Rob Blackhurst

John Campbell: Margaret Thatcher Volume One: The Grocer's Daughter

(Pimlico, 2000, pp447)

Global Thinking - The Foreign Policy Centre Newsletter

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Everyone knows where Margaret Thatcher learned her politics. As with Lincoln's log cabin or Joe Kennedy's pep talks, her formative years have long been beatified: market economics inculcated in the corner shop, a suspicion of public spending learned from her Alderman father, and Victorian fastidiousness taught at chapel. John Campbell's biography of Thatcher covering the years up to 1979 deconstructs this folksy mythology to reveal her in a succession of more complex guises.

For all the platitudes about her sainted father, this bright and ambitious teenager couldn't wait to get away. But if Grantham was deadening in its provinciality, then wartime Oxford was a hostile and snide world. She was a misfit, her earnest Samuel Smiles philosophy mocked by her urbane boarding school contemporaries. As with Nixon, this early condescension at the hands of the "liberal elite" stayed with her for life. This steeled her ambitions. As Linda Colley has pointed out, whereas most women of her generation would have turned frustration inwards into depression, she coolly ordered her life to make these against-the-odds ambitions materialise. Firstly, she found financial backing through marriage and became an archetypal Home Counties wife – wearing Penelope Keith hats, sending her son to Harrow and adopting the kind of strangulated vowels normally confined to Pathe news reels. Traces of her Lincolnshire past were expunged. It was only when as Leader of the Opposition she was recast as a brassy heroine for the tabloids that the "grocer's daughter" legend was born.

In her junior ministerial jobs at the Department for Social Security and later as Education Secretary, she kept her right-wing credentials well hidden. She even intervened to save Wilson's Open University from closure at a time when most Conservatives distrusted its egalitarian overtones. And even as Leader of the Opposition her natural caution held sway. She flatly rejected Keith Joseph and Nigel Lawson's calls for her to be far more explicit about her monetarist creed.

There are no hints before her Premiership, either, of the anti-Europeanism that would dominate her own politics from the late eighties onwards. When the Macmillan Govt announced its intention to join the EEC, Thatcher had been an enthusiast. Preserving sovereignty, she argued, was not an end in itself: "it is no good being independent in isolation if it involves running down our economy". Perhaps Britain in Europe should send a text to the Bruges group.

She even deployed arguments familiar to today's pro-Euro enthusiasts. If we didn't join the Common Agricultural Policy "at the beginning" then others would set the terms. Most startling of all, she harried Callaghan in 1978 for failing to join the European Monetary System. This, according to Campbell, was rooted in national pride. If there was to be European integration, then Britain should lead it.

Despite its persuasive analysis, The Grocer's Daughter can be hard to digest. Thatcher's staggering work rate – developed while she was still at school – left no time for any kind of private sphere at all. She seems never to have had any close friends, no spontaneity, no hinterland, no laughter. In these four hundred pages, there is a void where the biographical subject should be.

Rob Blackhurst is Communications Manager of the Foreign Policy Centre.