| Denis Thatcher was called on to play a role that no Englishman had ever had to play before, and he played it with style, good humour and an unselfish sense of duty that contributed substantially to the achievements of Britain’s first woman Prime Minister. It was a role not easy to put in words: it is hard enough to define the importance of the wives of famous men, and the phrases sound even more stilted when the roles are reversed — phrases such as “a shoulder to cry on”, or “supportive presence”. Yet the truth is that in 10 Downing Street a devoted spouse is a source of power. And such a publicly strong but embattled personality as Margaret Thatcher had perhaps more reasons than most to need a shoulder to cry on from time to time. Again, it must have been no bad thing, in a world of economic theorists and political gurus, for a Prime Minister — uniquely — to have had on hand a practical businessman, a man who knew how to read a balance sheet, with whom she could discuss affairs. Because there were so many caricatures of him, it was often forgotten that Denis Thatcher had a successful career of his own, with an effective record in business behind him by the time he moved into No 10. The role of the prime ministerial consort is not one he would have chosen. He was, as a friend once said of him, the sort of man who, but for his wife, would have been in a bar proclaiming: “There’ll never be a woman running this country.” That said, he had known from the start that he was marrying a strong woman determined to be herself; and his pride in her was enormous. Denis Thatcher, who was born in 1915, boarded rather unhappily at Mill Hill School, decided against university and took an industrial training course instead. He started work in 1933 with Atlas Preservatives. This was a family business that went back to his grandfather, a New Zealand farmer who had developed his own sheep-dip and weed-killer, and found that his products were highly marketable. By Denis Thatcher’s time it was a reasonably prosperous firm dealing in paint and chemicals, and with a business in the descaling of boilers. There was a thriving export side, which took him abroad. On a visit to Germany in 1937 he witnessed marches by the Hitler Youth and the Brown Shirts. Convinced that war was coming, he joined up in 1938 and was commissioned into the Royal Artillery. His first posting was with antiaircraft guns — where he overcame his diffidence sufficiently to give instruction talks — and he later served in Italy and France. He was mentioned in dispatches and appointed MBE in 1944. He later said that he had enjoyed the discipline of the Army: “The war didn’t have a traumatic effect on me, but I think I’m an insensitive person.” Meanwhile he made a first, wartime marriage, to Margot Kempson in 1942, but by the time he was demobilised he and his first wife, as he confessed, “were strangers”. He was distressed by their divorce — however “amicable” — in 1948 (she later married Sir Howard Hickman), and he was to conceal the very fact of his previous marriage from his children. Only when Margaret Thatcher became Leader of the Opposition — when the children were in their twenties — did he admit to it, because the papers had got hold of the story. In his mid-thirties, Thatcher took over the family business from his father in 1947. In his spare time he enjoyed playing golf and following rugby, a passion inherited from his father. He refereed to a high level, and was disappointed not to make it to the international league by the time he gave up in 1963. Though he had not voted in 1945, he was interested in politics to the extent of being active on the local ratepayers’ association, and standing as a “Ratepayer” candidate in a county council election in north Kent, where his firm was based. This was Labour country, and he lost. Then in 1949 he was present at the meeting held by the Dartford Conservatives to pick a parliamentary candidate to oppose the sitting Labour MP. The candidate was Margaret Roberts, who at 23 was the youngest woman candidate in the country. After the adoption meeting she accepted Thatcher’s offer to drive her home, and a shared loathing of socialism drew them together, despite his 12 years’ seniority. Meanwhile she had another serious admirer, whom she refused; soon afterwards he married her sister, Muriel. Denis Thatcher and Margaret Roberts became engaged shortly before she was due to fight the Dartford seat in the 1950 general election. They were married that December in Wesley’s Chapel in City Road, London. Although she had lost her first parliamentary contest, there was no doubt that she was set for a political career (indeed, she fought Dartford again in 1951). Nor was there any doubt that her political path would be made smoother by being married to a well-to-do husband. She gave up her job as a research chemist and was financially able to read for the politically more promising career of the Bar. Denis Thatcher’s business experience provided useful background for her work in taxation law. Their children, Mark and Carol, arrived in 1953 (twins born while her husband was watching England win the Ashes), but the family could afford the support, such as nannies, that can make all the difference to a mother determined on a career. The strain of very long working days, a family and, from 1959, a wife in the Commons, began to tell on Thatcher, and in 1964 he came close to breakdown. He went to South Africa and then on safari further north, returning after three months determined to sell the family firm. When it was sold the following year to Castrol, it was on terms which provided that he joined their board. A swift takeover took him into Burmah Oil, and within a few years he was a director responsible for the organisation and planning of Burmah Oil Trading — a substantial figure in the business world. This was to cause embarrassment when the company had to be rescued by the Bank of England just six weeks before his wife became Conservative leader in 1975. The family found itself exposed to publicity which Thatcher, a shy man behind his outward bonhomie, could scarcely welcome. Moreover, whereas she was 49 when she became leader, he was at an age when he might otherwise have contemplated easing himself into retirement. She was well aware of, and appreciated, the sacrifices that he had to make for her. The media, fascinated by a woman party leader, came to delight in her husband, and proceeded to typecast him. It was decided that he fitted into a pattern of the suburban middle-class male, with the sort of robust, simplistic Conservative views that had largely given way to the socially progressive breed of politician — later christened “wets” — who ran the Tory party until the advent of Thatcherism. Denis Thatcher certainly had little time for wetness. “I don’t pretend,” he would say, “that I’m anything but an honest-to-God rightwinger.” His wife had little time for wetness either, but to some extent she was inhibited by the political conventions. He, on the other hand, could complain loudly about, for instance, the BBC being run by a bunch of unpatriotic pinkoes, as he regarded them. He also denounced what he saw as the effects of television on the sporting ethic of fair play. He lived, one of his friends said, by a simple, clear set of values, unsullied by the sophisticated confusion of modern morality or Freudian psychology. He could turn up at Harrods to do his Christmas shopping after an IRA bomb, and announce bluntly that “no damned Irish murderer is going to stop me”. As a sports enthusiast he thought the anti-smoking lobby was being ridiculous in complaining about the tobacco companies’ sponsorship of sports events — and that it was a piece of downright nonsense that teams should stop touring South Africa when they were free to go to China or Russia.
