A great PM, but an "awful" mother?

Last year my son was at football practice when an old woman came to sit on the bench in the sun and watch them ldquoAt first I thought she was Meryl Streep from the filmrdquo he told me when he came home from school that day ldquobut then I realised it was the real Margaret Thatcherrsquorsquo At half time he had gone up to her to say hello and to explain that she should be watching the A team ldquonot our D team as wersquore all terriblerdquo Thatcher had smiled and said to him ldquoI never came to watch you enough dearrdquo Margaret Thatcher with her husband Denis 19152003 and their children Carol and Mark on the occasion of her Silver Wedding anniversary on December 13 1976 PICCentral PressGetty Images Bad mothermdashthatrsquos the one epitaph everyone agrees on when talking about Margaret Thatcher She may have been the first British female Prime Minister poached an egg for her husband every day for breakfast and had Mitterand Gorbachev and Reagan for lunch but she wasnrsquot there for tea or her childrenrsquos football matches As soon as they were born in 1953 they slept in the nannyrsquos room From the age of 6 when their mother became an MP the twins had to fit into her hectic schedule and they went to boarding school aged 8 and 9mdashCarol says that neither parent came to watch her win a prize on sports day No wonder she ended up on Irsquom A Celebrity and Mark allegedly became involved in a coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea Both of them were abroad when their mother died alone in her suite at the Ritz Thatrsquos understandable Carol says that she talked to the Downing Street secretaries more often than her mother Mark was unthawing his own frozen suppers when he was 7 Thatcher once told an interviewer ldquoHome is where you go when you have nowhere else to gordquo Thatrsquos pretty tough for a child to hear their mother say Jonathan Aitken who went out with Carol agrees that the Thatcher home was not a particularly cosy environment despite the pictures of Margaret pruning the roses or playing the piano and Denis mowing the lawn ldquoHugs cuddles and kisses never seemed to be on the agendardquo he says ldquoThey just werenrsquot tactilerdquo According to Aitken Carol once shouted at her mother ldquoLady Thatcher you were a great prime minister but you are an awful motherrdquo But Thatcher was no heartless witch who snatched bairnsrsquo milk and went out of her way to ruin the twinsrsquo lives She actually had a great deal of time for children She stopped wearing a hat partly because she thought it frightened toddlers when she bent down to talk to them As a guest at the press gallery childrenrsquos Christmas party one year she was the first to notice a small boy crying into his pudding ldquoTheyrsquove given me blancmange and I donrsquot like blancmangerdquo he sobbed ldquoThat is what parties are all about eating food you donrsquot likerdquo she said before kindly whisking it away and replacing it Aitken admits she once changed a vote as Opposition leader to ensure that hemdashas an MPmdashcould go on a skiing holiday with her daughter After Mark was lost in the desert during the ParisDakar rally in 1982 she ldquofell apartrdquo according to her press secretary Sir Bernard Ingham She not only paid pound1800 towards his rescue fee but also his bar bill in Algeria for the celebrations rather than telling him off She could be too indulgent particularly to her son she obviously felt the same guilt as every other mother only hers was compounded by the knowledge that it was hard to live in her Spitting Image shadow In many ways the twins were lucky In their early twenties they had free accommodation at Downing Street and Chequers with its indoor swimming pool Thatcher didnrsquot even have an inside toilet growing up Mark used his motherrsquos connections to become a multimillionaire businessman Carol became a TV personality and wrote books about her parents before retiring to Klosters in Switzerland What they lacked was time with their mother Princess Anne once summed it up saying ldquoCertainly as far as we were concerned we were definitely not the lead item in the establishmentrdquo Itrsquos painful to understand this even when you are an heir to the throne but itrsquos right In the 1950s in particular when both women were beginning to make their mark they had to prove themselves as leaders of men as well as mothers to the nation Thatcher admired stayathome mums ldquoTo be a mother and housewife is a vocation of a very high kindrdquo she said ldquoBut I simply felt it was not the whole of my vocation I knew that I also wanted a careerrdquo To be taken seriously she told Shirley Williams in the 1960s you had to work twice as hard as your male colleagues So she sat ramrod straight on the green baize benches past midnight and knew everything there was to know about pension policies Now mothers can often balance their jobs to have flexibility go to sports days nativity plays and help with homeworkmdashand they should Sheryl Sandberg the COO of Facebook talks about ldquoleaning inrdquo so you can both push on at work and relax with your children after school But as the prime minister or monarch yoursquore still different Everyone is leaning on you you canrsquot keep disappearing or everything could topple over Both women realised this Itrsquos the same for men Clementine Churchill once told her husband that he had to reach the top now that he had given up so much of his family life But she understood that leading the country was more important than being involved in her domestic routine Thatcher tried to make it up in her final years when as Charles Moore her biographer suggests she became gentler But when Carol was asked why Markrsquos children didnrsquot see their grandmother more often and she rarely visited for Christmas she replied tersely ldquoA mother cannot reasonably expect her grownup children to boomerang back gushing cosiness and make up for lost time Absentee mum then gran in overdrive is not an equation that balancesrdquo u00a0