The Incidental Feminist E-Book

Tina Gaudoin

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 446

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Meet the woman behind the politician 'Offers a remarkable new view of a remarkable and still under-appreciated leader' Simon Jenkins Since stepping down in 1990, Margaret Thatcher has become a cardboard cut-out hate figure or an iconic defender of freedom, depending on your politics. In The Incidental Feminist: Friend, foe, femme fatale: The truth about Thatcher, Tina Gaudoin investigates the complexities of the woman behind the tropes. Drawing upon explosive new material from the archives and interviews with her contemporaries, Gaudoin reveals how Thatcher triumphed over rampant misogyny and class prejudice to normalise female power and manipulated her femininity, sexuality, and intellect to become the most powerful woman in the world. Publishing to coincide with the 100th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher's birth

Leseprobe

For EE & TGEDedicated to the memory of Dorothy Hodgkin. So far, the only British woman to hold a Nobel Prize for science. Tutor to Margaret Thatcher, Somerville College, Oxford, 1943–7.

Contents

Introduction: Margaret Thatcher… What the Hell?

Housekeeping

Prologue: We Need to Talk (Again) about Margaret

1 Autistic Glamour Puss?

2 The Mother Complex

3 Breaking the Class Ceiling

4 The Incidental Feminist

5 The Three Marketeers: Anatomy of an Icon

6 Warrior Queen, Gender Blender?

7 Onward Christian/Scientist

8 Madness, Madonna and MT: Pop, Profanity and Power under Thatcher

9 Knights, Rotters, Bounders and Cads

10 All the Prime Minister’s Men

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Be sure that long patience and jealously hidden sorrows have hardened this woman of whom one cries out: She is made of steel! She is simply a woman and that is enough.

Colette, La Vagabonde

‌Introduction

Margaret Thatcher… What the Hell?

In the last three years of working on this book, I have, of necessity, become accustomed to hearing the above interrogative (give or take another four-letter expletive) when telling people about this project. It’s not an unreasonable enquiry, especially when put to someone who did not actually vote for the woman in question. It’s certainly one I have asked myself, many times. And yet there were unresolved issues, relating in particular to Margaret Thatcher’s personality, which fascinated me. Why, for example, in the 35 years since Margaret Thatcher stepped down as PM, has she remained so indelibly lodged within the public consciousness? What aspects of her character and her leadership have been overlooked or ignored in the course of that history, which would render her a ‘whole’ person, rather than the two-dimensional character who has lived ‘rent free’ for so long in the minds of so many of us? What does it say about us that we still care (one way or the other) so much about her?

We are all familiar with the diametrically opposing Thatcher narratives: one endorses her as perhaps the greatest politician of the twentieth century and the other condemns her as the architect of a Britain dominated by privatising elites, blinded by greed and competitive consumerism, grown careless of the welfare of those less fortunate. What is so often forgotten, in the heat of debate, is the plain and simple fact that Margaret Thatcher was a woman, operating in what, at the time, was almost exclusively a male-dominated world. You might well say it still is. But what we experience these days is nothing compared to what she and millions of other women struggled with in their battle to achieve at least a level of parity with the opposite sex.

More than almost any other woman, we decontextualise Margaret Thatcher and her legacy, viewing both her achievements and her failures through the lens of today’s societal values and norms. This was never more apparent than in the claim that she was ‘not a feminist’ – one I examine in greater detail in Chapter 4. Whether we like it or not, as women we all, to a greater or lesser extent, stand on her shoulders. We only have to look at the history books, read the novels and watch the movies of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, when she was making her political way, to understand that, for women, the past was truly a foreign country. And yet, we judge the first female leader of a G7 nation, her actions and her policies as if they were taking place in real time – today. Even less fathomable is our modern-day tendency to blame Margaret Thatcher for the ills of today’s society – as though every one of our succeeding nine PMs somehow lacked intelligence, policy or agency.

I do not seek to rehabilitate Margaret Thatcher. Indeed, many would say she needs no redemption – for millions, particularly outside the UK, she still offers a peerless example of supremely effective leadership. (When, in 1989, editor in chief Marc Burca of Boardroom magazine, interviewing New York businessman Donald Trump, asked: ‘If you could meet anyone in the world, who would it be?’ he was met with an immediate response: ‘Margaret Thatcher.’) My intention then, is to examine elements of Margaret Thatcher’s personal and political life in a way that her (mostly) male biographers have not yet done. And that is to look at her as a woman first and a politician second. The fact that she was a female does not diminish her successes, nor for that matter does it excuse her failures. Rather it requires us, with the benefit of hindsight, to take another, more nuanced look at one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century.

‌Housekeeping

This is not a soup-to-nuts biography – if that is what you seek then I recommend the many excellent works in the bibliography at the back of this book, the mother of them all being Charles Moore’s peerless three-volume official biography of Margaret Thatcher (Penguin 2013/15/19). Vast numbers of documents relating to MT have been gathered by Chris Collins, the editor of the Margaret Thatcher Foundation, and made freely available online at margaretthatcher.org.

Because this book does not follow the narrative arc of a typical biography, it does not contain footnotes or endnotes. When a quote from a book is introduced, the book and its author are referenced. It follows, then, that any further quotes from this author are taken from the referenced book, unless otherwise noted. Quotes from interviews are in the present tense, unless otherwise noted. For ease of reading, throughout the book I have chosen to forgo the use of most honorary and inherited titles (of which there would be very many). I mean this as no disrespect. I refer to Margaret Thatcher, after her initial introduction, as MT, for the same reason.

Also provided at the close of the book is a list of acknowledgements. I should, however, like to take this early opportunity to posthumously thank the late Sir Julian Seymour, without whose help and guidance I could never have completed the task. Thanks also to my friend Jonathan Berger, who provided the initial connection, and to Andrew Riley and the team looking after the Thatcher Papers at the Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge, without whom the writing of this book would not have been possible.

