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this stature.
    This is why the hopefuls are visiting her, even if she is not quite sure who they are.

2
    La Pasionaria of Middle-Class Privilege
    Let me give you my vision. A man’s right to work as he will. To spend what he earns. To own property. To have the state as servant and not as master. These are the British inheritance.
    â€”THATCHER’S FIRST SPEECH
TO THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY
CONFERENCE AS PARTY LEADER
    To place the rest of this book in context, we must take a biographical detour. Don’t skim this part! You must understand where she came from to understand what she accomplished.
    Margaret Hilda Roberts was born in 1925 in Grantham, Lincolnshire, above her father’s grocery shop. If you look at a map of England, Grantham is about a third of the way between London and the Scottish border, slightly to the east of Britain’s midline. Isaac Newton, too, was raised in Grantham, and in between, nothing of note happened there. Grantham was twice voted Britain’s most boring city in national polls. It is known for its production of
diesel engines and road rollers. I was on a train that stopped there once. It is a flat, featureless town of red-brick houses, all roughly alike. As the train idled in the station, I wondered for a moment if I should get out to take a closer look. I peered from the rain-streaked window at the dreary expanse of low-slung brick buildings. In the distance lay a food-processing plant. I looked up at the slate-colored sky. I stayed in my seat.
    Hers was a lower-middle-class, piously Methodist family of no distinction. During her time in power, rumors circulated persistently that somehow, through some ancestral illegitimate dalliance, nobility had slipped into her bloodline. No evidence for it at all. The rumors themselves are significant, though, for they suggest the depth of Britain’s obsession with breeding and class. Never were there rumors, by contrast, that Bill Clinton’s grandmother had trysted with a Kennedy; no one in America believed it literally impossible for a leader of his stature to have surfaced from an Arkansas trailer park milieu. Americans don’t think that way.
    Her father, Alfred Roberts, was a town alderman and for a short time Grantham’s mayor, so she was exposed to politics from her earliest childhood, but he earned his living as a grocer. He was a Wesleyan lay preacher. This is a significant point. Lay preaching was one of the few ways a man of his epoch and class background could acquire ease and fluency as a public speaker. He thereby inherited a famously eloquent oratorical tradition and passed it on to his daughter. Margaret Thatcher’s speaking career began in childhood, on Sundays, when she read from the high pulpit.
    Her mother was a dressmaker. Thatcher revered her father and spoke of him often; she almost never spoke of her mother. No one knows why she didn’t, but everyone thinks it significant. It is a clue, it is said, albeit an opaque one, to understanding her ambition and the nature of her interactions with men.
    Margaret Roberts spent her youth, according to the legend she later assiduously promoted, carefully weighing flour and counting change in the family shop, learning the housewifely principles of
industry and thrift that subsequently informed her economic policy. Clearly this legend is not the whole story; there is no obvious path between measuring flour and championing monetarism. But like many legends it contains elements of truth. Even if her political philosophy clearly emerged from other influences as well, her class background—that frugal, industrious, Methodist upbringing—was crucially important to informing her worldview.
    Britain’s aristocracy tends to be educated at public schools, such as Eton and Harrow, which are not public schools in the American sense, but rather exclusive private ones. Margaret Roberts went to the local grammar school, a public school in the American sense.