conservatives

At the 1950 and 1951 elections, she fought the safe Labour seat of Dartford. Although she was unsuccessful in winning the seat she did reduce the Labour majority in the constituency by 6,000.[12] She was at the time the youngest ever female Conservative candidate and her campaign attracted a higher than normal amount of media attention for a first time candidate.[13][3] While active in the Conservative Party in Kent, she met Denis Thatcher, whom she married in 1951.[14] Denis was a wealthy divorced businessman[14] and he funded his wife's studies for the Bar.[15] She qualified as a barrister in 1953 specialising in tax law. In the same year her twin children Carol and Mark were born.[16]

Thatcher then began to look for a safe Conservative seat and was narrowly rejected as candidate for the Orpington by-election, 1955. She was subsequently not a candidate in the 1955 election and spent her time practising law.[16] She had several other rejections before being selected for Finchley in April 1958. She won the seat after hard campaigning, in the 1959 election and was elected as a member of Parliament.[17] Her maiden speech was in support of her Private Member's Bill (Public Bodies (Admission to Meetings) Act 1960) to force local councils to hold meetings in public, which was successful. In 1961 she went against the Conservative Party's official position by voting for the restoration of birching.

She was given early promotion to the front bench as Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance in September 1961, retaining the post until the Conservatives lost power in the 1964 election. When Sir Alec Douglas-Home stepped down, Thatcher voted for Edward Heath in the leadership election over Reginald Maudling, and was rewarded with the job of Conservative spokesman on Housing and Land. In this role she adopted the policy of allowing tenants to buy their council houses, an idea first developed by her colleague James Allason. http://louis-j-sheehan.bizThe policy would prove popular.[18] She moved to the Shadow Treasury team after 1966.

Thatcher was one of few Conservative MPs to support Leo Abse's Bill to decriminalise male homosexuality, she voted in favour of David Steel's Bill to legalise abortion and in favour of a ban on hare coursing.[19] . She supported the retention of capital punishment and voted against the relaxation of divorce laws. Thatcher made her mark as a conference speaker in 1966 with a strong attack on the high-tax policies of the Labour Government as being steps "not only towards Socialism, but towards Communism". She won promotion to the Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Fuel spokesman in 1967, and was then promoted to shadow Transport and, finally, Education before the 1970 election.http://louis-j-sheehan.biz