THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER2, 2019 61
tory. But Roberts was also a lay preacher,
and later became an alderman and the
town’s mayor. Ascent, for Margaret,
wasn’t merely a matter of sorority, then;
she studied her father’s public speak-
ing. At Oxford, she was one of only five
women in her year studying chemistry.
Called to the bar in 1954, she was the
first woman in her mentor’s law cham-
bers. She chose tax law, because, as a
young mother, she needed a regular
schedule—a year earlier, she had given
birth to twins, Mark and Carol. She
evidently went into the law because it
was the familiar (male) path to a career
in politics.
Her deep understanding of middle-
and working-class social aspiration, rev-
olutionary in the placidly entitled world
of Conservative Party politics, is what
kept her in power for so long, and is also
her greatest legacy. She figured out that
the labor movement, conservatism’s tra-
ditional radical foe, had itself become
conservative: it wanted too many things
to stay the same. Arthur Scargill, the
militant leader of the National Union of
Mineworkers, said that his members’
strike was taken in defense of the right
of their sons and grandsons to go down
the mine. Almost two decades earlier,
Mrs. Thatcher, then a young M.P., had
said that if she were “given a choice” she
would not send her son down a pit. It
was perilous and unhealthy: in 1967, three
miners were killed a week. The impor-
tant word there is “choice,” something
exercised, in 1993, by the same Arthur
Scargill, when he tried to buy a London
council flat (the equivalent of public hous-
ing), under a right-to-buy policy that
Mrs. Thatcher pioneered in the early
nineteen-eighties.
There is an unavoidable sense of
strategic efficiency about her domestic
life. Margaret Roberts was twenty-three
when she met Denis Thatcher, and she
reported back to her sister thus: “Major
Thatcher, who has a flat in London (age
about 36, plenty of money) was also din-
ing and he drove me back to town at
midnight. As one would expect he is a
perfect gentleman. Not a very attractive
creature—very reserved but quite nice.”
With admirable evolutionary shrewd-
ness, the right mate was being selected:
Margaret’s husband, who had means
from the family paint-and-preservatives
business he managed, would prove to
be impressively supportive, and canny
at backing out of the limelight. Friends
said that it was a solid marriage but no
great love affair. “She was pleased to
have twins, but more because it meant
that she need not get pregnant again
than because of a wild enthusiasm for
motherhood” is Moore’s dry comment.
Not that Denis compensated with any
wild enthusiasm for fatherhood. “I just
wished the little buggers had been
drowned at birth,” he said years later,
when asked about his children. He was
watching cricket at the Oval when they
were born. Mark and Carol were dis-
patched to boarding schools at the ages
of eight and nine, respectively, and Mar-
garet Thatcher entered Parliament, in
1959, as a Conservative M.P. for the
North London constituency of Finch-
ley. Her steady rise to power had begun.
Thatcher’s singular mission was po-
litical. Such single-mindedness, which
is hoarded eccentricity, is easy to dis-
like—it so isn’t like us. Yet one can only
marvel at the determination and the for-
titude needed to surmount the slights
and obstacles of that time. Nearly every
normal habit of life—engaged parent-
hood, sibling loyalty, marital intimacy,
deep friendship, ordinary social inter-
course—gave way to the achievement
of that one thing. Denis Healey, a bril-
liant Labour politician of Thatcher’s
generation, thought that politiciansneeded to have a “hinterland”; he said
that he had always been as interested in
music, poetry, and painting as he was in
politics. The English idea of the non-
chalant gentleman-amateur—Harold
Macmillan calmly reading Jane Austen,
and so on—had always presupposed
such hinterlands. You had one foot in
Downing Street and the other in your
country-house library. It was a tradition
of male affluence, to be sure, and Thatcher
might well have felt that she couldn’t let
her guard down. Or perhaps she just had
no hinterland. And no innerland, either:
in all of Moore’s thousands of pages,
there is not the slightest stirring of in-
teriority. What Margaret Thatcher felt
privately about God, or death, or a beau-
tiful phrase of music, or love, or sex, or
a sad movie, or the great blessings of
having children, or the beauties of for-
eign cities, or the anguish of suffering,
is not recorded. Her soul was shuttered.
But how hard she worked at that one
thing, and with what steely ministration!
Moore provides an example from the
beginning of her career. Junior members
of Parliament are encouraged to propose
their own bills; the gesture announces
a freshman’s seriousness of intention.
The young Thatcher found a subject—
she devised a bill that would force La-
bour councils to open up their proceed-
ings to the public (including newspapers
involved in labor disputes). But she“It’s good, but not forty-five-minute-wait good.”