Writing a book about Margaret Thatcher is, as I have already mentioned, a tricky task. The volume of information about our former PM is so great and the accounts so conflicting that it has at times been necessary to accept versions of events which have received the most coverage or on which the greatest number of opinions or accounts appear to converge. There is little doubt that I have made some mistakes – any errors are mine, and for them I apologise in advance. MT’s spelling and grammar was occasionally not on point. We have taken the decision to correct her mistakes, again for ease of reading.

Many people agreed to be interviewed for this book (both on and off the record). A few, despite more than one entreaty, did not respond. In such cases, I assumed they did not wish to be involved. Occasionally, a refusal to speak revealed more than an interview ever could. The two people who almost certainly owed their careers and positions in largest part to Margaret Thatcher – both ex-PMs: John Major and Theresa May – declined immediately. I cannot help but think that, had their situations been reversed, Margaret Thatcher would not have done the same.

‌Prologue

We Need to Talk (Again) about Margaret

On 29 July 1981, at St Paul’s Cathedral, London, the wedding of the Prince of Wales (now King Charles III) and Lady Diana Spencer brought together, under one seventeenth-century domed ceiling, the three most famous women in the world.

At approximately 11.20am, in front of 3,500 people in person, with another 750 million tuning in around the globe, Lady Diana Spencer, lost in acres of Suffolk taffeta, on the arm of her ailing father Earl Spencer, began a halting walk down the aisle and into the history books. The TV cameras had already captured the groom’s mother, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, pale and pensive in powder blue, white gloves and pearls. At a certain point in the procession, they seemed to pause momentarily. The object of their attention was the third woman in the troika: Prime Minister Margaret Hilda Thatcher in her Conservative-blue power suit and beribboned pillbox hat, standing ramrod straight, hands clasped in front of her, smiling benevolently, as the bride-to-be floated by. The contrast between the three women and their journey to global fame was never writ larger: one had been born into royalty; another, already ennobled, would emerge from the 90-minute wedding ceremony into global stardom. The third, who by the law of averages should never have been there in the first place, was a grocer’s daughter from Grantham, the granddaughter of a cloakroom attendant, who had won her place in history as the first female Prime Minister of Great Britain, and one of the first global female leaders, the more conventional way: through hard work, grit, determination and sheer bloody-mindedness.

At least that was the way she and most political history books told it. The Margaret Thatcher legend charts a straight line from a modest flat above a grocery store in the desperately ordinary Midlands town of Grantham, to the shiny black door of No. 10 Downing Street, via a few other seemingly less meaningful stops: Somerville College, Oxford; the five constituencies where she was rejected; the Methodist chapel on City Road, Islington, where she married Denis Thatcher; Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea Hospital, where she gave birth to her twins Mark and Carol in 1953; Lincoln’s Inn, where she was called to the Bar in 1954; and Finchley in North London, where she finally won her seat in 1959. And thence on to power.

In fact, the story of Margaret Thatcher is a good deal more nuanced than history so far dictates.

Margaret Thatcher was a paradox: a woman from the ‘wrong’ class, who succeeded in a world almost entirely dominated by upper-class men, whilst bringing few women along with her. An upright Christian with a Methodist upbringing, a curiously liberal approach to sex, a sense of humour bypass and absolutely no compunction about using her feminine wiles to get what she wanted, Thatcher was about as far removed from the tired trope of her as a man in woman’s clothing as one could get. Rather, she relished her femininity, was addicted to the glamour of clothes, the seduction of Hollywood, and had a magpie eye for detail – political or otherwise. Margaret Thatcher was not, as is also commonly thought, simply a product of her time; rather she was an anomaly of her sex and class – a once-in-a-lifetime (or possibly a few lifetimes) phenomenon. This book analyses Margaret Thatcher as woman first and politician second.

‌1

Autistic Glamour Puss?

Can you recommend any exercises or anything from the medical point of view particularly for reduction of the area of the seat and control of the tummy muscles – oh and also reduction and uplift of bust?

Letter from MT to her sister Muriel, 20 August 1944

Margaret Thatcher had a long-lasting fascination with glamour, beauty and image in all of its guises, from film and fashion to music, poetry and lifestyle. The men she appreciated and would work best with were of the fine, upstanding Clark Gable variety (for which, see a certain American President and former actor); the women she most respected would be well dressed – from Queen Elizabeth II to her first ‘dresser’, the elegant Dame Guinevere Tilney; her design doyenne, Margaret King; her friend ‘the Italian’ Carla Powell; and her secret ‘crush’, Barbara Castle. Her musical preference was for Bach in all of his cantata splendour and her favourite poet was Rudyard Kipling, who constantly venerated the glossy opulence of the Raj. Perhaps the place she most appreciated geographically and politically was the USA; its ‘can do’ attitude and appearance-oriented culture played directly to her strengths and interests – particularly California, home to both Hollywood and the Reagans. An obsession with glamour on the part of Britain’s first female PM is not an obvious topic to have troubled most biographers. Possibly this is because the majority of them thus far have been male? A notable exception is Charles Moore, Thatcher’s official biographer, who pays heed in his comprehensive, three-tome biography (Penguin 2013/15/19): ‘More striking, and more apparently at odds with her upbringing, was a strong interest in glamour, both in films and in fashion. Almost every letter to Muriel mentions the latest films to hit Grantham.’

The letters of which Moore speaks are the collection of roughly 150 missives, written between Margaret and her older sister Muriel Cullen, to which he and, later, I were granted access by Julian Seymour (director of MT’s private office) and the Cullen family. Here, on greying lined exercise paper, raggedly torn from school books, on parchment stock from her father’s grocery store – ‘A. Roberts, Grocer and Provision Merchant, THE MOST COMPREHENSIVE STOCK IN THE DISTRICT’ – and later on cream Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA) blue embossed letterhead, on husband Denis’s own notepaper after they married (she crossed out his name) and finally on her own constituency letterhead, Margaret Thatcher the teenager and early twenty- and thirty-something writes, with what could at first be interpreted as a solipsistic focus, to her sister about school exam results, bossy teachers, Oxford flatmates, love interests and glamour with a capital G.

