Any effort from Mrs Thatcher to show cultural interest met with derision from such critics. When the poet Philip Larkin had visited Mrs Thatcher in Downing Street in 1980, he had been much impressed by the fact that she had been able to quote from one of his poems. The poem is called ‘Deceptions’, and concerns a Victorian poor woman’s account of having been drugged and raped. Mrs Thatcher had praised it to Larkin, and referred to the line ‘Her mind was full of knives.’ The original words are ‘All the unhurried day, / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.’ Alan Bennett wrote scornfully that ‘Larkin liked to think that Madam knew the poem or she would not have been able to misquote it. Inadequate briefing seems a likelier explanation‡ and anyway, since the line is about an open mind it’s not surprising that the superb creature got it wrong.’12§ Actually, it is striking that Mrs Thatcher fastened on that particular poem. Any other woman politician would have got some credit from the left for drawing attention to a poem about rape. But it was a special gift of Mrs Thatcher not only to inspire dislike in her opponents, but to goad them into an extravagance of condemnation. As the novelist Ian McEwan perceptively put it immediately after her death in 2013, ‘It was never enough to dislike her. We liked disliking her.’13 This self-indulgence by her critics tended to work to her advantage. Part of Mrs Thatcher’s alleged ‘philistinism’ was her failure to be automatically impressed by the status of highbrow writers accustomed to praise from the upper reaches of society. ‘Intellectuals in Britain had always dreamed of having influence with practical politicians,’ recalled David Hare, ‘but the bitter irony was that when a prime minister finally came along who did like intellectuals, it was the blowhard right she wanted to listen to – Keith Joseph, Alfred Sherman, Hugh Thomas – not, if you like, the usual suspects.’14 ‘She reads best-sellers’ was one of the attacks hurled at her by the novelist Anthony Burgess.15* Few of the wider public regarded this as a crime.
Across British fiction, film, drama and music from and about the Thatcher era, a similar extravagance of feeling tended to dominate. Freely acknowledging Mrs Thatcher’s powerful influence, the singer/songwriter Billy Bragg described her as ‘my greatest inspiration … Like an angry line of kettling coppers,† Thatcher’s Tories pushed me around, forcing me to question the assumptions I had made about the British state and my place in it.’16 In his song called ‘Thatcherites’ (1997), Bragg complained, ‘You privatize away and then you make us pay / We’ll take it back some day, mark my words, mark my words.’‡
Other songs about – and against – Mrs Thatcher included ‘Ghost Town’ by the Specials, which was the number-one single during the riots of 1981, ‘She’ll Have To Go’ by Simply Red (1989) and ‘Margaret on the Guillotine’ by Morrissey (1988). In ‘Tramp the Dirt Down’ (1989), Elvis Costello sang, ‘But when they finally put you in the ground / They’ll stand there laughing and tramp the dirt down.’§ The song ‘Maggie’, by the punk band the Exploited (1985), had the refrain: ‘Maggie, Maggie, you cunt / Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, you fucking cunt’. Also in 1985, the Angelic Upstarts put a cartoon of Mrs Thatcher with her arms and legs blown off on the cover of their single ‘Brighton Bomb’ and called on ‘killers’ to ‘unite’, presumably to do away with her. Oddly, the most successful anti-Thatcher song was never released in Britain. By Renaud, ‘the French Bob Dylan’, it was called ‘Miss Maggie’ and reached number one in France in 1984. It celebrated women for not being hooligans, assassins and committers of genocide, but proclaimed Mrs Thatcher as the sole exception. Its conclusion, translated from the French, was ‘If I can’t stay on earth, I will change into a dog so that I can use Madame Thatcher daily as a lamp-post.’
