Family values under the hammer

In the course of John Campbell’s superb second volume of his Margaret Thatcher biography, he poses the question of what Alderman Roberts would have thought of the new Thatcherite Britain which his daughter did so much to create. It is a question which, to the best of my knowledge, has never been asked before. But it should have been since any attempt to answer it reveals the paradox at the heart of both her life and her life’s work. For, as Mr Campbell shows, Mrs Thatcher presided over and celebrated a culture of rampant materialism which was repugnant to everything her father stood for. While claiming to stand for thrift, she left behind a population with an unrivalled record of indebtedness. By the time of her enforced retirement about one in five individuals was living far beyond his or her means. Never before had improvidence taken such hold. We had become — as we remain — a nation of gamblers. What is more, while lauding Puritanism, she had created a cut-throat economy and a climate of social fragmentation — not to mention an anti-marriage taxation system — which made the practice of family values almost impossible. Worst of all, in the climate of commercialism which she promoted a tide of pornographic and sexual blatancy was released the like of which this country had never seen before. To put it bluntly, she debauched the world of Alfred Roberts.

In short the paradox of Thatcherism is piquantly embodied in the history of her own family. Campbell urges us

to think back to Alfred Roberts in his Grantham grocery, the small town shopkeeper, patriot and preacher, husbanding the ratepayers’ pennies and raising his clever daughter to a life of Christian service, diligence and thrift. Then look forward to the future of Sir Mark Thatcher, an international businessman possessed of visible abilities, qualifications of social conscience, pursued from Britain to Texas to South Africa by lawsuits, tax investigations and a persistently unsavoury reputation.