One reporter’s Thatcher is another director’s Iron Lady
I’m haunted by her. Not by her in the flesh, but her as portrayed by Meryl Streep. Make no mistake, Streep does become Thatcher in celluloid. Let nothing detract from the scale of her achievement. An American woman of 62 becomes Thatcher at 48, and Thatcher at 80 – completely convincingly, vocally, physically.
It’s strange because I am myself the right age to have reported her from the beginnings of her power to her political end. As a cub reporter I caught her final year as education secretary and moved to TV reporting as she became Tory leader. By 1979, I was “live” outside Downing Street as she became prime minister – a snatch of my doorstep report makes it into the Iron Lady movie. I was there again in 1990 as she wept with Denis in the back seat of the Jag as she departed Downing Street for the last time as premier. In between I interviewed her perhaps a dozen times – mainly as a diplomatic correspondent reporting European summits and meetings with Reagan, Gorbachev and more.
I always presumed that she knew my name because Bernard Ingham (press secretary) had whispered it in her ear…possibly with the pre-fix – “frightful b******”! In fact her husband, gorgeously portrayed by Jim Broadbent, did go on the record describing me as “that pinko”!
But though Jim and Meryl shone, for me the film did not. I felt I learned nothing new, and I had hoped to. Perhaps there is no more to be learned. Certainly my sense was that she was as she was, precisely because she was a woman in a “man’s job”.
The film does play to this but without analysing why men were so retreated and subservient in her presence. Many of the Cabinet around her had never experienced a woman in power – the last they had known had been matron in their boarding schools. Hence my suspicion was that they feared that as she glared across the Cabinet table, she was saying in her head and in theirs “Geoffrey have you washed behind your ears?” Or, “Kenneth…those finger nails…” She was breathlessly intimidating and seductive at one and the same time. It was a most infernal combination.
I lost every interview I ever had with her – reduced to a pimple… which I feared, I had missed, and she had spotted, under my chin.
I wanted more of that from the film…more account of how she did it…how she persuaded men, in particular, of her “rightness”. “Is he one of us?”, did not surface in the film. Nor “the Lady’s not for turning”. But then this was not a biopic, but rather an over coherent and linear journey through dementia.
My mother suffered from dementia and was never as linear nor as lucid. Most of Mrs Thatcher’s recollections in the film were actually a reasonably correct account. Whilst Mrs T believed, in the film, that Denis was still alive, eight years after he’d died, my mother was convinced her own long-dead parents were still in the house where she was born and that she herself was there too, still around twelve years of age. In the film, Mrs Thatcher never loses the sense of having been prime minister.
In the end, the Iron Lady falls between a fantasy study of her dementia and an account of assorted high points in her time as PM. It is remarkable centrally for Meryl Streep’s wondrous portrayal, and Jim Broadbent’s staunch yet sensitive supporting role.
Follow @jonsnowC4 on Twitter.
Related posts:
- Thatcher portrait for a world in crisis
- China left out of iron ore price talks
- I suspected Polish reporter was a fake
- Gorbachev flashed his "iron teeth"
- On G20 day, we had nothing better to do
There are 17 comments on this post
Like her or hate her , she made her impact on Great Britain and for that alone I maintain an interest . My mother hated her, as she did all blue haired tories, my father thought she was marvellous , as he adopted the tory stance when he was a boy. Meryl Streep is another and similarly to Jon I feel this women has a special charisma of her own. I watched her at weekend in ‘Prada’ and you felt, like her role .. she just knew..there is nothing glamorous about her , but boy! can she do her job. BUT could Margaret Thatcher do her job? I truly believe that her intentions were well thought out from her own perspective , but she did not bank on her grocers shop being swallowed up by greater and greater saracens , being starved into borrowing and living from hand to mouth. Capitilism is fine as long as we all have capital , however her maneouvres let in the creatures who do truly have capital and the rest of the country has been running on opposites, that is minus capital or in other words credit .
Sensible capitilism is where she came from . We dont borrow unless we have our own resource to cover bad debt and don’t project into the unforseen.
Margaret Thatcher, person ,I will watch.
Perhaps it is my age, but I think it’s rare that one can point to a group of individuals (although she was autocratic she did have advisors so the blame has to be heaped on a few shoulders) and say that they changed the attitudes of a nation. Sadly not for the better. There is a valuable lesson to be learnt from those days: the Government should attempt to get the best out of society by putting in place infrastructure that encourage people to help one another and make the country a good place to be for all their citizens. I only hope that Mr Cameron’s Government and subsequent governments will take this to heart and address the fundamental problems. Many of the citizens recognise the mistakes and the failings I just hope the Governments will be listening.
But, perhaps I am misguided.
I see dementia most days of my life,in dear friends and aquaintances.They know and yet they don’t know.They forget, they repeat.In days of old we would have referred to them as “doo lally” and thought of them as silly old people,yet they remember snippets of their past and are sometimes very lucid.It must be a horrid condition to live with.Aware and unaware.
By all means make a film of it if it aids our understanding,but to me to make it into a film,no matter how good,of one of our living icons is odious.I suspect many go to watch out of a sense of voyeurism and even hatred.It will not see me in any cinema or when it hits our small screen.
Streep is doing her job as an actress,but the writers and producers ,to me are repugnant.
It would undoubtedly have been better if Meryl Streep had been PM and Thatcher a thespian although I fancy Bridges of Madison County would have been a much different film.