In Britain, much the best-known song about Mrs Thatcher remains the one sung in the stage version of the wildly successful musical Billy Elliot. The story, set against the backcloth of the miners’ strike of 1984–5, concerns a young boy from a mining family who wishes to become a ballet dancer. Mrs Thatcher is the object of hatred. ‘Merry Christmas Maggie Thatcher’ is sung by the cast in chorus, including the words ‘Merry Christmas, Maggie Thatcher / We all celebrate today / ’cos it’s one day closer to your death.’*
Newspaper cartoonists, whose job is to depict politics through politicians, had a more directly professional challenge about how to deal with Mrs Thatcher. Although existing women politicians, such as Shirley Williams and Barbara Castle, were already widely caricatured, most cartoonists found that her sex, initially at least, made her a harder subject. Nicholas Garland,† who was the main political cartoonist, first at the Daily Telegraph and latterly at the Independent, throughout her time, recalled that he felt it ‘freakish’, at first, that a woman was in charge. He found Mrs Thatcher, ‘very very difficult to draw’, partly because of her sex: ‘Women change more than men – hair, outfits, make-up. They are elusive.’17 His first – unfavourable – impression of Mrs Thatcher was that she was simply ‘tribal Tory woman’. When she was Education Secretary, he had dealt with her by concentrating on her ‘puffball hats’18 rather than her face. On the day she beat Heath for the leadership in 1975, he remembered thinking, ‘I just can’t do this.’ Shortly afterwards, Mrs Thatcher attended a leader writers’ conference at the Daily Telegraph and Garland was able to study her in the flesh. He was surprised to find that ‘This woman turned out to be rather attractive, with considerable presence.’19
This personal encounter kept Garland out of the camp which reacted to Mrs Thatcher with disgust. Although of moderate left-wing views himself, and moving in Hampstead intellectual circles, he ‘never hated her’. He recalled attending a dinner party of his great friend Jonathan Miller, at which a fellow guest denounced Mrs Thatcher as a fascist. This was absolutely untrue, Garland protested: Mrs Thatcher was a democrat, chosen through democratic process. ‘No one agreed with me.’20 As a cartoonist, he began to study her more carefully, and noticed that ‘She had slow eyes – the outside corners lower than the inside ones – strong, high cheekbones and a little, pursed mouth.’21 He tried to draw in her face ‘the power and the activism, which gave her a slightly bad-tempered look’, and ‘the underlying possibility of panic’ expressed in her flashing eyes. ‘Energy came off her. She was good at drama, which is a two-edged thing. She often had one finger raised, haranguing somebody.’ Or she wielded the handbag as a weapon. Her handbag, of course, was an essential accoutrement for the cartoonist, like a crown for the Queen.
Garland’s Thatcher followed several phases. She changed very much through the experience of the Falklands War, he noticed – ‘I drew her more strong, frowning and vigorous.’ Then there was a long period when she was a ‘fixture’ on the national scene, and he often showed her as Britannia or Queen Victoria. She also grew older, more hollow-cheeked and more chic in her dress and hair. Finally there was ‘the tail-end period’, roughly from 1988. In his cartoons, she became ‘omnipotent; a bit mad’.22*
Other cartoonists treated her as mad – or bad – all along. Gerald Scarfe,† appearing mainly in the Sunday Times, emphasized her pointed nose and red lips. He turned her into a shark, a pterodactyl, a cannibal and a nuclear mushroom cloud. Steve Bell,‡ who was the principal cartoonist at the Guardian in the later Thatcher period, emphasized the fact that her left eye was rounder than her right. He made both eyes huge and threatening, and the left one crazed. He too turned Mrs Thatcher into a shark, as well as a vampire, a zombie and a sculpture worked out of South Atlantic penguin guano. Some of these – particularly the works of Bell – were powerful and inventive; but their relentless hostility and exaggeration meant that there was little room for jokes, or for degrees of satire. Since Mrs Thatcher was thoroughly evil in their eyes at all times, they missed the nuances of the time, so their cartoons were usually uninformative. None of them ‘nailed’ her with one image. There was nothing like Vicky’s encapsulation of Harold Macmillan as Supermac or Steve Bell’s depiction of Mrs Thatcher’s successor, John Major, wearing his underpants over his trousers. All shared, however, a strong pre
occupation with Mrs Thatcher. A count of Garland cartoons through Mrs Thatcher’s premierships,23 for example, shows that on average 25 per cent of his daily cartoons featured her. This compares with only 6 per cent by David Low featuring Winston Churchill when prime minister. Mrs Thatcher outscored the combined appearances of her entire Cabinet.*
The subsidized theatre almost invariably treated Mrs Thatcher as a subject for attack. Indeed, A Short, Sharp Shock (1980) provoked an apology in the House of Commons by the Arts Minister, Norman St John-Stevas,† for the fact that public money had been spent on it. Written by Howard Brenton‡ and Tony Howard, the play showed, among many lurid scenes, Mrs Thatcher forcing her Employment Secretary Jim Prior to drink the sperm of the free-market economist Milton Friedman from a Coca-Cola bottle. In the same year, at the National Theatre, The Romans in Britain, also by Howard Brenton, drew a parallel between the Roman invasion of ancient Britain and the Thatcher government’s treatment of Northern Ireland, using an explicit scene of male rape to make its point. Brenton also, with David Hare, wrote a much more observant play called Pravda (1985) which satirized, in pseudonymous form, the power of Rupert Murdoch in the Thatcher era.
