our own lives out of the circumstances that prevail; circumstances do not make us. It was pure Grantham and pure Thatcher.
Extracted from Not For Turning: The Life Of Margaret Thatcher by Robin Harris, to be published by Bantam Press on April 25 at £20.© 2013 Robin Harris. To order a copy for £15 (inc. p&p), call 0844 472 4157.
The four years that separated Margaret Hilda Roberts from her elder sister, Muriel, are perhaps one reason why, despite Margaret’s public protestations, they were never close.
But their photographs as little girls growing up in the somewhat dreary town of Grantham, Lincolnshire, already reveal something of their differences in character.
Margaret has a sweet smile, beautiful hair, flashing blue eyes. Muriel, too, is attractive, but in a solider, homelier manner.
The physical contrast would sharpen as the years passed — particularly when Margaret decided, almost certainly to please her husband Denis, that she would cease to be a brunette and become a blonde.
Frugal family: Margaret, left, aged four, with her older sister Muriel in 1929 - both would grow up to be contrasting charachters
The contrasts in character between the sisters mirrored their parents’ expectations. Margaret was, from an early age, destined by them for university; Muriel never.
Margaret was the ambitious one, intellectually curious, always anxious to be appreciated, ever keen to make an impact, certainly not above manipulative use of her very real charms.
Muriel was quite simply more normal — in her outlook, her aspirations, her capacities, her limits. She was the kind of girl who longs to settle down; and she did so, as Muriel Cullen, happily married to a Norfolk farmer.
Margaret Thatcher, by contrast, was incapable of settling anywhere. For her, marriage would be a place of departure, not a destination. The same restlessness helped make her Prime Minister, and a great one.
Muriel was closer to her mother, Beatie. By contrast, and it is perhaps the best-known fact about Margaret’s early life, the younger daughter was her father Alf’s favourite, and he hers.
Perhaps Alf had wanted a son. Certainly, the kind of attention he devoted to her and the values and ambitions he inculcated in her would suggest so.
Childhood: While Muriel, left, was close to her mother, it is well-known Margaret was her father Alf's favourite
Much has been made by practitioners of psychobabble of Margaret’s attitude towards Beatie. They draw attention to the daughter’s refusal to say anything notable about her mother at all.
Yet the assumption that this wall of near-silence concealed hostility seems wide of the mark. Margaret Thatcher would never be very interested in people’s personalities as such, only in their actions — and specifically those of their actions that directly concerned her.
When it came to psychology, on the individual level at least, she was profoundly unimaginative, and this applied in respect of her family just as much as it did in respect of her colleagues.
The truth is that when she was asked what she thought of Beatie, she simply did not know, for the very good reason that the two had no common tastes or interests, at least beyond Alf Roberts’s welfare.
THE SECRET ASSISTANCE SHE GAVE TO MANDELA
Lady Thatcher had an excellent rapport with the black African leader, Nelson Mandela, pictured right — to the fury of those on the Left, who considered him their political property.
Her views of South Africa were influenced by Denis, and were not what many people imagined. He knew and loved the country, but thought that apartheid was as stupid and cruel as the Boers who devised it.
She refused to impose economic sanctions on South Africa not because she was a racist and wanted to perpetuate white rule — though that is a charge still glibly and wrongly levelled at her — but because the hardest impact of sanctions would fall on the living standards of black people in the townships.
She wanted, above all, a peaceful transition of power and she consistently worked to secure it.
In private, she bullied the white South African government into secret negotiations with the ANC and pressed for Mandela to be freed from detention, believing he was the key to the process.
After his release, she had MI6 provide a safe house in which he could relax and recuperate.
Mandela himself knew perfectly well what he owed her. Once she left office, he could simply have ignored her. Instead, he visited her in London on several occasions and they also met when she spent Christmas with her son Mark in South Africa.
It has been suggested that Beatie starved her younger daughter of affection and that this explains Margaret’s apparent chilliness. But there is no evidence that this is so, nor did Margaret’s later private conversation ever hint at such a thing.
It is, indeed, most unlikely. Beatie was a kind and sweet-natured person, with a strong sense of duty to her husband and both her daughters. Margaret did not dislike her mother. Rather, she pitied her.
Beatie’s life seemed to her daughter an example of everything she intended in later life to avoid. ‘Drudgery’ was the word that most often came to her lips to describe it; ‘poor mother’ she murmured in unguarded moments, whenever the subject was raised.
If pressed, she would even express surprise at the idea that such a life as her mother had lived might actually be satisfying.
This says more about daughter than mother. And near the end of her life, Margaret seems to have felt a touch of remorse.
Coming across her mother’s old prayer book among some family papers, she wrote a little note inside recording her sorrow that she hadn’t thanked Beatie enough for all she had done for her.