Over and above the gauche schoolgirl chat – ‘Life in 6 Lower is not half as nice as life in form Va’ and ‘we are still doing worms in biology’ – the main focus of the early letters, written in her distinctively firm, clear, grammar-schooled right hand, reveals an almost obsessive fascination with Hollywood and fashion, which as Moore points out were both ways to ‘bring glamour to unexciting Grantham’. This was much called for. Once dubbed Britain’s most boring town, Grantham was reputedly also the most bombed town of its size during the war. Remarkably, in the letters between the sisters, Thatcher rarely references the searing air-raid warnings and the ever-present threat of bombing raids, which would have marred her school and university days. What she does reference, though, is the punitive rationing, which continued long after the war was over and would see her counting down the days until she could use her next set of tokens, which naturally she puts towards her fashionable purchases: ‘I also got a pink uplift bra, but they hadn’t a white one so I am hoping to get that tomorrow with my remaining coupon.’

The experience of growing up in Grantham during the Second World War would nonetheless inform and shape the rest of MT’s life. Her entry to Oxford in 1943, for example, was in part facilitated by the fact that, because of the war, more women than men would attend Oxbridge for the first time in the colleges’ histories. In turn, this increased the possibilities for grammar-school girls like Margaret, who would, up until then, have stood little chance of acceptance. In her autobiography, she devotes five pages to the Great Depression of the thirties and the war itself: ‘Well before war was declared we knew just what we thought of Hitler.’ She also writes about the ‘long queue waiting at the Labour exchange, seeking work or claiming the dole’. Her biggest impression, however, is the appearance of the children. ‘I have never forgotten how neatly turned out the children of those unemployed families were.’ Whilst black-and-white pictures reveal the devastation of wartime Grantham, with its bombed-out buildings and railway bridges, the young Margaret barely flinches. ‘Last night I went fire watching at KGGS [Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School, her old school] with Miss Bowins… We slept in Harrowby House perfectly normally,’ she writes, seemingly unfazed, to Muriel in 1944.

What is perhaps most interesting about these rarely seen letters is that they offer some early clues that Britain’s first female PM possibly had a form of Autism Spectrum Disorder (or, as some campaigners would now prefer for it to be termed, Autism Spectrum Condition).

‘You’re not the first to suggest traits of autism in Margaret Thatcher’s personality,’ says one distinguished psychiatrist, ‘but these would be at the mild end of the autism spectrum (which extends into normality).’

Autism, which is simply a neurological difference, tends to appear in childhood, but is now also increasingly diagnosed amongst adults, can make it difficult for people to understand social cues or express themselves to others. According to the National Autistic Society, ‘Autism influences how people interact with the world.’ Those with the condition may also often have ‘intense interests, prefer order and routine, and use repeated movements or actions to calm [themselves] or express joy’.

I am, of course, indulging in armchair clinical psychology with my thesis; and it is impossible to conclusively diagnose individuals retroactively (though plenty have tried). However, the more one studies the letters, which contain MT’s detailed, almost obsessive descriptions of her clothing and of the movies she has seen – and later the extensive, but painfully dull details of her exploits (such as they were at school, Oxford and beyond) – it’s hard not to conclude that they represent what experts might term the ‘special or restricted interests’ that those with this kind of neurodevelopmental condition frequently display, often finding it hard to switch between topics. MT’s infamous rigidity of thinking, her lack of a sense of humour, her awkwardness in social situations, what was perceived to be her rudeness, and her inability to sleep also to point to the condition. ‘Her brief, seemingly uncharacteristic bouts of kindness, which have often been reported, were probably the results of masking,’ says another psychiatrist, describing the tendency for those on the spectrum to overcompensate in certain forms of social interaction to ‘fit in’.

For some people with an autism diagnosis the singularity of focus which this affords them may ultimately allow them to become brilliant at a specific subject or in a particular profession – for which, in MT’s case, see politics. It should also be noted that often those who have the condition do not regard it as an ‘affliction’ but more as a ‘difference’ – and often a benefit. Conversely, those with severe autism may require full-time support and care.

Classifying autism is notoriously challenging. In the USA levels of intensity (1–3) are applied. By their measure, were MT diagnosed with autism today, she would almost certainly be classified as a level 1 on the Autism Spectrum Scale, meaning her symptoms allowed her to be ‘fully functioning’ with low support needs. (Until just over a decade ago, this mild form of autism was known as Asperger’s and some campaigners or ‘Aspies’ argue that they’d like to return to the old terminology to promote a greater understanding of levels of neurodiversity.)

But Margaret Thatcher was born too early to receive any such diagnosis. The term ‘autism’ was first coined by Austrian-American psychiatrist Leo Kanner in 1943, the same year that she went up to Oxford.

Margaret was not popular at school. She found it hard to make friends and was ‘perhaps a bit too eager and intense, inclined to be a know-it-all, her hand always up first in class’, writes Robin Harris, one of Thatcher’s speechwriters and advisors in Not for Turning (Bantam Press 2013). ‘She never seemed to quite fit in with her peers,’ says Penny Junor, who writes in the biography Margaret Thatcher: Wife, Mother, Politician (Sidgwick & Jackson 1983) that ‘she tended to put a bit of a damper on their fun, to the extent that some of her classmates would walk a different route to school, so as not to meet up with her on the way’.

