Food - Bee Wilson on how Maggie spent her good old British pound
It was an eerie, anomalous moment when Lady Thatcher appeared recently at her first Conservative general election rally since 1987. "The mummy returns," she joked, and the Daily Telegraph cheered. The genius of Thatcher, as well as her failure, depended on the image she created of herself as a "mummy", the manager of a limited budget, a trimmer of shopping lists and a decisive but ruthless carver-up of pies. She was always a British housewife, spending her good British pound on cheap British mass-produced food, none of that foreign Euro muck.
When still in her early twenties, Margaret Thatcher (nee Roberts) spoke to a ladies' luncheon club about women's rights. "Don't be scared of the high-flown language of economists and cabinet ministers, but think of politics at our own household level," she said. "After all, women live in contact with food supplies, housing shortages and ever-decreasing opportunities for children."
To be a "young married woman" in the 1950s was, according to Thatcher, "very heaven". The late Fifties were a blessed relief after the Spam, snoek and socialism of the austerity years. In her memoirs, she goes all misty-eyed about the era of "Murray Mints" and "frothy coffee", when "bananas, grapes and fruits I had never heard of suddenly reappeared in the shops". She also relished the attention to detail involved in being married to Denis. His breakfast grapefruit always had to be segmented meticulously, and he insisted on marmalade with chunky strips of peel in it before setting off to work in his Jaguar.
Such details were second nature to Margaret, having grown up in a grocer shop in Grantham. The sign outside proudly read "A ROBERTS Family Grocer and Provision Merchant. If you get it from Roberts's . . . you get . . . THE BEST", although a cruel biographer tells us that A Roberts was not, in fact, considered the best - indeed, not even the second-best - grocer's in town. But Margaret, loyally, always described the shop as a "specialist grocer" and claimed that her father sold "the best-quality produce". A serious little girl, she helped weigh out sugar, tea, biscuits, lentils and dried fruit from their big sacks and boxes into smaller 1lb and 2lb bags. She watched as butter was shaped into neat pats, and later remembered "wonderful aromas of spices, coffee and smoked hams". From her father, Alfred, Margaret learnt how international trade could affect even small lives. From her formidable mother, Beatrice, she learnt the virtues of a structured existence. In interviews, the prime minister avoided mentioning her, except to say: "My mother was an excellent cook and a highly organised one."
Organisation ran in the family. Margaret Thatcher was a more adventurous cook, but still a creature of habit, fond of poached eggs on Bovril toast, roast lamb both hot and cold, and comforting, fattening dishes of macaroni cheese, which she liked to eat when she met women friends for lunch. Christmas at Chequers ran as smoothly as a cabinet meeting. Carol Thatcher recalled that "the menu never, ever, varied from absolutely traditional fare".
Being such an efficient manager of her own household ship, it never occurred to her that some economies might not be so uncomplicated - the nation's, for example. Abolishing free school milk when she was education minister was simply a question of changing the household shopping list to fit the budget. If you want to eat beef, sometimes you must do without treacle tart. It was the same with schools: if you want books and buildings, you must do without milk. Anyway, she argued wishfully, no mother would let her children starve. Later, with the cries of "Thatcher, Thatcher, milk snatcher" ringing in her ears, she regretted that she hadn't made the schools sell the milk instead.
She caused another domestic storm, this time over tinned salmon, shortly after challenging Ted Heath for the leadership of the Tory party. Thatcher gave an interview to a magazine for OAPs called Pre-Retirement Choice, in which she suggested that old people should keep a store of special-offer tinned foods as a safeguard against inflationary times, something she did herself. Outrage ensued. The Consumer Association accused her of disgusting greed, since "only the rich can afford to hoard food or have enough space to stockpile". Dennis Skinner MP raged that she was stealing tinned salmon from the mouths of pensioners. Thatcher replied that she was simply doing what any other mother would do when the pound in her purse was shrinking. The trouble, though, was that she never was just any other mother. She had the strange pretension to be ours.
What a long time ago it all seems.
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