How Maggie took her whisky

The whirligig of time brings in his… astonishments. Who would have thought it? Even a couple of decades ago, the notion that the Tory party could be led by a black woman would have seemed incredible. I remember 1975, and the doubts that were expressed about Margaret Thatcher: much louder than any adverse comment about Kemi Badenoch now. There seemed to be a widespread belief that the country was simply not ready for a female PM.

I recall a lunch with Barbara Castle not long after the 1979 election. A former street-fighting termagant, she seemed to have eased into post-partisan serenity. When I confessed that I was a Tory, she merely responded with a tut-tutting smile, as if I was an errant grandson. ‘Of course I wanted you Tories crushed under foot,’ she said with a flash of the old passion. ‘But I knew that if this happened, everyone would say that it had been folly to choose a woman, and any progress towards equality would have been set back for 25 years.’

There is another factor in the slow march towards the benign regimen of women: Mrs Thatcher as a feminist influence. Before 1975, the men in charge of law firms or counting-houses – and it was always a man in those days – would almost all have spoken with one voice on the subject of hiring female employees. ‘The sweet little things. But where would they sit? Which lavatories could they use? Everyone knows that they’re no use for one week a month, and they’d distract the young men. And if by a miracle the girl did turn out to be some good, she’d only go off to get married and have babies. Jolly good thing too, but rather a waste of all our time.’