If the precocious Margaret was offended by other girls’ behaviour towards her (she had notoriously thick skin), or she lacked the ability to read verbal and non-verbal clues, another characteristic prevalent amongst those on the autism spectrum, none of this makes it into her relentlessly detailed letters to Muriel. She writes to Muriel in September 1941:

Last Thursday we went to see Quiet Wedding with Margaret Lockwood, a very amusing film. Also, we saw This England with Constance Cummings, Emlyn Williams and John Clements. We enjoyed it… although it was a historical film, for the greater part. With it was Romance of the Rio Grande with Cesar Romero and Patricia Morison… Most of the films you mention in your letter have been. Bitter Sweet is coming to the Picture House next week and Pimpernel Smith to the Savoy in the near future. I have seen the film Rebecca. I thought it one of the best I have ever seen, with a well-concealed plot. It starred Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier.

In July 1944, she writes with similar focus to Muriel about clothes: ‘Do you think that person who makes the handbags could make me one in maroon leather like your blue one? I have decided that maroon would be the best colour for my wardrobe as I am having that pinky dress made up.’ And later in the same letter: ‘Yesterday I went to Chambers and bought two underwear sets that I am very pleased with… I was hoping to buy some dark red court shoes in Lincoln tomorrow as two pairs of my shoes, a brown and a blue pair, have both suddenly worn out simultaneously.’

Often her single-minded passion for clothes led the teenage Margaret to be impulsive and secretive – revealing two other characteristic neurodivergent traits. For example, rather than telling her parents about her obsessive shopping habits, which she knows she can ill afford (she describes that summer holiday’s tutoring of a ‘not a very smart kid’ as the ‘hardest earned £2-2s I’ve ever had or hope to have in my life’) she uses the excuse of changing trains in London, on her way back to Oxford, to indulge in some secret retail therapy: ‘I went straight across to Paddington, dumped my suitcases and tubed to Oxford Circus,’ she confides to her sister.

I explored Oxford St, thoroughly looking in all the shops, also Regent St and Bond St – the latter I hadn’t seen before. I had intended to do some shopping (though I didn’t tell Mummy) so that was why I looked round thoroughly first. I got a pair of brown suede court shoes from Dolcis in Bond St – the last pair they had in my size. They are an American shoe called ‘Debutante Lovette’ and are size 7½, American size of course.

Horrified by the price of an ‘absolutely stunning’ frock she tries on, she makes her way to the woollen department, where she tries on a ‘fairly plain little frock with a Peter Pan collar two little pockets on the bodice and two to match on the skirt… looks much nicer on than off and underline it is absolutely pure wool through and through’. Cost: £3 16 shillings. Thrilled, she pronounces it ‘one of the most worthwhile purchases I’ve ever made. I’ll try and smuggle it home next time to show you without Mummy seeing it.’ Later, in 1948, she writes to Muriel that ‘I decided I couldn’t possibly go to Llandudno with the “communal coat”’. So she rashly draws out some savings certificates, despite being short of money, and buys ‘a fine lightweight black wool swagger’. She signs off with a cautionary plea: ‘Don’t mention new coat to parents. Love, Margaret.’

There are few of the conversational sister-to-sister niceties that you might expect from siblings four and a half years apart in age. And what quickly becomes clear are early signs of MT’s inability to read social cues or to comprehend that her perspective might come across as arrogant or patronising. ‘Margaret always brought to mind that old adage “I wish I was as sure about any one thing as she is of everything”,’ says David Howell (Secretary of State for Energy 1979–81 and then for Transport 1981–3), referencing the original William Lamb quote. ‘She was overfull of theory and could be very rude and patronising.’ Aged nine, MT famously told her primary school headmistress, who congratulated her on her luck at winning a prize: ‘I wasn’t lucky, I deserved it.’ From Oxford she writes to Muriel that ‘at a Conservative meeting I gave my paper on agricultural policy, which was a staggering success’. There is no tongue in her cheek as she writes (and surely Muriel, by then inured to Margaret’s unusual responses, must have rolled her eyes?).

Charles Moore describes Margaret Thatcher as ‘literal-minded’ and that may have been so, but it was also yet another example of MT’s ‘different’ take on the world. She was by all accounts incapable of telling anything but the truth, and she saw the world in black and white, without nuance. She admits this herself in her memoirs: ‘I was perplexed by the metaphorical element of phrases like “Look before you leap”. I thought it would be far better to say “Look before you cross”.’ The National Autistic Society points to differences in social interaction and communication as among the core characteristics of autism, such as ‘being confused by metaphors and idioms, not always understanding hidden meanings or inference and taking phrases literally’.

In the most infamous example of this she fails to understand the witty rejoinder written into a speech for her by Ronald Millar, her speechwriter, making reference to the then PM James Callaghan, who, invoking Moses, had said that the nation would enter ‘the promised land’. When Miller gives the kicker to her riposte – ‘Keep taking the tablets’ – she argues: ‘Ronnie, nobody calls them tablets any more. We’ll say “Keep taking the pills”.’ She famously had little or no conventional sense of humour and struggled to understand jokes, double entendre or implication. ‘It was well known that she was resistant to humour, often had to have jokes explained to her. But she was also indifferent to most of the tricks of paradox, ambiguity, understatement and saying the opposite of what you mean, which pepper the talk of almost everyone else in the country,’ according to Ferdinand Mount, one of her former speechwriters (Cold Cream, Bloomsbury 2008).Mount calls his time at No. 10, working for MT, a ‘holiday from irony’.

Tim Bell, one of the three men responsible for Thatcher’s image (the other two were Millar and PR man Gordon Reece), later detailed the delicate situation which arose when he was called upon to illuminate MT upon why she was never to use the term ‘pussy’ – as in ‘The trouble with Mr Callaghan is he couldn’t even organise pussy.’ ‘What’s wrong with “pussy”, dear? What do you think it means?’ she asked Bell, to the delight of other ministers present (Right or Wrong: The Memoirs of Lord Bell, Bloomsbury 2014).

