Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  After all that, none of the audience would have mistaken Mrs Thatcher for a feminist. Yet her position was more nuanced than is often remembered. She had, after all, spent her career as a working mother in a man’s world. And although she liked to lay into ‘women’s libbers’, she never failed to beat the drum for working women. In an interview with Living magazine, reflecting on her experience as a female Prime Minister, she said she was annoyed that people always referred to her that way: ‘People don’t evaluate the contribution men have made to life – so why do they do it with us?’ But she recognized that women in politics faced particular difficulties, and that she had been unusually fortunate. ‘If my husband’s work had been in Cornwall or Cardiff I couldn’t have left my children to be an MP,’ she admitted. ‘And my husband is supportive. Denis said, “It’s absurd for you not to use your talents.”’ In other words, if Mr Thatcher had not been so encouraging, the world might never have heard of Mrs Thatcher. As she herself put it: ‘I’m just lucky that things have bounced right for me.’

  As in her lecture, Mrs Thatcher maintained that women’s domestic experience actually worked in their favour – an argument that never failed to annoy her feminist critics. ‘Women are natural decision-makers,’ she explained. ‘We’re very practical and we don’t moan about things – we get on with life … Being a housewife is a managerial job – you’re used to taking responsibility and living within a budget, and we need those qualities in government, and everywhere else.’ In other words, it was precisely because women were so good at running the home that a woman – preferably one from Grantham, perhaps with experience in a grocer’s shop – ought to run the country. Indeed, women’s domestic backgrounds even meant they were better suited to winning wars. When, a few weeks after the end of the Falklands campaign, the Express’s George Gale asked about the pressures of the war, Mrs Thatcher reached, as so often, for the domestic analogy. ‘Many, many women make naturally good managers,’ she explained. ‘You might not think of it that way, George, but each woman who runs a house is a manager and an organizer. We thought forward each day, and we did it in a routine way, and we were on the job 24 hours a day.’ She made it sound a bit like organizing her children’s laundry; and that, of course, was the point.38

  The paradox of all this is that Mrs Thatcher completely failed to promote other women. Year after year, photographs of her Cabinet showed one woman surrounded by men in suits. To be fair, the Conservatives were hardly unusual in remaining overwhelmingly male. Although Labour claimed that Mrs Thatcher was letting other women down, its own senior ranks were almost entirely populated by men, too. In Michael Foot’s Shadow Cabinet there was just one woman MP, Gwyneth Dunwoody, who was given the traditionally female-friendly health portfolio. Yet many Conservative women were disappointed that Mrs Thatcher, who had an unprecedented opportunity to promote their interests, showed no interest in doing so. In the Guardian, Polly Toynbee argued that a male Prime Minister would have done more for women, because he would have felt guilty. But Mrs Thatcher felt ‘no guilt about women, because she is one. She is that all too familiar creature, the Queen Bee. The one who makes it herself, and pulls up the ladder behind her.’39

  Queen Bees were common targets in liberal newspapers in the 1980s, often getting a kicking from feminist writers such as Jill Tweedie and Katharine Whitehorn. ‘Queen Bees are women who have fought to succeed and made it, and now fear competition … or simply don’t see why others should have it any easier,’ explained the Observer in 1980. And given the near-total absence of women from her Cabinet, it is easy to see why so many people saw Mrs Thatcher as a particular offender. The truth is that she visibly enjoyed being the only woman in the Cabinet Room, and had no desire to share the limelight. As Charles Moore notes, not only did she make very little effort to ingratiate herself with her ministers’ wives, she could not even be relied upon to support women’s equality measures.fn2 At first she was even against the ordination of women priests, before she was persuaded to change her mind.40

