His daughter bathed in reflected glory. She hero-worshipped him but what a stickler. If her classmates were going out and she asked to join them: “My father would say: never do something just because other people are doing it. Never adopt their opinions just to go with the crowd. Make up your own mind what you want to do and then try to persuade others to your view.”
She learned that lesson. As she spoke I realised she was a corner shop princess. She was never one of the people. She was a cut above the neighbours – separated from her schoolmates, elevated above her mother and sister. Each week she and Alf went to the library to select biographies for the two of them – and a novel for her mother.
Her father, she said, told her that popularity didn’t matter. What mattered was that people respected you. I said my own father would have agreed and she replied, “and although we are from different backgrounds”.
There it was, that class consciousness she’d carried right through her premiership. In her memoir, The Downing Street Years, she attributed her downfall to the grandees of the Tory Party. Clearly she thought I had sprung from them too. This time I managed to interject that Douglas Home was my married name and my background was more like hers. Instantly she was friendlier. She was now engaged and co-operative.
I asked how she had emerged from a background that was echoed millions of time across the country to be talked about in the same breath as Elizabeth I of England? What made Margaret Thatcher different?
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