‘The one thing she definitely lacked throughout her political career was a sense of humour,’ agrees Jonathan Aitken (MP for Thanet East 1974–83 and South Thanet 1983–97). ‘She was notorious for not getting the joke.’ She was especially unamused when she heard on the grapevine that Aitken was making his own jokes at her expense, once dismissing her lack of foreign policy nous with an example, suggesting that the PM thought ‘Sinai is the plural of sinus’. ‘Erm, no. She most certainly did not find that funny,’ Aitken says, ruefully, shaking his head.

Writing for Psychology Today (September 2021), Claire Jack PhD, an expert in women with Autism Spectrum Disorder, asserts that people with autism might struggle with certain types of humour because they take things literally and are less likely to engage in laughter purely for the sake of social interaction. ‘Perhaps it’s not so much that autistic people find things less funny – they may just not respond to the same social cues to laugh at things out of politeness or manners,’ she writes.

The unfiltered directness of people who are neurodiverse can sometimes cause them to be unintentionally cruel. Margaret’s obsession with appearance often makes itself felt in the letters, with her unsparing descriptions of the way people looked or dressed: ‘The new games mistress is not young as we have been used to having. Her name is Miss Dales and she looks about 30’; and ‘the history mistress is very disappointing. She is quite middle-aged and very dowdy in dress.’ In 1948, she writes about the Colchester landlady with whom she is living whilst working in her first job at British Xylonite (BX) Plastics in Manningtree, Essex: ‘To our surprise Mrs Mac [Macaulay] looked completely out of place – in fact, she looked rather tarty – not so much in dress as in behaviour and of course her figure doesn’t help.’ Later in life MT’s directness of approach would make others feel uncomfortable, but leave her unfazed. ‘She was utterly incapable of feeling embarrassment. I’ve seen her say and do things that no other person would,’ says Charles Powell, her Private Secretary and foreign policy advisor from 1983 to 1991. Her former press secretary, the irascible Bernard Ingham, once called her ‘the most tactless woman I have ever met’. And he spoke as a loyal friend.

She was no more sparing of her sister Muriel’s feelings. Many people with an autism diagnosis don’t ‘do’ empathy, in the same way that they don’t ‘do’ tears at the expected moments. (Even those closest to MT can count on one hand the number of times they saw her cry.) Writing to Muriel in November 1948, she references ‘Eric… whom you thought was rather nice?’ This is likely code for the fact that Muriel has, in modern-day parlance, ‘the hots’ for the aforementioned Eric. And yet Margaret fails to see how her subsequent words or actions might wound her sister. ‘Well,’ she continues triumphantly, ‘he’s coming to supper tomorrow evening.’ On the 15th she writes to Muriel again with further details: ‘Eric Derbyshire turned out to be a bit of a bore – he’s rather inclined to talk as if he’s in the pulpit half the time and he’s very self-righteous.’ A supreme irony indeed, given that this sentence sums up precisely the criticisms that many of her political opponents would level against Margaret, later in life.

These days, there is no shortage of information to suggest that MT may have been autistic. The biggest ‘tell’ is probably her inability to master social situations. ‘Autistic people can find social situations difficult or overwhelming and struggle to make and maintain friendships, leading to social isolation,’ says the website of the National Autistic Society. ‘Rigidity in the way people with autism can think may make it difficult for them to compromise or cope with changes in routine,’ says the charity Ambitious About Autism. According to the NHS, people with ASD may act in a ‘different way to other people’. Another characteristic is that people with ASD often find it difficult to understand how other people think or feel.

Margaret’s seeming lack of empathy or tact would mean her life would be a lonely one. ‘You couldn’t get close to her,’ Betty Spice, a college mate, told Charles Moore, whilst another described her as ‘not easy to know’. ‘A great many of her relationships were transactional – she was like a sponge. She would learn all she could and then discard that person. She didn’t seem to have a clue about the idea of friendship in the same way that most women would,’ says one acquaintance of both Denis and Margaret. Another says that ‘outside of politics, she was the embodiment of what young people today would call “awks”. Her biggest problem socially, and sometimes politically, was that she could never “read the room”.’ Indeed, what sometimes came across as snobbish arrogance or coldness was often Margaret’s inability to understand quite what to do or say in informal social situations. ‘She wasn’t one for small talk,’ says her former private secretary Caroline Slocock (1989–91). ‘But when she was meeting individual members of the public she would quickly get on their wavelength and she could be empathetic and kind to strangers, as I saw once when she was visiting dying AIDS patients.’ Anne Hamilton, wife of Archie Hamilton (her former Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) and then Armed Forces Minister 1988–93), who spent a great deal of time with MT during her later years, agrees. ‘She was actually very happy to chat, but you needed to get her onto something she actually had an interest in or passion for – that could have been anything from getting aid into Romania to historic houses or antique china.’

Throughout her life, MT had been famously short of that vital social emollient, ‘small talk’. ‘Her absence of small talk was so unusual that I could never quite believe it,’ writes Mount. Her former daughter-in-law, Diane Burgdorf, described the entire Thatcher family’s attitude to emotions as ‘stiff upper lip’ and said that MT could not make conversation on a one-to-one basis: ‘She would change the conversation to clothes. When she asked me what label I was wearing… I’m not a clothes horse… I’d have to say, “I don’t know.”’ Oliver Letwin, who worked for Thatcher in what he describes as a ‘minor apparatchik role’ between 1983 and 1986, says that she was in some ‘obvious’ ways impossible to deal with. ‘She would talk over you all the time and you never got the sense she was listening to what you said. But you would later discover she had taken in exactly what you had said. And there were only important subjects. She had absolutely no small talk whatsoever. And I mean none.’

