Margaret Roberts was born a grocer’s daughter in Grantham in Lincolnshire. In her memoir, The Path to Power, she describes a contented Methodist upbringing that valued community spirit, the value of a pound, and common sense anti-socialism (the last may be a retrospective reading of the future into the past, but then again a memoir tends to be the aligning of the past to fit the present).

For our purposes, a detailed recitation of Margaret Roberts’ pre-parliamentary life is not necessary. Suffice to say that she worked hard at school, won a place at Oxford (where she was more fully awakened to the political world by joining the Oxford University Conservative Association), and graduated with a science degree and worked in the private sector. She was selected as the Conservative candidate for Dartford (where she met and married Dennis Thatcher) and fought the elections of 1950 and 1951 unsuccessfully. She took time off from the pursuit of a seat while becoming a lawyer and a mother. Returning to active politics, she was selected for the seat of Finchley where she successfully fought the 1959 election and finally became a member of parliament.

Margaret Thatcher began her career as she meant to go on: determinedly and with a dash of luck. She came second in the annual lottery for Private Members’ Bills (almost the only way for a backbench MP to independently propose legislation). After mulling over a few ideas, she settled on a bill that would prevent local councils from excluding the press and public from their meetings. Interestingly for the future, the junior minister assigned to assist her in preparing her bill was Sir Keith Joseph. He was a fellow member of the right wing of the Conservative party and the man that she thought should have replaced Ted Heath as Leader of the Conservative Party. But that story lies in the future; for now she applied herself to her bill and secured its passage.

In her own telling, at the beginning of her career Margaret Thatcher was on the right of a Conservative Party run by centrists – well meaning but weak-kneed men like Harold Macmillan, Rab Butler, and Reginald Maudling. In her years on the backbenches she expressed her views: criticizing the Government in print over the expanded powers it had given itself to investigate tax avoidance (a stance which presumably endeared her to the wealthy backers of the Conservative Party) and voting against the government on an amendment designed to extend corporal punishment to violent young offenders (the amendment failed). She was not, however, an embarrassment to the Government nor a persistent thorn in its side. Additionally, by her own account, there were not many women MPs in the Conservative Party at the time “and it was thought politically desirable to keep up the number of women in the Government.” Therefore, nearly two years to the day after she entered Parliament, Margaret Thatcher accepted a post in the Government, becoming Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance. She had begun to climb Disraeli’s greasy pole.

Her time at the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance was spent learning the ropes. It was a good training ground dealing as it did with the complicated and technical aspects of the welfare state. This is where she first learned how the civil service operated and how to work with it (and around it). She stayed with the department through the death throes of the Government, serving through the Night of the Long Knives (when Macmillan sacked a third of his cabinet) and the Profumo Affair (an exciting spy sex scandal). At the 1964 General Election she kept her seat but lost her post.

In Opposition, Margaret Thatcher was named Pensions Spokesman (as she calls herself in her memoirs). She supported Ted Heath over Reginald Maudling in the 1965 Leadership contest at the urging of Sir Keith Joseph and Heath named her Housing and Land Spokesman (she would later make it up to Maudling when she appointed him to her Shadow Cabinet). Labour went on to win the 1966 election and she became a Treasury Spokesman. Thatcher thoroughly enjoyed her time shadowing the Treasury. Although she had no formal economic training, she reveled in the complexity and technical details of the subject, just as she had done as a junior minister at Pensions and National Insurance. It was in this role that she made a bit of a name for herself both in the House of Commons and at the 1966 Conservative Party Conference by railing against the Wilson’s Government dangerous drift toward full blown Communism (as she saw it). By the following autumn, her star had risen high enough for her to be brought into Ted Heath’s Shadow Cabinet, first as Shadow Fuel and Power Minister and later as Shadow Transport Minister.

In The Path to Power, Margaret Thatcher recalls her evolving views on economic policy during the 1960s as she moved further to the right of the political consensus. She spends a lot of time in The Path to Power on economic matters, especially incomes policy (the book is practically a primer on the subject). On social matters, however, she still had one foot in the center, voting to decriminalize homosexuality between consenting adults and in favor of abortion in cases of medical advisability. At the same time, she voted against making divorce easier and in favor of the death penalty (she was in the minority on both). It was during this time that she first visited the United States and the Soviet Union, spurring a budding interest in foreign affairs and solidifying her ideological opinions .

On her return from her visit to the Soviet Union in 1969, she was appointed Shadow Education Secretary and when, to the slight surprise of the conventional wisdom, the Conservative Party won the General Election of 1970, she became Secretary of State for Education and Science. Her rise had been steady. In only eleven years she had gone from the backbenches to the Cabinet. Her determination and luck had taken her far and was about to take her further. But let us pause here, with Margaret Thatcher on the cusp of entering the Cabinet, to bring some of her future cabinet colleagues into the story.