Such plays did reflect feelings that were strong amid elements of the theatre-going classes. David Hare later recalled ‘a tremendous blast of energy from the audience because they wanted an anti-Thatcher, anti-Murdoch blast’.24 Brenton generalized the thought behind this energy when interviewed at the end of the Thatcher era:
If there is one insight that comes from the most noted novels, television drama series and plays of the 1980s, it is that during the decade we were overtaken by something malevolent. It may seem exaggerated, but it was as if some kind of evil was abroad in our society, a palpable degradation of the spirit.25
Edward Bond,* who wrote plays such as Derek (1982), about the exploitation of a working-class man in the Falklands War, and The War Plays, which depicted nuclear war, was not untypical in such company in seeing Mrs Thatcher as a symbol of everything he hated. ‘When I vote,’ he told the Guardian just before the 1987 election, ‘I shall keep faith with those who died to protect us from Fascism and militarism – and their sidekick Thatcherism.’26 He did not identify those who had died in the struggle against Thatcherism.
Only one play of the era went strongly against the trend. This was The Falklands Play by Ian Curteis. Commissioned for television by the BBC, for whom Curteis had been a successful writer, the drama made Mrs Thatcher the unambiguous heroine of the Falklands story, depicting her as decisive when others had dithered and as a woman of compassion as well as courage. After initial enthusiasm for the play, the BBC went cold on the project. The head of plays, Peter Goodchild, told Curteis that he objected to scenes which showed Mrs Thatcher writing letters of sympathy to the widows of servicemen who had been killed, although she had indeed done this.27 He wanted dialogue inserted showing Conservative politicians discussing the possible electoral advantages of war. Curteis refused. In July 1986, the BBC cancelled the drama, on the grounds that it might cause controversy in the run-up to the general election which was expected in 1987. This was widely interpreted as an excuse for canning the play altogether, and a huge row ensued in the press, with Curteis claiming he had been the victim of the BBC’s politics. Michael Grade,† the controller of BBC1, added fuel to the flames by putting out the suggestion, which had not previously been made, that the play was simply not good enough. The BBC also stopped another Falklands drama, the much more anti-Thatcher Tumbledown, because of the coming election. But whereas Tumbledown was merely held over, and broadcast in 1988, The Falklands Play was killed. It was not finally broadcast until the twenty-first century, treated as a historical curiosity. Altogether, the BBC ran seven Falklands dramas which were, to greater or lesser degrees, anti- the Falklands War, and none which was pro-.
In film, two pictures written by Hanif Kureishi sought to anatomize Thatcher’s Britain unfavourably. My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), which was extremely successful, highlighted what Kureishi saw as Mrs Thatcher’s bad effects on race relations. Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987), about the breakdown of communities, was ambitiously intended, according to its director, Stephen Frears,* ‘to bring the government down’.28 In this it failed, but the ardour of the intent reveals the mood of the moment. Other films, such as Letter to Brezhnev (1985), which compared the Liverpool ravaged by Mrs Thatcher unfavourably with the Soviet Union, and Business as Usual (1987), which was a thinly veiled anti-Thatcher polemic about predatory bosses and rights in the workplace, drew from similar wells of feeling. The latter starred John Thaw (later famous as Inspector Morse) and Glenda Jackson† who, in 1992, was to become a Labour MP.‡ Top Girls (1982), an explicitly anti-Thatcher play by Caryl Churchill,§ depicted Marlene, a woman so determined to succeed in business that she does not help other women and models her behaviour on that of unscrupulous men. The idea that Mrs Thatcher was not ‘really’ a woman was a common motif among her critics. This sorted oddly with the misogynistic instinct, also manifested by some of her critics, that her sex justified particularly extreme and obscene attack.