To compensate for her seeming inability to make friends at Oxford and throughout the rest of her life, Margaret would focus on her passions: politics, religion and – naturally – her appearance. This, too, irritated some of the other girls in her college. ‘Her preoccupation with her appearance caused amusement. She went to the most expensive hairdresser in Oxford (Andreas) and spent the days during the vac combing the West End for suitable dresses,’ complained one. Indeed, she did. And as far as the young MT was concerned there was nothing wrong with that. Alongside politics, fashion was always Margaret’s way of making sense of the world. ‘The essence of the well-dressed woman should never be exaggerated,’ she later told Vogue in 1985 (she appeared in the magazine four times in total). ‘Appearance is the first impression people get of you. And it does matter. It matters tremendously when you represent your country abroad.’

Another trait of a neurodivergent thinker is to use an obsession or fascination as a distraction or calming tool, in what they may perceive as a ‘crazy’, out-of-control world. Before what appears to be an important series of four Oxford (perhaps OUCA) evening events, MT writes, hurriedly and without nicety, to Muriel on an OUCA letterhead, which she embellishes with the emboldened acronym ‘SOS’, requesting, with obvious urgency,

the pearls because I shall be wearing black two-piece for [event] one and three and black dinner frock for the second… the most important things are the pearls which will have to be sent off straight away – if they are to reach me by Friday. I have been to a very smart dressmaker here with my velvet and she promised to make it up before the end of term.

‘Send Vogue when you have finished with it,’ she directs impatiently, finishing another letter to Muriel and underlining the imperative. Amanda Ponsonby, who was MT’s unofficial lady-in-waiting and officially her Diary Secretary (1983–91), recalls that ‘some of the best times were the very rare occasions when we kept her diary free for fittings of dresses and suits. After the sessions, which she loved, she would come down the stairs and be completely relaxed having enjoyed it immensely.’ Towards the end of her prime ministerial term, whenever MT became seriously stressed, those closest to her would apparently discreetly place a call to Margaret King. Soon after, King would ‘spontaneously’ pay a visit to No. 10, under some spurious fashion pretence, to calm and distract the distressed PM. It was King who in effect dressed Thatcher for her final audience with the Queen and the press. ‘Denis said, “Can you help? I can’t get through to her.” I went into her bedroom and she was sitting in a shocked daze. I distracted her with talk about what she should wear and how to do her make-up. She got back on her feet. Fashion always fortified her. It focused her. She loved it.’

Predictably, Margaret Thatcher was held to a different standard to every male politician who had gone before her (and for that matter to almost any male she came into contact with in her role as PM). With the headline ‘Tories Choose Beauty’ when she was nominated for the seat of Finchley in 1959, the Evening Standard opened the floodgates for commentary, judgement and hostility, based solely upon how Margaret Thatcher looked and what she wore, rather than on her policies or achievements. It was one thing for Her Majesty’s Leader of the Opposition to be sporting a ‘comb-over’, but quite another for MT to be greying at the temples. ‘I dye it myself,’ she told an interviewer, which might have been partially true, but she also had it ‘lifted’ to an almost Monroe blonde as time wore on, by accomplished colourists. ‘It was always to Paul [Allen] on Mondays for a wash and set, Thursdays it was a comb out – this was always in the diary and could not be moved. The colour she would have done in Kensington every six weeks,’ says Ponsonby. There’s a much-quoted story (which turns out to be apocryphal as far as I can tell) that, such was the hardwired sexism at No. 10 in the early days, MT’s advisors decreed that the PM’s diary entry should never read ‘hairdresser’, which they viewed as distinctly ‘un-prime-ministerial’ – so either Allen’s name or simply ‘Carmen’ (code for Carmen rollers – the brand she used) was entered instead. In fact, the nervousness around her feminine ‘toilette’ appears to have prevailed only whilst she was in opposition. In her No. 10 diaries, the entry simply reads ‘hair’. She herself always said she went blonde to hide the grey, but there was at least a nod to the fact that Denis preferred blondes. His first wife (also called Margaret) had been a blonde, and once MT changed her hair colour, the similarities between Margaret Thatcher and, by then, Lady Hickman, who divorced Denis after six years of marriage in 1948, were striking.

The pressure to ‘dress for success’ and to appear immaculate was not, and never had been, lost on Margaret Thatcher. From an early age she was the physical embodiment of the infamous Head & Shoulders shampoo advertisement: ‘You Never Get a Second Chance to Make a First Impression.’ ‘She dressed to kill. Every single day. She was a power dresser long before power dressing was fashionable and she never looked anything less than immaculate. She never for one moment considered the exploitation of her femininity to be a weakness,’ says Virginia Bottomley, a Conservative MP from 1984 to 2005 and holder of a number of ministerial roles. But MT didn’t always get it right. Her initial forays into the world of parliamentary dressing were less than successful. The reasons behind this were twofold. Firstly, she did not, for all of her slavish ‘passion for fashion’, come from the social milieu whereby sophisticated dressing was the norm; and secondly, as one of the first global female leaders (Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka, Indira Gandhi in India and Golda Meir in Israel notwithstanding) she was effectively a pathfinder for senior women in the workplace. ‘Before there was Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama or Kamala Harris there was Margaret Thatcher – she literally created the prototype for how a woman in power could and should dress,’ says Shirley Soskin, businesswoman and image expert, who was involved with David Cameron’s drive to get more women into politics. ‘She was the original Boss,’ says Robin Saunders, from the US, who became one of the most successful women from the financial sector in noughties Britain. ‘We were all watching avidly from the USA – she literally created the “working woman’s uniform” before our eyes. And she made us believe that anything was possible.’

