The first volume of my biography of Margaret Thatcher was published on Tuesday. Since Lady Thatcher had stipulated that the book could appear only after her death, we were, in principle, ready. But it is still a huge undertaking to finish correcting a 900-page book on a Tuesday (the day before the funeral), and get back the printed book the following Monday. Reviewing my endnotes, I came across an interviewee called Rosie Cruikshank. She appeared in relation to Margaret Roberts’s most serious boyfriend. Who on earth was she? Just in time, I remembered. While writing all the ‘love interest’ passages, I had worried that they might fall into the wrong hands, and so I gave the characters pseudonyms. I chose names to fit the period. Thus the first boyfriend, Tony Bray, was called Arthur Negus, after the antiques expert on the BBC’s Going for a Song. Robert Henderson, the Scottish doctor whom she met in Dartford at roughly the time that she first met Denis Thatcher, was named Andrew Cruikshank, after the actor in Dr Finlay’s Casebook. ‘Rosie Cruikshank’ was really Josie Henderson, the woman Robert later married. I discovered her, by then an elderly widow, living ten miles from us. She is now dead. Thank goodness, I managed, just, to ensure that she appears correctly in history.
There was also a startling late entry for the book. On the day after Lady Thatcher died, I received an email from Haden Blatch. Mr Blatch’s father, Bertie, was the chairman of the Finchley Conservative Association when it selected her in 1958. I had asked Haden for information before, but he had not got round to it. Now he revealed that his father had come home from the Finchley selection meeting and explained that Mrs Thatcher had not really won the vote. Her rival, Thomas Langton, had just pipped her. Blatch senior, however, was very keen on Mrs Thatcher, and thought that Langton, who ‘was born with a silver spoon in his mouth’, would easily get in somewhere else, whereas she, being a woman with young children, would not. ‘I “lost” two of Langton’s votes,’ he told his son, and he announced her victory. If this is correct, Mrs Thatcher (unknowing) was set on her political career by a fraud. To get this story into the book, I was not allowed any more lines: I had surgically to remove 150 words, and insert 150 new ones.
‘Arthur Negus’ — Tony Bray — is the only one of Margaret’s early loves still alive, though sadly he is now in poor health. Once I had tracked him down, I found him happy to speak about those distant days at the end of the war when he danced with the future prime minister. But he was extremely anxious — 60 years later — that his wife (who is now dead) should not know of my inquiries. ‘If you ring up, please say nothing of your purpose,’ he said, ‘and if you write, please don’t do so in a Daily Telegraph envelope.’ When he married his wife, a couple of years after the relationship had ended, a similar sense of honour induced him to destroy all Margaret’s letters to him. As a biographer, I protest, but as a fellow human being, I salute his touching delicacy.
The more I re-read it, the more masterly do I think the Bishop of London’s sermon at the funeral was. His thought about Lady Thatcher being, in death, ‘one of us’, was a neat way of putting Shakespeare’s famous lines that ‘Golden lads and girls all must, /As chimney sweepers, come to dust’. Having established the common humanity, he was then able to point out, without getting into politics, how she herself understood this in a Christian context. He quoted from her speech in St Lawrence Jewry in 1978. In it, he reminded the congregation, she spoke of community as the Body of Christ, a concept which (her words, not his) revealed ‘the great truth that we do not achieve happiness or salvation in isolation from each other but as members of Society’. When she famously said, elsewhere, that there was ‘no such thing as society’, this was part of a discourse about what society really rested on, rather than an attack on its existence. Bishop Chartres explained this with grace and tact, but its effect is a slow-burn version of Mark Antony over the grave of Caesar.
The Bishop’s striking black cope was, I discovered, made for his predecessor for the funeral of Winston Churchill. This was not announced at the time, since it might have inflamed the controversy then raging. The mantle was quietly handed on.
Next to us at the funeral was Nicci Pugh, nearly unique in being a female Falklands veteran. She was a naval nursing sister on SS Uganda, and has written a book about it (White Ship, Red Crosses; Melrose Books). She introduced me to some of her former patients in the congregation, including a moustachioed Para called Denzil Connick, who lost his legs in the battle for Mount Longdon. Because of his disability, he could not move as others came into his pew. He looked pleased as Joan Collins and his fellow Welshman, Shirley Bassey, were forced to climb over him.
Two pleasing vignettes. At the entrance, we were surprised to encounter a shabby man in a raincoat emerging from the cathedral carrying two cups of takeaway coffee. It was one of my heroes, Sir Colin McColl, the former head of MI6. When the IRA speak of Britain’s grim ‘securocrats’, I always think of this donnish, kindly man, and smile. The other was the substantial figure of Bruce Anderson trying to sit down. About 40 per cent of him spread on to his neighbour, Sir David Frost, whose expression of polite, restrained horror was a joy.
There was another nice touch. Lady Thatcher’s Order of the Garter was carried by her grandson up the aisle. Each Garter is numbered. By chance, hers is No. 10.
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