  To her critics, this left Mrs Thatcher’s crown as the first woman Prime Minister tarnished beyond repair. But was she even a woman at all? When Mrs Thatcher won the Tory leadership, the admiring Barbara Castle had called her ‘the best man among them’. Castle meant it as a joke. But it was not long before the idea of Mrs Thatcher as a woman pretending to be a man – or simply as a man in drag – caught on. The psychiatrist Anthony Clare, for example, wrote that she ‘looked like a woman, talked and walked like a woman but behaved with the ruthlessness and confidence which had hitherto been assumed to be the prerogative of men’. On the satirical puppet show Spitting Image (1984) she was typically shown in a suit and tie, using the men’s urinals and speaking in an unnaturally deep voice. The owner of the voice in question, the comedian Steve Nallon, made a decent living out of Mrs Thatcher, although it was hard to tell if he was a man impersonating a woman impersonating a man, or a man impersonating a man impersonating a woman. Even some Cabinet ministers – perhaps especially some Cabinet ministers – enjoyed his act. The only person who disliked it was Nallon’s grandmother. A former seamstress from Leeds and a staunch working-class Conservative, she was outraged to see him mocking the Prime Minister. ‘We don’t watch Spitting Image in this house,’ she once told him. ‘We watch That’s Life.’41

  On the left, there were always those who questioned whether Mrs Thatcher deserved her status as the nation’s first woman Prime Minister. ‘She may be a woman but she isn’t a sister, she may be a sister but she isn’t a comrade,’ explained the playwright Caryl Churchill, adding that there was ‘no such thing as right-wing feminism’. So in Churchill’s play Top Girls (1982), Mrs Thatcher is represented by the ruthless Marlene, who has sacrificed her femininity and abandoned her child to compete with men and get to the top. Marlene is naturally a great fan of the Iron Lady. ‘She’s a tough lady, Maggie. I’d give her a job,’ she says admiringly. ‘First woman prime minister. Terrifico … I believe in the individual … I don’t believe in class. Anyone can do anything if they’ve got what it takes.’ Top Girls has a tremendous reputation in some circles (academics, basically), but it has to be said that its analysis of Thatcherism falls well short of the height of sophistication. ‘I hate the working class,’ says Marlene, who thinks the term just means ‘lazy and stupid’. This, of course, was exactly the kind of Cruella de Vil-style thing that Mrs Thatcher’s critics believed she said. But she never did.

  Among radical feminists, Top Girls’s basic argument – that women like Mrs Thatcher only got on by surrendering their femininity and betraying their sisters – was very popular. There was an ‘air of unreality’ about her, thought Sheila Rowbotham. ‘Not only the voice is contrived; her whole body can be seen in permanent tension, shifting across the borders of femininity and masculinity.’ Mrs Thatcher had completely failed to develop a ‘critique of the patriarchal family’, agreed Beatrix Campbell. ‘Femininity is what she wears, masculinity is what she admires. She wants to be a woman who does what men do.’ And in some quarters this view proved remarkably enduring. ‘The first Prime Minister of female gender, OK. But a woman? Not on my terms,’ thundered the Oscar-winning Labour MP Glenda Jackson after Mrs Thatcher’s death. ‘She set back the cause of women in public life,’ agreed the novelist Hilary Mantel. ‘She imitated masculine qualities to the extent that she had to get herself a good war … The idea that women must imitate men to succeed is anti-feminist. She was not of woman born. She was a psychological transvestite.’42

  But she was a woman. All Margaret Thatcher’s biographers agree that her femininity was absolutely fundamental to her sense of herself, her political experience, her relations with her colleagues and her public image. Even her public nickname, ‘Maggie’, identified her as a woman. And because she was a woman in a man’s world, she felt she always had to prove herself. Few people recognized this more clearly than her Private Secretary for Foreign Affairs, John Coles, who wrote a fascinating memoir of his time at her side in the s
ummer of 1984. As Coles observed, most of her colleagues could draw on ‘the shared experience of a few public schools, university, the services and the major Pall Mall clubs. They draw on a reserve of accepted thought and behaviour, of male humour, argument and sign-language from which a woman is excluded.’ By contrast, Mrs Thatcher was the eternal outsider, a ‘woman among men’, who knew that there were ‘many ready and waiting to criticise the choice of a woman to lead the Conservative party just as soon as she could be shown to be given to unreasonable feminine behaviour’.