His views inevitably lent themselves to caricature, which reached its highest art-form in the celebrated and brilliantly written “Dear Bill” letters that appeared in Private Eye from May 1979. These were the supposed outpourings of a no-nonsense rightwinger who was also a much-tried husband, with the simple ambition to get away from a domineering wife for quiet weekends drinking with Bill Deedes (then Editor of The Daily Telegraph) and the rest of the boys. Thatcher was willing, up to a point, to play along with the parody. Asked how he managed to put up with the pressure of Downing Street life he would reply blandly: “Gin and cigarettes.” But his family, although they could see the funny side of the Private Eye letters, were hurt when John Wells produced a stage version, Anyone for Denis (1981), which portrayed him as someone whose horizons were limited to gin, cigarettes and golf. Even so, in her perceptive and sympathetic biography of her father, Below the Parapet (1996), Carol Thatcher wrote that “gin and golf were to Denis as shoes were to Imelda Marcos”. He was still, in Downing Street, living an active life as a director of various companies, and he escaped to the golf course less often than he might have wished. Furthermore, with the possible exception of a much publicised occasion when he wrote on Downing Street notepaper to a minister on a business matter, he lived his double life as prime ministerial consort and a professional in his own right, with impeccable propriety. His manifest pride in his wife as a politician grew week by week (The only time he had wondered whether the game was worth the candle had come when she was struggling with the frustrations of the job of Education Secretary, pushing through a programme of comprehensivisation of which he could scarcely have approved). At the 1983 general election, when she conducted the daily press conferences, he was there at the back of the room expressing forthright support for everything she said, apparently puzzled that some journalists were less rhapsodic than himself. Although he refused to give interviews, he accompanied her on the inevitable visits to factories and building sites, dutifully clad in hard hat or white coat as circumstances demanded. When she was called on to do walkabouts, he would “work the other side of the street”, chatting to people in the crowd who were unable to get close to the Prime Minister. There was in this an impressive old-fashioned courtesy — both in his avoiding the limelight and in his attention to people who were missing out on the main attraction. He was there in crises, a bluff influence on the side of common sense. “It was quite a thump,” he was reported as saying after the bombing that nearly killed them — and did kill five others — in the Grand Hotel, Brighton, when it was attacked by the IRA during a Conservative conference. “You should have seen our bathroom — it looks as if it’s been through a wringer,” was his comment. On overseas tours he would be the only person who could persuade his wife to take things easier, to get a little sleep when her instinct was to work through the night. His political influence was unquantifiable. His enthusiasm for privatisation as the remedy for every fault of the public-sector economy was never hidden — but then his wife needed little prodding in that direction. After the general election victory of 1987, Thatcher did not want his wife to stand again, and he suggested to her in early 1989 that ten years as Prime Minister was long enough. She, however, did not want to leave No 10, and William Whitelaw urged her to stay on, which she unwisely did until her forced resignation 18 months later. The former Prime Minister was at first bewildered by her new circumstances, but Denis Thatcher promptly bought himself a new Rolls-Royce and was rewarded in his wife’s Resignation Honours with the first baronetcy to be granted since the early 1960s. As a political consort, Denis Thatcher had early on resolved, in his own words, to keep his “mouth shut and be thought a fool rather than open it and remove all doubt”. This resolution proved him to be nobody’s fool. He is survived by his wife, and by their daughter and their son, who now becomes the 2nd baronet.
Sir Denis Thatcher, Bt, MBE, TD, businessman and husband of Britain’s first woman Prime Minister, was born on May 10, 1915. He died on June 26, 2003, aged 88. |