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earning money the old-fashioned way, she always averred, and she earned hers in the most old-fashioned way of all: She married it. Her subsequent career might have been possible without her husband’s money, but it wouldn’t have been easier. This marriage was one of her shrewdest political decisions. It appears to have been a genuine love match, too; by all accounts the Thatchers were utterly devoted to each other. As mothers the world around have traditionally reminded their daughters, it is just as easy to love a rich man as a poor one.

    Let us take a detour within a detour and return to Sir Bernard Ingham, to whom we have been speaking at the Institute of Directors. Ingham is the man who, more than anyone except Thatcher herself, invented the Margaret Thatcher legend. As her press secretary, Ingham was responsible for managing her image in the media, and in Thatcher’s own words, “He never let me down.” 11
    Ingham is a convert, and like many converts, uncommonly devout. He was a member of the Labour Party and in his youth ran, unsuccessfully, as a Labour candidate for the city council in Leeds. Before joining the civil service in 1967, he worked as a journalist for the Guardian, Britain’s leading organ of socialist sanctimony. After winning the 1979 general election, Thatcher met him, took an instant liking to him, and plucked him from his obscure position as a civil service under-secretary. It was a curious decision,
particularly because she was later known for sniffing out and at the soonest feasible opportunity extirpating the ideologically suspect from her inner circle. But as usual, her political instincts proved shrewd. Ingham became the truest of the blue believers, serving her faithfully until her downfall.
    His views about Thatcher are important. Why? Because they represent the Party line. This is how Thatcher wanted herself to be understood. And because her press secretary was good at his job, this is widely how she was understood.
    He describes the background from which she emerged thus:
    BI: We should not forget her upbringing . . . You’re not going to get anywhere unless you work like stink, there are no prizes in this world for not working, you know, and you really will have to apply yourself, girl, and I suppose the unspoken words were, “and especially since you are a girl.” You could also say it comes from this non-conformist Methodism in which she was brought up. And they are an identifiable people, they’re no longer really identifiable except among my generation, but they were identifiable then. And of course she wasn’t part of a privileged upbringing, like so many members of her cabinet . . . I think she got the resolution from her father, who if he taught her anything, it was to stand up against the herd, never go with the herd if you think the herd is wrong, he told her. And she never went with the herd.
    CB: What I’m trying to understand is the iron confidence that she projected, did that—
    BI: Projected?
    CB: Exactly. How deep did it go? Was it a compensation for an underlying sense of insecurity?
    BI: I do not think you should play up the insecurity in her character. I think there was a basic insecurity there in her class and upbringing and sex. I think that is what caused her to
be very careful and deliberate in what she did. But it was not allowed to undermine her determination to do what she believed to be right. Her father had told her that she must do what she knew to be right. And she revered her father. She was in many ways her father’s son.
    CB: You just said that she was her father’s son.
    BI: Well, I mean, she was.

    She did what was right, she did what was right, she did what was right. She did it because her father told her to. She repeated those words over and over until through the hypnotic power of repetition they appeared at last to blaze from her forehead. If it is also true that she did what was practical and