  Coles thought few people realized the ‘emotional cost’ to Mrs Thatcher of sustaining her leadership under such pressure, or ‘the steps to which she had to resort to defy the conventions’. Perhaps she did not even realize it herself. For instance, Coles thought her hatred of compromise derived in part from the fact that it seemed to have a ‘male quality, the civilised talk of clubland’. If she was ‘upset or offended by a particular line of argument’, he recalled, ‘the resentment could bubble on for days. Not for her the political clash followed by the reconciliation over a drink in the club. She didn’t have a club; she distrusted appeals to the team spirit.’ It was this isolation that explained her ‘abusive, rude and unpleasant’ style, as well as her denigration of dissenters as ‘soft’, ‘wet’ or ‘backsliding’. It was because she was a woman, Coles thought, that she could never back down, pushing disagreements ‘to the point of extreme embarrassment to other listeners’. But for some of her ministers, who had not had to endure such treatment since the days of their boarding-school matrons, this seemed almost unbearable. As her colleague and frequent critic Jim Prior admitted, she brought out their ‘male chauvinism’. Prior had been perfectly happy to tolerate rudeness from Ted Heath. But it seemed much worse ‘when the challenger is a woman and the challenged is a man’.43

  Mrs Thatcher was never allowed to forget that she was a woman. Because she seemed so different from her predecessors, people often compared her with other strident women who had come to prominence in the 1970s. The most obvious was Penelope Keith’s magnificent Margo Leadbetter in The Good Life (1975–8), a staunch Home Counties Conservative, but also a bully and a snob with no sense of humour. But when the Guardian invited people to write in with unflattering nicknames for the Prime Minister in 1980, one of the most popular choices was ‘Servalan’. As discerning readers will know, this refers to the Supreme Commander of the Terran Federation in the BBC1 science-fiction series Blake’s 7 (1978–81). Played with scenery-chewing relish by Jacqueline Pearce, Servalan is at once immensely glamorous and thoroughly evil. One Blake’s 7 character calls her ‘the sexiest officer I have ever known’; another calls her ‘spoilt, idle, vicious’; a third calls her ‘a tasteless megalomaniac’. That was pretty much what Guardian readers said about the Prime Minister.44

  Like Servalan, Mrs Thatcher was perfectly happy to exploit her femininity. Her biographers often describe her as an actress working her way through the female repertoire – the housewife, the mother, the nanny, the nurse, the diva – with her handbag as the essential prop. When Ludovic Kennedy visited Downing Street to make a programme about her murdered friend Airey Neave, she played the ‘charming and considerate hostess’, showing the crew around and telling them about the portraits. But when Kennedy saw her on television, he might have been watching a different person, giving a theatrical performance of ‘extreme femininity’, ‘assumed intimacy’ and ‘mild flirtatiousness’. The BBC’s John Simpson was similarly struck by her love of performing. In 1980 he was covering a press conference in Venice when she launched a ferocious attack on the BBC for calling the Afghan mujahedeen ‘guerrillas’. Approaching her afterwards, Simpson tried to explain why they did it. She put her hand on his arm and looked at him ‘coquettishly’. ‘My dear,’ she said softly, ‘you are sensitive.’ It was, he recalled, ‘like flirting with Queen Victoria’.45

  She was no less ruthless about using her femininity in private. Matthew Parris felt she sometimes teetered on the verge of self-parody, running her fingers disapprovingly over dusty paintings and telling her colleagues that only ‘a woman knows whether a room’s been cleaned properly’. But the best example comes in Alan Clark’s diaries. In June 1981 she hosted the Defence and Foreign Affairs Committees at Number 10. Various backbenchers came in first, then the ministers, led by Lord Carrington, ‘very bronzed and la-di-dah’. But then:

  The Lady came in and sat down on the yellow silk sofa on which Carrington had perched himself. There took place one of those curious, almost petty, but completely feminine, scenes which remind me of my mother. We all had drinks in our hands. Carrington had put his on a minute coffee table beside the right arm of the yellow silk sofa. The Lady had nowhere to put hers but an empty chair immediately on her left. Just as we were about to begin she called to Ian [Gow], who was at the far end of the room, and asked him to bring her a table for her glass. Ian was fussed by this, there was no table in sight or accessible. As he looked round Carrington got the message and got up. Against a background of ‘no, no Peter,’ etc., he removed his glass, put it on the mantelpiece, picked up the small table and stooping carried it round the sofa and put it down by the Prime Minister’s left hand. I enjoyed this, not least because I could see that he did not. What a bore for all those men in the Cabinet to have as their leader not only a woman, but a woman who, whether subtly or overtly, insists on being treated as such.