And what of her father? Alf Roberts was tall, blond and blue-eyed and had a certain presence. Born poor, yet intellectually precocious, he had once wanted to be a teacher, but his family could not raise the money to keep him long enough at school.
Formative years: Margaret Thatcher brought much of her later political conviction from frugal upbringing. 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, pictured in the late1930's
So he had to take jobs where he could find them. Being extremely industrious — and very thrifty — he saved enough money to buy that now celebrated Grantham grocery store. Margaret was born in the flat above the shop.
More than any other British premier, she was made what she was by her early life, and she knew it. She never forgot her origins and often alluded to episodes in her childhood.
The deeper truth, however, was that she reacted against her background more than she reflected it. Once she had the chance to leave, she rarely returned. She escaped to a better life than the one she knew as a child — and in her heart she rejoiced in it.
One of the qualities that made escape possible was her extraordinary strength of purpose. From the time she went to school to the time she left Downing Street, people were astonished at Margaret’s unrelenting drive to impose her will, to attain her goals. She learned this from her father.
The key to his philosophy, and later hers, was hard work. For both of them, work was a ‘virtue’, not just a means to an end. Alf’s motto was ‘never waste a minute’ and he applied it to everyone around him.
From an early age, Margaret was weighing out goods in the shop, taking orders from customers and accompanying her father on deliveries.
The store was open from early morning until late into the evening; to ensure the business never faltered, Alf and Beatie always took separate holidays, albeit usually in the same place, Skegness.
The spirit of enterprise as such — which she would later come to exalt — was not so much appreciated at home. Alf even disapproved of investment in the stock exchange as a form of gambling, and some of these attitudes remained with his daughter, despite her intellectual commitment to capitalism.
Strength of purpose: Margaret Thatcher possess an astonishing and unrelenting drive to impose her will
It was effort that father and daughter prized, not risk. She grew up during the Depression of the Thirties, but Grantham as a whole was never poor.
She saw long dole queues, but this was not the industrialised North and the town’s economy was resilient.
Margaret Roberts’s heart did not perhaps bleed easily, at least for collective ills; but then, it had no reason to bleed in Grantham. This fact has some political importance.
She never acquired from real or imagined experience of the Depression either the rage that activated socialist radicals or the social guilt that affected so many of the Tory grandees who would later figure in her political life.
Instead, what struck her during those hard economic times was the way in which the poor kept their self-respect, while those with the money to help out did so quietly and voluntarily. That was the Grantham way, and she followed it all her life, both in her political principles and in her personal behaviour.
Although she could on occasion be absurdly mean, usually about small sums and when she suspected wastefulness, she could also be extremely personally generous, even a soft touch, the cheque book opened and alarming quantities of noughts written down before anyone could stop her.
Sacrifices: Despite holding to top political job in the country, as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's personal bank account was often in the red
As Prime Minister, she found herself extremely short of cash. Her personal bank account was often in the red. But she insisted on giving.
The broader outlook she gained from Grantham and from her father was a strong sense of individualism. She remembered vividly his scorn for following the crowd. ‘Don’t do something just because everyone else does’ he imbued in her. Think for yourself. Rely on yourself. Strive harder than anyone else. And make no excuses.
Yet, for all that she admired him and was inspired by him, life under his roof could be remarkably grim. Alf Roberts may have had a healthy income and high status in the town — he served as a councillor for 25 years, including a term as mayor — but he was extremely mean.
The family lived in uncomfortably constricted accommodation, which could possibly be excused by the demands of living over the shop. Even the outside lavatory was not unusual at that time. But the failure to install running hot water and the meagreness and dullness of the food they ate were her father’s choice, not necessity.
Alf prided himself on selling quality produce, but the quality was enjoyed by his customers, not by his loved ones.
Conspicuous consumption was frowned upon, too, by the family’s severe brand of religion. Among Methodists like the Robertses there was a kind of competition to avoid waste.
Even the cotton used to tack up the hems of the girls’ dresses was re-used and to say that someone ‘lived up to the hilt’, that they spent everything they earned and more, was a deadly insult.
Mrs Thatcher later applied the same frugal philosophy in Downing Street, to a sometimes ludicrous extent. She refused to have the carpet under her desk repaired though her feet had worn a hole in it. She had a patch inserted instead.
Another stifling feature of life among the Grantham Methodists was strict observance of the sabbath. On Sunday, the young Margaret had to attend church four times and all levity was outlawed. She was not allowed to go swimming. Even snakes-and- ladders or cards were banned.
In later life, Margaret Thatcher retained no sabbatarian instincts whatsoever. She worked as much on Sundays as she did on weekdays. And restrictions on trade were, in her view, no more acceptable then than at any other time.
But there is no evidence that, as a child, she had a thwarted desire to kick over the traces. She was always a serious girl.