In this there was an element of trial and error. For starters there was the hat. It wasn’t her fault. When MT first ran for a seat in the 1950s it was still the custom for ‘smart’ women to wear hats. And wear them she did, from the dramatic black wool cloche she wore while canvassing in Dartford, to her sapphire-blue velvet wedding ‘Duchess of Devonshire’ number, complete with a vast ostrich feather, to the jaunty straw boater she was photographed outside Parliament wearing on her first day as Education Secretary. The nadir of Thatcher hat wearing came during the early 1970s, when she wore what was described at the time as a ‘cream puff’ at the state opening of Parliament. She repeated the look later in the year when she was pictured alongside Ted Heath at the party conference wearing a striking black-and-white-striped confection, which rested on the back of her head like a giant doughnut. The hats did nothing for her image – she was fast being labelled as what social historian Wendy Webster (Not a Man to Match Her, The Women’s Press 1990) identifies as ‘Tory Lady in a Hat’. Even with her blinkered focus on ‘correctness’, MT began to realise the way she was presenting herself would not help her win over her target market – what she termed as ‘ordinary working people’, and what pollsters and strategists would describe as the influential C1 and C2 sectors of British society. Until Margaret Thatcher came on the scene, these groups had been the Labour Party’s bread and butter – the ambitious upper working and lower middle classes, whence she also originated.

It was Gordon Reece, the Tories’ Director of Publicity, who finally banned the hats and began to help MT craft her appearance as a political powerhouse. ‘Gordon was terrific,’ MT explained to TV interviewer David Frost. ‘He said my hair and my clothes had to be changed and we would have to do something about my voice. It was quite an education.’ It was almost certainly Reece who managed to edge out Dame Guinevere Tilney, who was her unofficial ‘dresser’ until 1983. Tim Bell explained that ‘Guinevere chose Margaret’s clothes, which is why, in the early days, she looked like a sort of Victorian remnant, because that’s how Guinevere dressed. Guinevere must have been 70 and Margaret was about 50, so you had this 20-year difference – it was hopeless.’ This is harsh, even if there’s an element of truth in Bell’s analysis. In fact, Dame Guinevere, the daughter of Sir Hamilton Grant and the wife of a former Conservative MP, was something of a style icon in her day. She was also a distinguished human rights advocate at the United Nations, with a mission to end female circumcision and arranged marriages. She was introduced to MT in 1973 by Denis, who had apparently played golf with her husband. After Margaret became PM, Guinevere worked unpaid from a desk in the corridor of No. 10 until 1983. She was honoured by MT the following year.

Tilney’s daughter-in-law, Juliet Hunter-Tilney, describes Dame Guinevere’s relationship with MT as one of mutual respect. ‘They liked one another. She advised Margaret on social niceties, etiquette, what to wear, things like that.’ Thatcher made liberal use of Dame Guinevere’s jewellery, which was generously made available to her, including brooches and a stunning necklace created out of an old tiara. (MT was never above borrowing from other people and later would appear at events wearing her own trademark pearls – a gift from Denis – having borrowed a brooch, a bracelet, a ring, or sometimes all three, from Margaret King.) Her standard jewellery – a large amethyst ring and a ‘hard stone’ pebble and gold bracelet – she wore with almost talismanic reverence, on her right hand and wrist, regardless of whether she was also wearing a borrowed Cartier diamond parure to a state banquet. ‘Guinevere did think that Margaret had style, but she also thought it was not quite right. She was certainly not shy or retiring and I’m sure she gave Margaret a lot of unasked-for advice, which is probably what led to Margaret respecting her,’ says Hunter-Tilney. The two went on diets together – famously one before MT’s much publicised first tour of China, where she was photographed still wearing a vast broad-rimmed hat, but also deftly handling chopsticks. ‘She had to slim down, so I had to show her how to do it,’ commented Dame Guinevere. It was probably also Guinevere who suggested MT wear a daring long, floaty red chiffon Granville Proctor evening gown for a speech to the Finchley Conservatives on 31 January 1976, where she and her speechwriters had adroitly capitalised on a description of her by Yuri Gavrilov which had recently appeared in the Soviet newspaper the Red Star (and was later used by Tass). ‘I stand before you tonight in my Red Star chiffon evening gown, my face softly made up and my fair hair gently waved, the Iron Lady of the Western World.’

Let it not be said that Margaret Thatcher merely ‘wore’ pussy-bow blouses. In the BMT (Before Margaret Thatcher) era pussy bows had been seen on a 1935 Vogue cover, in the designs of Coco Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent, and on movie stars from Ingrid Bergman to Grace Kelly. But it was MT who created the direct link between an innocently feminine twist of a silk or satin necktie and global power dressing. Since then, the pussy-bow blouse has been worn by everyone from Lady Diana Spencer to Nancy Reagan, Melania Trump and Kamala Harris (who wore her white version whilst accepting the first nomination of a black woman to the vice presidency in 2020). Samantha Cameron, wife of then PM David Cameron, even wore a stylish, modernised version of a Thatcher outfit from her own label Cefinn to MT’s funeral as a mark of respect, complete with cream silk pussy-bow blouse. Meanwhile, in 2025 cutting-edge rapper, singer, producer and poet John Glacier wears a pussy-bow dress in the video for her single ‘Ocean Steppin’’.

Thanks to MT, these days the pussy-bow blouse is a fashion metaphor, an item which says ‘I mean business’ with greater clarity than a sandwich board – or at least it did until Liz Truss wore it. MT apparently thought the bow a feminising and flattering addition to her increasingly monotone style of dressing, another Thatcher fashion choice which has been utilised by women across the globe, from Merkel to Meloni to Rayner and now Melania Trump. ‘It’s terribly important to have quite a wardrobe of attractive blouses,’ MT told TV-am presenter Anne Diamond in an interview on 17 March 1984, which she gave during London Fashion Week specifically to show her support for the British fashion industry – she was the first PM ever to do so.

I think we haven’t quite taken it seriously enough. It is a very big employer. It’s a very big exporter and with some very creative people doing excellent work. I want to show how much we appreciate them, how much we value them. Other governments do that. If you go to France, you know, you’ll find all government ministers absolutely behind the fashion industry and we haven’t somehow done it to quite the same extent here.