On television, The Boys from the Blackstuff, BBC2, a series written by Alan Bleasdale, the tale of five Liverpool tarmac layers, was later described by the British Film Institute as ‘TV’s most complete dramatic response to the Thatcher era’,29 although the original play on which the series was based had been written in 1978, when Jim Callaghan’s Labour government was still in office. Sometimes such responses were well satirized by her critics themselves. A BBC comedy called The Young Ones (1982–4) featured four students sharing a squalid house while studying at Scumbag College. It contained lines like ‘The bathroom is free. Unlike the country under a Thatcher junta!’ Its stars and authors included Ben Elton, Rik Mayall and Alexei Sayle.
Even Doctor Who, the long-running children’s programme, began a surreptitious effort to attack Mrs Thatcher. According to Sylvester McCoy, who acted the Doctor from 1987 to 1989, ‘We were a group of politically motivated people and it seemed the right thing to do … Our feeling was that Margaret Thatcher was far more terrifying than any monster the Doctor had encountered.’30 Andrew Cartmel recalled that he was asked by the show’s producer in his interview for the post of script editor what he wanted to achieve in the role. ‘My exact words were: “I’d like to overthrow the government.” I was very angry about the social injustice in Britain under Thatcher and I’m delighted that came into the show.’31 Under Cartmel, the villain of the drama for a three-part Doctor Who serial in 1988 called The Happiness Patrol became Helen A (played by the fiercely anti-Thatcher Sheila Hancock, wife of John Thaw), the tyrant of a human colony on the planet Terra Alpha. The Doctor persuaded the enslaved human beings to rise up against Helen A. The trouble for the BBC children’s TV subversives, however, was that any explicit declaration of their political intent might have been fatal to their jobs, so they had to tread carefully. It seems that no one noticed what they were up to. The programme was going through a period of decline – its ratings fell from 16 million at their height to 3 million – which Helen A did nothing to redeem. A writer called Tony Attwood wrote a Doctor Who spin-off children’s novel called Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma at the time, with a villain called Rehctaht – Thatcher spelt backwards – but, again, few seemed to have noticed.
By far the most popular programme which dealt with Mrs Thatcher was Spitting Image, the ITV puppet show which ran from 1984 to 1996 and caricatured public figures of the period. It depicted Mrs Thatcher as the authority figure bossing her Cabinet,* frequently dressed as a mannish dominatrix in a pinstripe suit and tie, sometimes with a Churchillian cigar.* On one occasion, it showed her standing up in a men’s urinal. Although the treatment of her on the programme was harsh, its message constantly reinforced the impression of her power, so it probably did her more good than harm. It was her Cabinet colleagues, depicted, for the most part, as abject, who had more cause for complaint.
Oddly enough, the most successfu
l and witty political television comedy of the era, Yes Minister (BBC), by Antony Jay† and Jonathan Lynn,‡ did not really deal with the Thatcher phenomenon, even when it developed into Yes, Prime Minister from 1986 to 1988. In fact, much of the inspiration for the authors had come from the diaries of the Wilson–Callaghan period, since the show began in 1980 before any equivalents from the Thatcher era were available. The invariable plot structure was based on the joke that the civil servants (led by the Permanent Secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby, played by Nigel Hawthorne) always get their way in the end by outwitting and then rescuing their minister. The minister, Jim Hacker (played by Paul Eddington), who eventually becomes prime minister, is an amiable if cowardly buffoon. The programme was a brilliant depiction of Whitehall ways, but it never tackled the clear and present danger of a prime minister who struck fear into civil servants. Perhaps because the satire was not near her knuckle, Mrs Thatcher felt free to say how much she enjoyed it. When Lynn congratulated her on her victory in 1983 she told him that she ‘loved’ his programmes. ‘The dialogue & timing [are] superb. And the insight into the thought-processes of politicians & civil servants is supremely perceptive.’32 She even agreed to take part in a rather stilted sketch with Eddington and Hawthorne at an awards ceremony in honour of the show in 1984.§ Another successful television serial, implicitly rather than directly anti-Thatcher, was Paradise Postponed (1986), the BBC’s adaptation of John Mortimer’s 1985 novel of the same name. Rather as Satan is the most exciting character in Milton’s Paradise Lost, so is Leslie Titmuss (played by David Threlfall), the Norman Tebbit-ish Tory Cabinet minister and property developer, the most gripping though disgusting figure in Paradise Postponed. Mortimer intended Titmuss to represent all that he most disliked in Mrs Thatcher’s overthrow of the 1945 settlement, but he portrayed Titmuss so convincingly that members of Kinnock’s Shadow Cabinet were encouraged to read his book to understand the sort of arguments Labour would have to counter.33
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