owned a country estate in Essex, and later became Conservative MP in the area, sitting for Maldon from 1955 until February 1974. He died in 2011. It was in Essex that Margaret met Brian Harrison. She had recently come down from Oxford and was working in BX Plastics in Manningtree. He was just the sort of man she liked. He was tall, sporting, well-off, kindly, older than she (Denis Thatcher, whom she was to marry in 1951, was eleven years her senior), and had had a good war. As Chairman of the Young Conservatives in Colchester, he took her under his wing, and encouraged her warmly when she felt rather lonely in a strange place. This was important to the young Margaret, because she often found that men patronised her because of her sex, and sometimes because of her class. Harrison did not. She was ‘an attractive girl’, he told me, and ‘very very clued up’. She was a good dancer too and ‘ambitious but intelligent enough to hide it’. Under Harrison’s patronage, she flourished. When she applied for her first parliamentary candidacy in Dartford, Kent, her campaigning experience in Colchester stood her in good stead. She was selected in February 1949, the youngest candidate of any party in the whole country. A Trinity man had helped nurture a great talent.
The other four relationships all had their problematic aspects. John Nott was perhaps the closest to her in ideological terms. As a member of the Economic Dining Club, a group of Conservative MPs who tried to uphold free-market principles in the dirigiste era of Ted Heath, Nott was a proto-Thatcherite. He influenced her economic thinking when she was Leader of the Opposition, and did well as her Trade Secretary after she won for the first time in 1979. It was Nott who immediately abolished price controls, showing greater boldness than his boss; she supported the idea but was cautious about going too fast. He had a clarity of mind and expression and was, in economic terms, a ‘Dry’ in a Cabinet sodden with ‘Wets’. In 1981, Mrs Thatcher promoted Nott to the post of Defence Secretary. There he showed such zeal in following her policy of economy that he enraged the T R I N I T Y A N N UA L R ECOR D 2013 113
Feat u r es
Of the five Trinity men who served in Mrs Thatcher’s Cabinet, it was Nicholas Edwards with whom she had the most uncomplicated and easy relationship. From 1979 to 1987, when he left the Commons and became Lord Crickhowell, Edwards was her Secretary of State for Wales. She was not much interested in Wales, and was content that Edwards, who was competent, pleasant, and politically fairly sympathetic to her, should get on with it. He did the job well.