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Churchill and Margaret Thatcher: Two Meetings of Two Minds
- By RICHARD M. LANGWORTH
- | March 28, 2023
- Category: Great Contemporaries Q & A
Q: How many times did Margaret Thatcher meet Sir Winston?
In a recent podcast, Steve Winduss interviewed Bill Murray, son of Churchill’s longtime bodyguard Edmund Murray. Bill recounted a 1964 meeting between WSC and Margaret Thatcher. Were there any other encounters?” —P.R., England
A: Twice, in 1950 and 1964
Your question sent us to Charles Moore’s authorized biography of Margaret Thatcher. In From Dartford to the Falklands (U.S. edition), Moore describes what he thought at the time was their only meeting. It occurred in January 1950, when 25-year-old Margaret Roberts (as she then was), ran for Parliament for the first time.
The contested seat was Dartford, Kent, then a Labour Party stronghold, and it was a courageous thing for the young Tory to challenge Labour’s popular Norman Dodds. But Miss Roberts ran a spirited campaign. A famous Churchill associate, Bill Deedes (later Lord Deedes), who did win a seat in that election, remarked: “Once she opened her mouth, the rest began to look rather second-rate.”1
Margaret Roberts reduced Dodds’s previous majority by 6000 votes over the combined Conservative-Liberal competition. In 1951 she ran again, a one-on-one match, cutting into Dodds’s lead again. It was the beginning of a career that would see Margaret Thatcher elected for Finchley in 1959. And the rest is history.
Churchill’s endorsement
To Steve Winduss, Bill Murray revealed that Churchill wrote a letter endorsing Margaret Roberts’ candidacy. He does not quote the source, which I am trying to discover, but the wording sounds pure Churchill:
We have set out the methods by which we Conservatives intend—if returned to power—to restore our national finances, regain our independence, and set our country once more on the highway to eventual prosperity. Miss Margaret Roberts, the Conservative candidate, is pledged to support this policy, which I commend to you. I ask you to give her your votes in the full confidence that she will discharge her parliamentary duties by combining the care of your interests with the interest of the British nation.2
There is no indication that they met during the 1950 campaign, but the stage was set for an encounter. Six months later, writes Charles Moore, “she sallied forth to be the youth speaker offering a vote of thanks to Winston Churchill at a party rally at the Albert Hall on 7 June 1950.”3 It was a mass meeting of 7000 members of the Conservative Women’s Association. Margaret was assigned to move the vote of thanks to the keynote speaker, Winston Churchill.
“The Winston meeting went off quite well,” she wrote her sister. I was absolutely terrified of the enormous audience but got through all right. Everyone was very flattering about it.” Alas, Moore writes, “there is no record or memory of the private words that she and Churchill exchanged or of what she said in her vote of thanks.”4 Fortunately for history, there is a complete record of Churchill’s.
“The noble structure of State-planned controls…”
It was a grand, rollicking rally that Churchill rose to address. In the January election, the Conservatives had gained 90 seats, only 16 short of Labour. Combined with the ten Liberals, whom Churchill was overtly courting, they were close to a majority. It was obvious that Prime Minister Attlee would have to go to the country again, soon. WSC’s political comeback plainly beckoned. So Churchill took aim at the bureaucratic super-state he saw developing under what he always referred to as “the Socialists”:
…what is the most obvious, dominating, outstanding, indisputable fact which was established by the very earnest and free expression of British public opinion at the General Election? Here it is. I am not going to keep it a secret. This is it. The British people do not want Socialism. The less they have of it the more they will be pleased. The more they have of it the more they will be obstructed and annoyed, and the more their recovery will be delayed….
Three years ago I proclaimed the watch-words, “set the people free.” What a clamour the Socialists raised at that. How shocking, they exclaimed, that anyone should seek to weaken that noble structure of State-planned controls and regulations enforced by two million officials, national and local, by which alone we could be kept alive. But now we see them on all sides casting away these very restrictions and controls which they assured us were the only means by which we could enter the brave new world from which they are running away so fast with their tails between their legs.5
“An experiment in freedom”?
The last remark drew laughter, but Churchill was just warming up. With words that resonate today—when we face the same sort of attitude by a regulatory state vying to rule us—he turned on Hugh Dalton, Labour’s Minister of Town and Country Planning. In summarizing a minor rollback of regulations, Dalton had declared: “This is an experiment in freedom. Be careful you do not abuse it.”
Was there ever a better example of the Statist mindset, then or now? Churchill was outraged:
Could you have anything more characteristic of the Socialist rulers’ outlook towards the public? Freedom is a favour; it is an experiment which the governing class of Socialist politicians will immediately curtail if they are displeased with our behavior.
This as I said at Edinburgh is language which the head of the Borstal Institution might suitably use to the inmates when announcing some modification of the disciplinary or dietary system. What an example of smug and insolent conceit. What a way to talk to the British people! As a race we have been experimenting in freedom, not entirely without success, for several centuries, according to what I read in the history books, and have spread the ideas of freedom widely throughout the world. And yet, here is this Minister, who speaks to us as if it lay with him to dole out our liberties as if he were giving biscuits to a dog who will sit up and beg prettily. But all I can say is that we have chopped off several better heads than Dalton’s in the past.6
Individual Rights and Liberties
With their handful of votes the Liberals could alter a vote in Parliament, and Churchill was playing for their support. Always partial to coalition governments, he blandished visions of alliance to the Liberal leaders:
Here let me say I am most encouraged by the Bill embodying individual rights and liberties which the Liberal Party has sponsored and which, I understand, Lord Samuel has introduced in the House of Lords. This bill serves to demonstrate that upon these great fundamental issues Conservatives and Liberals are completely united. Between them our two parties are in a majority among the electorate of 1 3/4 million. In these circumstances our voice can and should be decisive. It would be a tragedy for this country, and for the cause of freedom everywhere, if quarrels over minor issues and the raking of ashes of bygone controversies, were so to divide those who agree on fundamentals as to ensure victory at the next election for Socialism, whose doctrines and dogmas we equally deplore.