It was widely remarked of her as an adult that she had no sense of humour. That is not strictly true — she could enjoy a joke, but unless it was obvious it had to be explained to her.
She also had a capacity for mimicry, and liked on occasion to imitate the upper-class accents of men she thought feeble.
Humour: It was widely thought Margaret Thatcher - pictured smiling while listening to United Nations Director General Peres De Cueller - had no sense of humour, but this was not strictly true
But she distrusted frivolity and thought prolonged bouts of humour a distraction: she would cut them short by telling people to get back to serious matters.
That said, as she grew into her teens, it must have been increasingly galling to live at such close quarters with the family in such spartan conditions, with such an excess of religion and such a dearth of fun.
That is why the prospect of Oxford, rather than nearby Nottingham University, proved so attractive to her. It is why in her 20s she so quickly and so thoroughly cut herself off from Grantham and most of those she had known there.
SHE went on a scholarship to the fee-paying Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School.
A hard-working pupil, considerate and generous, she was also perhaps a bit too eager and intense, inclined to be a know-it-all, her hand always up first in class, but not so outstanding as to inspire jealousy. An inspiring science mistress, Miss Kay, was instrumental in her decision to specialise in chemistry. It was an unusual choice for a girl, but Margaret, determined not to end up like her mother, knew she wanted to pursue a career, and chemistry offered the prospect of a job in industry.
She narrowly failed on her first attempt to get into Somerville College, but then a vacancy unexpectedly arose and she went up to Oxford in October 1943. She was barely 18 and had no real idea of what to expect.
Initially, life there was thoroughly uncongenial. The college was a cold, austere place and many of the people she met seem to have been prigs who looked down on her.
Miss Roberts was regarded as a bore, and worse still a Tory bore. She was ridiculous and quite incomprehensible to those at ease with the prevailing self-satisfied, socialistic atmosphere.
Her chemistry tutor at Somerville, the Nobel-Prize-winning scientist Dorothy Hodgkin, thought her competent though uninspired. Nonetheless, Hodgkin was helpful in obtaining for her various grants — in later years Mrs Thatcher did not like to admit that she had needed them.
The truth is that without such help she would have been in some financial difficulty. She received little help from home. Her mother sent cakes, but her father, true to his principles and his prejudices, does not seem to have sent much money.
In her last two years at university, she shared lodgings with two other girls rather than living in college, and was better able to appreciate Oxford’s social life. She proved an excellent ballroom dancer.
If there were no boyfriends in the usual sense of the term, let alone any sexual liaisons, there were certainly men friends — and not surprisingly, for, though slightly plump, she was undeniably pretty.
Beyond work, the main focus of her university life was Conservative politics.
Fired by her father’s principles, she became a member of the Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA) as soon as she arrived, and in her final year became its president. At home during the vacation in that last year, she made a momentous decision.
As she was holding forth on some political topic, someone remarked to her that she ought to go into Parliament. The monologue stopped, because suddenly she knew that this was indeed exactly what she wanted.
Disapproval: Margaret Thatcher's parents disapproved of Denis Thatcher, a divorcee businessman and relations cooled after her marriage to him in 1951
By then she was looking to a future that did not include Grantham. She was in the process of leaving her home town behind — including even, finally, her father.
Alf, for his part, campaigned and even spoke for her when she was a Tory candidate in Dartford a few years later in 1950. But her parents disapproved of Denis Thatcher, the businessman she met there, who was a divorcee. Relations cooled after her marriage to him in 1951, and Margaret Thatcher’s children barely knew their grandparents.
Alf remained proud of his daughter’s political success and was listening to her speaking on the radio when he died in 1970. Significantly, though, he left her nothing in his will. The old magic of their bond had vanished long before. She had outgrown him, and she had outgrown Grantham.
When she left, she was quick to lose her Lincolnshire accent, adopting a tone that the uncharitable described as posh. But her roots were not so readily denied.
In particular, the impact of the Methodism she grew up with remained very deep, though not perhaps in the way that might have been expected.
It did not leave her an obviously spiritual person, and she did not feel any obligation to forgive, for example, Michael Heseltine for what he had done to her. But it did make her extremely moral, by giving her a set of rules by which to live.
At home in Grantham she had as a child a religious publication called Bibby’s Annual, which had been given to her by her parents. Its improving verses remained a favourite of hers, and there was one in particular she liked to recite:
One ship drives east, and another west,
By the self-same gale that blows;
’Tis the set of the sail, and not the gale,
That determines the way she goes.
The conclusion was clear: we make our own lives out of the circumstances that prevail; circumstances do not make us. It was pure Grantham and pure Thatcher.
Extracted from Not For Turning: The Life Of Margaret Thatcher by Robin Harris, to be published by Bantam Press on April 25 at £20.© 2013 Robin Harris. To order a copy for £15 (inc. p&p), call 0844 472 4157.