ABSTRACT
The 1980s were the Thatcher years. Born in 1925, Margaret Thatcher (née Roberts) was a provincial grammar school girl who had gone on to Oxford. Elocution lessons had eliminated her Lincolnshire accent (though the occasional dialect word escaped in moments of excitement-‘frit’ for frightened is the famous example). From childhood, ‘I wasn’t lucky, I deserved it’ was her watchword. Proof against poshocratic lures, Margaret Roberts nevertheless left Grantham and her family behind. Since her marriage to Denis Thatcher in 1951 she had enjoyed the benefit of a wealthy husband. As she acknowledged, she could not have made her political mark without the support of ‘a first-class nanny-housekeeper’. Once prime minister, however, she promulgated the petty-bourgeois values inculcated by her father Alderman Alfred Roberts, the Grantham grocer: hard work, thrift, initiative, self-reliance. In an interview for Woman’s Own in October 1987, Mrs Thatcher was to assert that ‘There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families’. Labour voters surveyed in March 1986 said much the same: ‘It’s nice to have a social conscience but it’s your family that counts’.
