Thatcher Balls

Of course, most of this week’s Margaret Thatcher: The Long Road to Finchley was intentionally silly. No one would have said “I’ll get a nanny sorted” even a dozen years ago, never mind in the Fifties. It was full of things like that, as well as the jokes about Carol Thatcher and the jungle, Mark Thatcher lost in the sand dunes, children’s milk provision, Ted Heath’s organ, and so forth.

But above all, we were expected to laugh at the attitude of successive Conservative Associations, and especially of the lower-middle-class women in them (not Thatcher’s own background, for all her downward affectations), that “a mother’s place is in the home, not in the House”. When that line was shown being uttered, Thatcher’s twins were three years old. And in 1950s Britain, it was mothers who did practically all of the child care, as they would not have called it. So what was unreasonable about the concern?

What could not be shown was what the real answer would have been: “My millionaire husband pays for a nanny, which is how I could read for the Bar, how I am able to look for a seat, and how I could easily be a perfectly effective and efficient MP despite having two small children.” For Maggie, we must never forget, came up the hard way. Didn’t she?

If Thatcher was anti-family, then we may at least say of her that her record in office was fully in keeping with those views. Just ask the pro-life and pro-family activists about the Tories in general and Thatcher in particular. There is, to put it at its politest, no love lost.

And as I write, there are small children (three, I believe) both of whose parents are working eighty or ninety hour weeks as Cabinet Ministers, again in an ostensibly pro-family Government. Ponder these things.