  She knew exactly what she was doing, of course.46

  Clark himself found Mrs Thatcher downright attractive: ‘so beautiful … quite bewitching, as Eva Peron must have been’. In this instance, though, his swashbuckling reputation was slightly misleading. As he told Charles Moore, ‘I don’t want actual penetration – just a massive snog.’ Astounding as it might seem, his enthusiasm was widely shared. The United Biscuits chairman Sir Hector Laing was so smitten that he would send notes to be placed underneath her pillow. Even François Mitterrand’s famous quip about her having the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe was a kind of compliment. Power had something to do with it, of course, but it was not the whole story. The novelist Kingsley Amis thought that Mrs Thatcher was ‘one of the best-looking women I had ever met’. It was not, he conceded, a ‘sensual or sexy beauty’, but that did not make it a ‘less sexual beauty’, which he thought a much ‘underrated factor in her appeal (or repellence)’. Not even her parliamentary adversaries were immune to her charms. Across the aisle, the future Social Democrat leader David Owen was evidently beside himself with excitement. ‘The whiff of that perfume, the sweet smell of whisky,’ he mused to his friend Brian Walden. ‘By God, Brian, she’s appealing beyond belief.’

  Some of Mrs Thatcher’s own ministers agreed with him. When John Nott retired as Defence Secretary in January 1983, he wrote her a farewell letter. In the press, Nott was generally seen as a superhumanly dull and gloomy figure, yet his note surely ranks among the most extraordinary letters ever sent by a minister to a Prime Minister:

  My dear Margaret …

  Our friendship has been sustained for me – through years of happy cooperation and occasional fierce disagreement (tinged with moments of positive dislike on both sides, I suspect!) – by your wonderful personality.

  Your greatest triumph as a PM, if I may say so, is that your colleagues (with very few exceptions) actually like you as a person. Some of them even love you, just a little!

  It is inexcusable to say so nowadays but I actually admire you as a woman – your good looks, charm and bearing have always attracted me, as a man. I’m sorry, but what’s wrong with that! …

  Love

  John

  As the Thatcher Foundation’s archivist Christopher Collins notes, Mrs Thatcher scribbled on almost every document she ever read, but not this one. Maybe she was embarrassed by it. Maybe she was flattered; she always enjoyed compliments. After she appeared on the radio with a heavy cold, Jim Prior, hardly her greatest fan, teased her about her ‘sexy voice’. She had the perfect comeback: ‘What makes yo
u think I wasn’t sexy before?’47

  Of course there were millions of people who would have shuddered at the thought of Mrs Thatcher being sexy. For every voter who saw her as a modern-day Boadicea or a reincarnated Elizabeth I, there was another who saw her as a battleaxe, a witch or a wicked queen. In this respect, at least, the feminist revolution was far from complete. For the angrier Mrs Thatcher’s critics became, the more they turned to what now looks like remarkably sexist, even misogynistic abuse. Almost without exception, the nicknames coined by her fellow MPs emphasized the fact that she was a woman, from ‘the Great She-Elephant’ and ‘Attila the Hen’ to ‘the Catherine the Great of Finchley’, ‘the Maggietollah’ and, of course, ‘That Woman’. For Denis Healey, her most colourful critic, she was ‘virago intacta’, the ‘Pasionara of middle-class privilege’, ‘Florence Nightingale with a blowtorch’, ‘a mixture of a matron at a minor public school and a guard in a concentration camp’. Even the nickname ‘She Who Must be Obeyed’, as her biographer John Campbell points out, refers to the diabolical African queen in H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887).

  The irony, of course, is that Mrs Thatcher’s critics typically saw themselves as right-on champions of women’s rights. But just as her admirers saw her as Britannia incarnate, so her critics returned again and again to the affront of her femininity. It is often suggested that their vehemence reflected the astringency of her economic policies. Yet when Ted Heath had presided over a ferocious confrontation with the unions, two miners’ strikes and the three-day week, the antagonism had never been so personal or so bitter. Heath had been wrong. But Mrs Thatcher was cruel, mad, evil. In parodies and satires she was Mary Poppins’s twisted twin, the Wicked Witch of Westminster, the Nurse Ratched of Greater Grantham. In newspaper cartoons there was an edge that had never been there in pictures of men. In the pop music of the 1980s the contrast was even stronger. Morrissey imagined her on the guillotine. Elvis Costello urged listeners to ‘tramp the dirt down’.