What Margaret Thatcher Was Like As a Mother
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Bad mother. It's a title that has often followed women in positions of power, a badge of dishonor that trails after their professional accolades. Much has been made, after all, of Queen Elizabeth II's role in raising her four children, and Queen Victoria's sour statements about motherhood are all but legendary, so perhaps it should come as no surprise that another prominent British figure, Britain's first female Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, has also earned a spot in the public mind as a member of the lackluster moms club.
But, of course, perception and reality don't always square, and defining someone's parental identity is often more complicated than it appears. What was Thatcher really like as a parent? Here's what we know.
Before Becoming Prime Minister
In 1951, at 25 years old and already eyeing a position as an MP, Margaret Roberts married Denis Thatcher, a divorced WWII veteran and industrialist. Despite having graduated from Oxford with a degree in chemistry, Margaret had already begun studying for a degree in law in her spare time when she became pregnant two years after their wedding. Relentlessly, she kept working toward her future in the law, even sending out her exam application for the Bar from her hospital room after giving birth to her twins, Mark and Carol, according to The Telegraph.
Though she first ran for Parliament in 1950, it wasn't until 1959 that she eventually won a seat, but from there her rise was dramatic. Just a year after entering the House of Commons, she gave her first big speech, followed a day later by her first television interview. It was, unbeknownst to them at the time, also the twins' entry into public life as well. For the interview, which took place in their family home, Margaret was joined on the sofa by her six year olds.
"I think we'll just try to be a very good back-bencher first," she said when asked whether she'd be taking a more prominent political role. "Certainly until these two are a little older, I couldn't take on any more political responsibilities—these responsibilities are quite enough."
Indeed, it would be another decade before she would become the secretary of education for Prime Minister Edward Heath and a decade after that before she was at last elected PM herself.
Her Relationship With Her Children
During her career, Margaret was circumspect about her family life. As a consequence, much of what we know of Margaret Thatcher as a mother comes from her daughter Carol, who has been vocal about her complicated relationship with her famous mom.
“All my childhood memories of my mother were just someone who was superwoman before the phrase had been invented. She was always flat out, she never relaxed, household chores were done at breakneck speed in order to get back to the parliamentary correspondence or get on with making up a speech," Carol said in a BBC documentary.
Though the twins were sent away to school not long after Margaret began as an MP (Mark, to boarding school at age 8, and Carol to prep school a year later.) Nonetheless, in her memoirs, Carol describes Margaret as domestically involved, sharing stories of her making food for picnics, personally wallpapering the twins' bedrooms, and teaching her daughter to drive.
Not all of the portrayals have been flattering. In the 2019 documentary Thatcher: A Very British Revolution, Margaret's principal private secretary Lord Robin Butler revealed that she had once made Carol hide in a closet to avoid her being seen in jeans, according to The Telegraph. Another of her secretaries, Lord Charles Powell, was direct in his assessment, saying in the documentary that, “The challenges of being a mother and Prime Minister were considerable and, to be perfectly frank, she rather failed. She didn’t have time enough for her children. She rather over-indulged Mark when she perhaps under-indulged Carol.”
On the other hand, Jonathan Aitken, a former MP who once dated Carol, recalls Margaret quietly rearranging a vote he was set to be involved in, in order to ensure that he wouldn't disappoint Carol by being forced to miss a planned weekend away. After the couple's breakup, Margaret was later rumored to have said that she would be damned if she was going to give a job to a man "who made Carol cry."
Perhaps Margaret's most publicly famous maternal moment came in 1982 when Mark went missing for six days while participating in the Paris-Dakar Rally car race in the Sahara desert. Margaret spent nearly £2,000 from her personal accounts on the search before Mark, his fellow driver, and their mechanic were found by the Algerian military.
Whether Margaret herself felt conflicted about her relationships with her children is unclear. According to Lord Michael Spicer who worked with Margaret as an MP, she told him in 1995 that “If I had my time again, I wouldn’t go into politics because of what it does to your family.”
However, publicly, she seemed to turn a more practical face on the issue, telling Saga magazine, "Look, you can’t have everything. It has been the greatest privilege being prime minister of my country… Yes, I wish I saw more of my children. We don’t have Sunday lunch together; we don’t go on holiday skiing any more. But I can’t regret. And I haven’t lost my children. They have their lives. I took a different life,” according to The Telegraph.
Mark Thatcher
The eldest of the Thatcher twins, Mark has spent his own fair share of time in the news over the years. Educated at Harrow, he reportedly finished high school with three O-levels (a British form of standardized testing) and later studied accounting. He went on to have several short term jobs, including his foray into racing which ultimately led to his disappearance in the Sahara.
In the years after he was rescued, Mark amassed his personal wealth through a variety of businesses including marketing and consulting. He moved to America in the '80s and married heiress Diane Burgdorf, with whom he has two children. (The couple later divorced.)
On several occasions over the years, Mark's business dealings have come into the spotlight for potential impropriety. In the mid-'80s, it was suggested that Mark's political connections through his mother helped earn a company he worked for a $450 million contract from the Sultanate of Oman—the contract reportedly came through following a visit to Oman by Margaret, during which Mark flew in for a private trip. Margaret denied the allegations and records pertaining to the matter have remained sealed. In 2005 he was arrested in regards to a plot to overthrow the president of Equatorial Guinea. In that case, he was given a suspended sentence and a £265,000 fine following a plea deal, according to The Guardian and The New York Times. Thatcher’s attorney issued a statement at the time that Thatcher "should have exercised more caution" but otherwise denied any intentional wrongdoing, according to the New York Times.
In 2003, following the death of his father, he inherited the title of baron which was awarded to Denis in 1990.
Carol Thatcher
Rather than business, the younger Thatcher twin chose to go into a more unlikely field for the child of a politician: journalism. She graduated from University College London with a law degree, but then moved to Australia to work as a journalist in newspapers and television, according to The Guardian. She eventually moved back to the UK, continuing her journalistic work at the Daily Telegraph for a time, as well as writing several books about her parents, her own memoir, and producing documentaries centered on both her mother and father.
In 2005, she won the British reality show I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here!, reportedly without telling her mother that she was going to participate in the show at all. In 2009 she was dropped as a presenter of BBC's The One Show after making a racist remark about a professional tennis player.
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