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Authors: Gillian Shephard
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because she was a woman. There was a great deal of male muttering and covert joking. She must have been aware of it, and it cannot have been conducive to confidence in her own leadership. Jim Prior was not the only one of her colleagues who found it irritating to be led by a woman. âI found it very difficult to stomach,â he later wrote.
There is no suggestion that Patrick Cormack, at the time MP for Cannock, shared Jim Priorâs distaste for a woman Prime Minister. On the other hand, he reflects the ambivalence towards Margaret Thatcher, on policy grounds, within the parliamentary party. Not only was she a woman, but she was taking the party into policy areas to which it was not accustomed, and to priorities not necessarily shared by colleagues.
I was of course aware of Margaret Thatcher as a rising star in the Tory ranks, when, as a very young schoolmaster, I fought the impregnable Labour stronghold of Bolsover in 1964, and even more so when I contested my home town of Grimsby eighteen months later. I had heard her speak at Party Conferences and candidatesâ gatherings, and there was much talk of her being in the next Conservative Cabinet. The first time I was really conscious of her as a force to be reckoned with was when she was in charge of Education in Ted Heathâs government of 1970, when my victory in Cannock, against another formidable woman politician, Jennie Lee, helped put the Conservatives back in power. Margaret quickly made her mark at Education, and not just as âMargaret Thatcher, milk snatcherâ. From my point of
view, as someone who had been educated at a grammar school, and taught at one, it was a disappointing mark, for there was no attempt to roll back the engulfing tide of comprehensive education, no clarion call for the virtues and values of the sort of school from which both she and I had benefited.
I did not find it easy to be a fervent backbench supporter of the first or indeed the subsequent Thatcher governments. It was partly because she herself never seemed to be fully in sympathy with the needs and aspirations of manufacturing in the Midlands, where the first three years of the Thatcher administration did not go down well. There is certainly little doubt that hers, like Ted Heathâs, would have been a one-term government had it not been for the extraordinary events of April 1982, the invasion of the Falkland Islands.
My biggest falling-out with her came during her second and third terms, over her decision to abolish, rather than reform, the GLC. There was no sustainable case for depriving London of a directly elected local government, and I said so, and voted accordingly. And then, of course, there was the Community Charge, the âpoll taxâ, where I was one of only two Tories who refused to support its experimental introduction in Scotland and who consistently voted against it thereafter. So my relations with the woman I had helped to elect to leadership of our party were sometimes a little difficult.
While Patrick Cormack expresses no personal antipathy towards the new Prime Minister, and certainly no objection to her on grounds of gender, these views, many of which were shared by parliamentary colleagues, illustrate just how precarious was Margaret Thatcherâs positionin the early days of her first government. Her reaction was emphatically not to betray any insecurity she may have felt, but rather to become, on occasion, overbearing and difficult.
John Major, as a former Chancellor and Foreign Secretary in a Thatcher government and eventually her successor as Prime Minister, was very well placed to observe some of the personality issues.
In the years since she left office, Margaret Thatcher has been buried under myth. The real Margaret â the one I knew, and for whom and with whom I worked â was more studied, more pragmatic and far more interesting than the stereotype celebrated in a thousand half-truths and exaggerations. I hope
There is no suggestion that Patrick Cormack, at the time MP for Cannock, shared Jim Priorâs distaste for a woman Prime Minister. On the other hand, he reflects the ambivalence towards Margaret Thatcher, on policy grounds, within the parliamentary party. Not only was she a woman, but she was taking the party into policy areas to which it was not accustomed, and to priorities not necessarily shared by colleagues.
I was of course aware of Margaret Thatcher as a rising star in the Tory ranks, when, as a very young schoolmaster, I fought the impregnable Labour stronghold of Bolsover in 1964, and even more so when I contested my home town of Grimsby eighteen months later. I had heard her speak at Party Conferences and candidatesâ gatherings, and there was much talk of her being in the next Conservative Cabinet. The first time I was really conscious of her as a force to be reckoned with was when she was in charge of Education in Ted Heathâs government of 1970, when my victory in Cannock, against another formidable woman politician, Jennie Lee, helped put the Conservatives back in power. Margaret quickly made her mark at Education, and not just as âMargaret Thatcher, milk snatcherâ. From my point of
view, as someone who had been educated at a grammar school, and taught at one, it was a disappointing mark, for there was no attempt to roll back the engulfing tide of comprehensive education, no clarion call for the virtues and values of the sort of school from which both she and I had benefited.
I did not find it easy to be a fervent backbench supporter of the first or indeed the subsequent Thatcher governments. It was partly because she herself never seemed to be fully in sympathy with the needs and aspirations of manufacturing in the Midlands, where the first three years of the Thatcher administration did not go down well. There is certainly little doubt that hers, like Ted Heathâs, would have been a one-term government had it not been for the extraordinary events of April 1982, the invasion of the Falkland Islands.
My biggest falling-out with her came during her second and third terms, over her decision to abolish, rather than reform, the GLC. There was no sustainable case for depriving London of a directly elected local government, and I said so, and voted accordingly. And then, of course, there was the Community Charge, the âpoll taxâ, where I was one of only two Tories who refused to support its experimental introduction in Scotland and who consistently voted against it thereafter. So my relations with the woman I had helped to elect to leadership of our party were sometimes a little difficult.
While Patrick Cormack expresses no personal antipathy towards the new Prime Minister, and certainly no objection to her on grounds of gender, these views, many of which were shared by parliamentary colleagues, illustrate just how precarious was Margaret Thatcherâs positionin the early days of her first government. Her reaction was emphatically not to betray any insecurity she may have felt, but rather to become, on occasion, overbearing and difficult.
John Major, as a former Chancellor and Foreign Secretary in a Thatcher government and eventually her successor as Prime Minister, was very well placed to observe some of the personality issues.
In the years since she left office, Margaret Thatcher has been buried under myth. The real Margaret â the one I knew, and for whom and with whom I worked â was more studied, more pragmatic and far more interesting than the stereotype celebrated in a thousand half-truths and exaggerations. I hope
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