Thatcher’s enthusiasm, which grew from childhood when she learned dressmaking skills at her seamstress mother’s knee, is palpable on screen, as she and Diamond enter into a lively discussion on the PM’s passion for clothes and she describes the ‘enjoyment’ of travelling to and from the dentist because, along the way, she’s able to window-shop on Regent Street from her chauffeur-driven car.

Later that evening, she would throw open the doors of No. 10 for the first-ever Downing Street fashion week reception (a tradition which has been continued ever since). It was here that the PM, dressed strikingly in a long, black velvet two-piece, complete with chequerboard pussy-bow blouse, was introduced to a scruffy, trainer-wearing young designer called Katharine Hamnett, who was wearing a large T-shirt she’d smuggled into the reception (and then presumably changed into in the loo) bearing the slogan ‘58% Don’t Want Pershing’. The incident was striking for many reasons, not least because Hamnett undermined the very premise of supporting her own industry by stealing the show and any available media coverage (which she ultimately then had to share with Thatcher). Whilst the papers portrayed it as an Extinction Rebellion-style ‘action’, reflecting a European opinion poll showing that 58 per cent of Brits did not want the American missiles stationed on British soil, Thatcher seized the moment with aplomb, shaking hands with Hamnett and beaming for the cameras. What did the two talk about? Hamnett later boasted that MT had let out a shriek of horror (which seems highly unlikely) and told her: ‘We haven’t got Pershing. But we’ve got cruise [missiles], my dear. So maybe you’re at the wrong party?’ Hamnett was either too preoccupied to pick up the masterful Thatcher put-down or it passed her by.

Long before Margaret King transformed MT into a style icon in 1987, MT had created for herself, by trial and error, a ‘working woman’s wardrobe’ of a type that had never been seen, or called for, before. In this she was ably aided and abetted by her personal assistant and dresser Cynthia Crawford, whom Thatcher nicknamed ‘Crawfie’, possibly after Queen Elizabeth II’s beloved nanny. Crawfie met Thatcher in 1978 whilst working for Conservative donor David Wolfson, and she swiftly became MT’s ‘mistress of the robes’ and much more besides. It was Crawfie who began the ingenious practice of recording MT’s outfits under the names of where they had first been worn, to differentiate them (there were, for example, many navy blue suits). ‘We might say, “We’ll take Waddesdon Navy”… Waddesdon was where she took Mitterrand, and they had a wonderful meal.’ Thus, there was the Madrid Pink, the Prague Green, the Wogan Red and so on. It mattered not only what Margaret Thatcher wore, but how and when. People noticed. Other leaders noticed. Only two other women had ever had such sustained global political prominence: Elizabeth I and Elizabeth II. Whilst the former Queen had unrivalled political power, she was at least spared the unyielding glare of the media spotlight. The latter, meanwhile, lacked any political agency and thus could afford to dress and act as she pleased. It was Britain’s good fortune that she chose to do both with such grace and style.

Margaret, meanwhile, was literally making it up as she went along and her biggest ‘power dressing’ inspiration was perhaps the redoubtable, perennially elegant redhead Barbara Castle (Labour cabinet minister, MP for Blackburn from 1945 to 1979 and ardent women’s rights campaigner), who recorded in her diaries that ‘in my political life I always found men vulnerable to a little femininity and many are unable to cope when it is combined with some mental ability and with what is considered a masculine strength of will’. Legend has it that Castle was once interviewed at home wearing pink fluffy mules and drawing seductively on a cigarette, complete with holder. She also owned a wig called ‘Lucy’ for days when she couldn’t make it to the hairdressers. She had a penchant for skirt suits in strong colours, silk blouses, bows tied at the neck, statement jewellery and structured handbags. Sounds familiar? As well it might. In fact, MT had more than just female political advancement or fashion leadership to thank Barbara Castle for. Had it not been for her, a ladies’ loo (infamously named ‘Barbara’s Castle’) situated hard by the Commons chamber might not have been in existence by the time MT reached Westminster in 1959.

‘There were chic working women before Margaret Thatcher – women like Barbaras Cartland and Castle in the 1950s and Marcia Falkender in the sixties. But really by the late 1970s there was still no workwear at all,’ says Lisa Armstrong, Fashion Director of the Daily Telegraph. ‘When Margaret Thatcher came to power the fashion was entirely inappropriate for her purposes, with the weird midi-length dresses and leg-of-mutton sleeves.’ Armstrong adds that during her time in office, especially during the early days, people regarded MT as a frump. ‘But now when you look at it you see that her look has aged incredibly well. Lots of women might even say that today her image is quite contemporary. Certainly, her style still influences fashion today.’

Margaret described the theory behind her working wardrobe to Anne Diamond as

Suits with quite a lot of blouses and then also if you’re travelling overseas and you arrive by aircraft, I do find it much easier to arrive with a coat and dress outfit. For a very simple reason: the moment you get on the aircraft you hang up your coat and then you can put it on just before you get off and you’re not full of creases. So that means I’ve got to go really for a basic wardrobe of good ‘tailoreds’.

Think of almost any businesswoman, female politician or public figure and you’ll find shades of Margaret Thatcher’s theory of dressing somewhere within her outfit. From Sheryl Sandberg, the former Meta Platforms boss, to Christine Lagarde, Angelas Rayner and Merkel, Giorgia Meloni, Michelle Obama, Rachel Reeves, Ursula von der Leyen, Emily Maitlis, Victoria Beckham and the current Queen of the Pussy Bow, Catherine, Princess of Wales. The dilemma of what to wear to work is one with which any woman who has worked in a high- or even a low-profile job will be familiar. ‘I have to be in my Sunday best seven days a week,’ she told Diamond. ‘If ever there was a day when I was wearing something old and not very nice, you can guarantee that would be the day someone important came to see me.’