Snobbery she could do nothing about. But the Westminster club remained a stiflingly male one in large part because Thatcher, across eleven years and three administrations, appointed just one woman to her Cabinet, and to a politically irrelevant post at that. Others can jolly well do the same. Lawrence describes the long rhythms of traditional agricultural life in Nottinghamshire.
The men, he suggests, stay close to the ground in wordless communion, and do not yearn for a significant life beyond their elemental work. For Lawrence, the woman is the ever-restless agent of social change. With astonishing enterprise and intelligence, she treated her lower-middle-class background as a problem to be solved. She looked out and up; she instinctively agreed with Mr.
The family house lacked a yard, hot water, and an indoor lavatory. At Oxford, she was one of only five women in her year studying chemistry. 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, revolutionary in the placidly entitled world of Conservative Party politics, is what kept her in power for so long, and is also her greatest legacy.
Almost two decades earlier, Mrs. Thatcher, then a young M. It was perilous and unhealthy: in , three miners were killed a week. Thatcher pioneered in the early nineteen-eighties. There is an unavoidable sense of strategic efficiency about her domestic life. As one would expect he is a perfect gentleman. Not a very attractive creature—very reserved but quite nice. Friends said that it was a solid marriage but no great love affair.
Not that Denis compensated with any wild enthusiasm for fatherhood. He was watching cricket at the Oval when they were born.
Mark and Carol were dispatched to boarding schools at the ages of eight and nine, respectively, and Margaret Thatcher entered Parliament, in , as a Conservative M. Her steady rise to power had begun.
Yet one can only marvel at the determination and the fortitude needed to surmount the slights and obstacles of that time.
Nearly every normal habit of life—engaged parenthood, sibling loyalty, marital intimacy, deep friendship, ordinary social intercourse—gave way to the achievement of that one thing. The English idea of the nonchalant 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.
Or perhaps she just had no hinterland. What Margaret Thatcher felt privately about God, or death, or a beautiful phrase of music, or love, or sex, or a sad movie, or the great blessings of having children, or the beauties of foreign 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.
The young Thatcher found a subject—she devised a bill that would force Labour councils to open up their proceedings to the public including newspapers involved in labor disputes. But she identified an impediment to its passage. On Fridays, when such bills were debated, M. When Heath lost the general election of , she made a bid for leader of the Conservative Party, and won, in February, Colleagues were astounded at how thoroughly she could master briefing material.
She needed little sleep, and worked late into the night. In , when the I. On a twenty-four-hour flight from Hong Kong to Washington, D. Premium Digital access, plus: Convenient access for groups of users Integration with third party platforms and CRM systems Usage based pricing and volume discounts for multiple users Subscription management tools and usage reporting SAML-based single sign-on SSO Dedicated account and customer success teams.
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