I say to all Liberals let us work together, both as parties or where that is impossible, as individuals, as much as we can, and let us harm each other by what we do or what we say as little as we must.7
Fourteen years on: 1964
Charles Moore wrote that 1950 was Margaret Thatcher’s only meeting with Churchill, but the recent podcast reminds us of another. Bill Murray explained that his father Edmund, Churchill’s bodyguard, first met Thatcher in March 1964. As the elder Murray wrote, they met in a troubling circumstance. Eddie’s daughter Aileen, returning home one night, was followed by a stalker near a patch of wood in East Finchley. The police found no trace of him, but Eddie believed the miscreant had sheltered in a badly fenced wood. Since it was in Mrs. Thatcher’s constituency, he called her to complain. The very next day
I had a letter from her private secretary, and the day after she came to see my wife and me and was very kind indeed and promised to look into the question of the railings. The next time I went to look, months later, new railings had been erected and the wood was only open during hours of daylight, having new strong gates that were locked at night.8
Ordinarily MPs usually didn’t visit constituents. But Mrs. Thatcher had seen Murray during Churchill’s visits to the House of Commons. Given the awe she felt for Sir Winston, it is believable that she went out of her way to assist.
The second meeting
Sergeant Murray next describes how his encounter with Margaret Thatcher led to her second meeting with Sir Winston:
Mrs. Thatcher could never pass the door to the [House of Commons] Smoking Room, when she saw me standing outside, without looking through the glass of the door to see my boss. I suggested that Sir Winston would be very happy to meet her, but she was always too shy to go in. However, there did come a day when she came along the corridor in front of the Smoking Room when I was there with Sir Winston, just on our way towards the lift and the car. With great pleasure I was able to tell Sir Winston as I introduced him to the lady who was one day to fill the seat he had been so proud to hold as Prime Minister of our great country, that she had helped me in a domestic matter. They shook hands and I felt at the time that Mrs. Thatcher was a very happy woman. Sir Winston beamed at her, seeming to indicate that he was also very happy that one of his party could spend time helping one of his friends.9
It is curious that Charles Moore and Edmund Murray each knew of one Churchill-Thatcher meeting, but not the other. Per Murray’s account, it is hard to imagine the Iron Lady, always known for forthrightness, being shy about anybody. But Margaret Thatcher’s respect for Churchill was lifelong. And Churchill’s words on the regulatory state in 1950 could have been her own words, 30 years later. When it came to liberty, neither of them was for turning.
Audio and further reading
Margaret Thatcher, Remarks on Becoming Prime Minister, 10 Downing Street, 4 May 1979.
Margaret Thatcher’s speech to the U.S. Congress, 20 February 1985. (This was the fourth speech to a joint session of Congress by a British prime minister. The first three were by Winston Churchill.)
Richard Cohen & Richard Langworth, “How Churchill Scaffolded His First Speech to Congress,” 2022.
John O’Sullivan, “Margaret Thatcher: A Legacy of Freedom,” Hillsdale College Imprimis, 2008.
Endnotes
1 David Runciman, “Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat,” London Review of Books, 6 June 2013.
2 Bill Murray, interviewed by Steve Winduss on “Batting the Breeze,” 2 February 2023, accessed 19 February 2023.
3 Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher, The Authorized Biography, From Grantham to the Falklands (New York: Knopf, 2013), 101-02.
4 Ibid.
5 Winston S. Churchill, “General Election Results,” Albert Hall, 7 June 1950 (London: Conservative and Unionist Central Office, 8 June 1950), Churchill Archives Centre, CHUR 5/35A. The Complete Speeches (1974), publishes an incomplete extract in vol. VIII, 8010 ff.
6 Ibid. Borstals were youth detention centers in Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth, known for their harsh discipline. They were eliminated in Britain in 1982 but still exist in countries like India.
7 Ibid. I have been unable to find this Bill or its fate in Hansard, or other Parliamentary archives, and presume that with the Liberals’ small influence, it never came to a vote.
8 Edmund Murray, I Was Winston Churchill’s Bodyguard (London: W. Allen, 1987), 258.
9 Ibid.
In 1982, during the Falklands War, I was not yet 20 years old, but a budding Anglophile who commuted to my local college while living with and looking after my maternal grandmother. Every evening, during the course of the conflict, she and I would watch the television news with great interest the war’s unfolding events. She had a photographic memory, and having lived through both world wars, the Falklands fighting induced many recollections of these conflicts and, inevitably, Churchill’s central role. She had always been impressed by him and saw much of his strength, and perhaps some of her own, in “The Iron Lady.” Thanks, I really enjoyed this article and resulting trip down memory lane.
Dartford is still part of Kent. It is not part of Greater London.
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Thanks for the correction; text has been altered. —Eds.