The grocer's daughter who beat Heath

A leadership is rarely seized by those the party expects to seize it. More often it is taken, in a quiet office on an ordinary morning, by a candidate nobody has put on the slate, at the hour when the candidate who was on the slate has just walked out of the room in tears. The men who run a party imagine the succession as a question of seniority, of soundings taken in the Smoking Room, of names that have been waiting their turn. They do not imagine that the answer might be a woman in a navy suit and a single string of pearls who has been keeping the Shadow Environment brief in order, and who has decided, between one telephone call and the next, that if no one else will stand against Edward Heath, she will.

THE GROCER'S DAUGHTER

Margaret Hilda Roberts was born on the thirteenth of October 1925, above her father's grocery on North Parade, Grantham, in a flat with no indoor lavatory and no hot water until she was a teenager. Alfred Roberts was a Methodist lay preacher, an alderman, and for a year the mayor of the borough. His daughter weighed out sugar from the sack into blue paper twists on Saturdays and listened, on weeknights, to him talking shop and council and conscience in the same breath. She read chemistry at Somerville under Dorothy Hodgkin, the future Nobel laureate, and read for the Bar in the evenings while she hunted for a Conservative seat. She fought Dartford twice and lost twice. She entered the Commons for Finchley in 1959, the year her twins turned six. She became Secretary of State for Education and Science in 1970. She closed more grammar schools than any minister before or since, because the law obliged her to, and the press gave her a nickname for the milk, Thatcher, Thatcher, milk snatcher, which she carried into the autumn of 1974 like a stone in a shoe.

By that autumn the party had lost two general elections in eight months under Edward Heath, and Heath had refused to resign. The procedural rule was on his side: no incumbent leader was contested unless he invited it. The right of the party put up Sir Keith Joseph. Joseph, in a speech at Edgbaston in October, used the phrase human stock in a sentence about working-class fertility, and the press had four weeks at it.

THE MORNING OF THE TWENTY-FIRST

It is the morning of the twenty-first of November 1974, in a small office at the House of Commons. The light off the river is the thin grey light of late autumn in London. The Shadow Environment papers are stacked on the desk; she has been at them since before nine. Sir Keith has been in the chair opposite her for the better part of an hour. He has just told her, in a voice that has gone from quiet to broken and back again, that he cannot now stand. She has watched him decide it across the desk. She has watched the candidacy of the right of the party leave the room with him, in his overcoat, down the corridor, towards the Members' Lobby.

She is forty-nine. She has been a Member of Parliament for fifteen years and a Cabinet Minister for three. Navy suit. Pearls. The discipline of a Methodist Sunday school still on her face on a Wednesday morning. She does not cry. She sits down at the desk.

THE SECOND AT THE DESK

She reckons it the way her father reckoned the day's takings: column by column, in pencil, against the price of being wrong. Heath has lost two elections in eight months and refused to resign. Joseph was the candidate the ballot was being run for, and Joseph has just walked out of this office. If no one stands, Heath stays. If Heath stays, the party loses 1979. If the party loses 1979, the Labour government has five more years of what is happening now: the IMF, the unions, the inflation, the lights going off at ten. She thinks of the shop on North Parade, of her father weighing flour against the price of a sack, and of the words he used to use, that you did not do what was easy, you did what was right, and you did it on a Wednesday morning as readily as on a Sunday evening.

She is not the candidate of the right of the party. She knows the right does not know her name in that sense yet. She is the candidate of the part of the back-benches that thought Joseph was the right candidate and has, this morning, no other. She has perhaps eight votes she can name and thirty more she cannot. Airey Neave, who knows how to count a lobby over ten weeks, will not run a campaign for a candidate who has not declared. Airey needs ten weeks. The new year ballot is ten weeks away. There is no other candidate the back-benches can vote for in good conscience. There is, this morning, only her.

She picks up the telephone. She rings her husband at the Burmah Oil offices in Swindon. She says, in a voice that is a register up from her usual, Denis, I think I am going to stand. Denis pauses. Good for you, Margaret. You'll lose, but you'll have done it. She rings Airey Neave's secretary and asks for an appointment at three. She returns to the Shadow Environment papers. She does not tell Joseph. She does not tell the Shadow Cabinet. She tells Airey, who tells William Whitelaw, who tells the lobby. The announcement goes out the next afternoon in a single paragraph.

THE TEN WEEKS

Airey Neave worked the lobby for ten weeks. He counted votes the way a stocktaker counts tins: by hand, in a notebook, twice. He told his colleagues in private that he expected her to come second on the first ballot, bleed Heath enough to force the resignation, and let a credible candidate, meaning Whitelaw, emerge clean for the second. He told her, in private, something else. He worked the men who hated Heath and the men who had been overlooked by Heath and the men who simply could not face another defeat with the same captain in the wheelhouse. He did not work the press. The press had her at twenty to one.

On the fourth of February 1975 the ballot was held in Committee Room 14. She beat Heath by a hundred and thirty votes to a hundred and nineteen, with sixteen for Hugh Fraser and eleven abstentions. Heath went back to his room, sat down, and said to his aide, So, we got it all wrong. He resigned that evening. She won the run-off the following Tuesday against Whitelaw, Howe, Prior and Peyton on the first round. She walked out of the room the Leader of Her Majesty's Opposition. She was the first woman to lead a British political party.

THE QUIET ROOM

In a quiet room in Wilton Street that night Edward Heath sat with the curtains drawn. He had been Prime Minister, he had taken Britain into Europe, he had broken with the miners and lost, and he had not believed, in any room he had ever walked into, that the Member for Finchley was a serious proposition. He had refused to see her for months. He had refused, the previous summer, to give her a senior economic brief, on the grounds that, once she was there, we should never be able to get rid of her. He sat in the chair and did not speak for a long time. The sulk that began that night lasted, in one form or another, for the rest of his life. The party called it the incredible sulk. He outlived her premiership. He never forgave her, and he never quite worked out what had happened on the morning of the twenty-first of November, when a woman he had not taken seriously had sat at a desk and counted, in pencil, against the price of being wrong.

DOWNING STREET

Four years later, on the afternoon of the fourth of May 1979, she stood on the step of Number Ten and read out, with a steadiness that was the steadiness of a woman who had rehearsed it, the lines attributed to Francis of Assisi: where there is discord, may we bring harmony; where there is error, may we bring truth; where there is doubt, may we bring faith; and where there is despair, may we bring hope. She was the first woman in British history to hold the office. She held it for eleven and a half years, longer than any Prime Minister of the twentieth century. She sold the council houses, broke the closed shop, took the Falklands back, faced down the miners in the strike of 1984, paid off the borrowing, was bombed in her hotel in Brighton and walked out at four in the morning to a Conservative conference she opened on time. She was removed by her own Cabinet in November 1990, in a corridor not unlike the one Sir Keith had walked down sixteen years earlier, and she walked out of Downing Street in tears she had not shed in office.

A leadership is rarely seized by those the party expects to seize it. It is taken, on an ordinary morning, by the candidate who is in the room when the candidate who was meant to be in the room walks out. The party machinery does not write that morning down. The diaries of the men who ran the party that decade barely mention it. But the shop on North Parade in Grantham is still there, above the door the plaque the borough put up after she became Prime Minister: Birthplace of The Rt Hon Margaret Thatcher MP, first woman Prime Minister. Alfred Roberts had been dead ten years by the time his daughter went to Downing Street. The sugar sacks were long gone. The blue paper twists were long gone. The weighing, the column-by-column reckoning of what a thing cost against what it was worth, she carried with her out of the small office on the morning of the twenty-first of November 1974, and never put down.