It was interesting to see miners’ wives demonstrating outside cinemas showing the Iron Lady to make the point that all these years later, their communities have never fully recovered.
Thatcher set the trend, enthusiastically copied by Blair and in time, no doubt, by Cameron: wreck people’s lives in the name of the national good, then retire on large pension and perks, completely unaffected.
How come the national good always entails ordinary working people making the sacrifices and never those who already have plenty?
Perhaps it would be better to make a film of the man ,who in his quest for power wrecked the mining industry.”Scargill” Then they would have something to demonstrate against.
If you want it Right, both Thatcher and now Cameron(i am not a fan)both had/have to try and rebuild an economy yet again ruined by Labour.There has not been a Labour government leave office ,in my life with a sound economy,yet they came into power with one
Are you saying if Scargill hadn’t existed that Maggie Thatcher would have kept our mining industry alive in the way that other countries subsidise theirs and keep people in work? I think not.
She was the first in a line of political leaders to decide that financial growth is the only important factor in a nation and to peddle the lie that the money would trickle down from the top. Look where that attitude has got us. The health of a nation is not only about the size of the deficit. Thatcher had no compassion for those who were collateral damage in her quest for unbridled capitalism and growth, along with her backward victorian tory values. The irony is that the collateral damage went on to become a new generation of ‘broken Britons’ – or ‘benefit scroungers’ as DM readers prefer. Thatcher created the very opposite of what she purported to be doing.
Jon,
I have no intention of seeing the film.
Ultimately, Thatcher is of little genuine historical importance – nothing more than a personality cult manufactured by the people who put her there, then removed her when she went off her insubstantial cake. The true measure of her is that she couldn’t find a single tear for the millions of lives she helped destroy at Establishment behest, but when she was made redundant herself broke down in floods of them. In short, she had no concern for anybody or anything except herself and her lower middle class prejudices, rather like the Daily Mail and the Murdoch gang.
Delve a bit deeper and I think you’ll find the Americans got rid of her when she got too big for her boots over the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. You remember – “Oh Al, that’s so wobbly.” Check out the timeline.
In the end she had nothing to do with femininism or social conscience or even great acting performances from Streep and Broadbent. She was a tenth rate, mean-spirited woman pushed up front to set the country back decades.
We don’t need a movie to tell us this. We still live with the awful consequences. All in all, that’s quite enough.
What a false view of history from a man,miles to the left of the destructive Labour Party.You would sit well in N.Korea,but of course would not be able to vent your twisted historical logic
With you there, Adrian. PE is very predictable!
It’ll be one big party when she goes….looking forward to that v much. It’ll help bring a little sunshine shining through the gloom.
Like most people I know in Scotland I won’t watch this film. There will never be a statue of her erected in any of our city’s. She was never a force for good in my country! Could list the reasons. Poll Tax destroyed our communities still paying for that.
One thing I would do is volunteer my services to dig her grave! State funeral aye right.
Thank you for sharing memories of your mother’s situation with us.
As for the subservience of men to the former PM: at least a partial explanation is surely to be found in sex? Most of her cabinet colleagues were single-sex public-school products whose sexual experience was undoubtedly limited. So having a(nother) woman around them who flirted with them must have been titillating and distracting. For her it was power; for them flattery. They were used to women being subservient so didn’t know how to behave when their jobs depended on one. Thatcher also had a devoted man behind her so was on stronger emotional ground. Thatcher had a poor relationship with her mother, I recall – when asked about her in an interview she famously spoke about her father. She was on safer emotional ground with men. She knew how to use them to her advantage.
It’s a Hollywood film so let’s treat it as entertainment. After all you wouldn’t get an Oscar for supporting General Pinochet, crushing the working class and bringing in deregulation that led directly to the credit crunch and the mess we’re in now would you?
Jon,
I also watched the film and was wondering why press and PM Cameron believe it’s all about dementia.
I saw a different film.
She is now 80 years old and looks back into the past. Her husband is still around her, of course, after 45 years sharing an intensive life. Because she wanted to change the country, her husband and children didn’t have much time with her.
Today, she is old and talks to her dead husband. Whatever she remembers, she knows exactly what his answer is. She knows what ties and suits he wore and that he never did his morning toasts right.
After reflecting their both life, at the end of the film, she has to ask her husband:
Have you been happy with me?
This is the question, where she has no answer.
This is a very important question in our life, Jon, and we should find an answer before we die.
In contrast to Bridges of Madison county, I wasn’t touched in the same way by this scene. Phyllida Lloyd didn’t give this scene the length it needed and most viewers seem to overlook it.
I too recall Thatcher vividly. How terrible and failing she was until a war revived her popularity. What an indictment of us British! I write for a different reason. All around Europe including the UK, Thatcher’s & Reagan’s discredited neoclassical extreme austerity economics policies are followed slavishly in spite of the facts that: a) they are not working b) they hit ordinary people not the bankers that caused the crisis and c) they ignore the contrary advice of those economists who have some credibility because they, unlike the neoclassical economists, forecast the crisis. (see: http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/15892/1/MPRA_paper_15892.pdf).
Please therefore host a programme so we can hear the views of those economists like Steve Keen and Ann Pettifor, who forecast the crisis, as to what should be done now in the UK and elsewhere to get out of it. How about one with George Osborne defending his inaction with Keen, Pettifor, Fred Harrison, etc., saying why he is wrong.
I am not sure if I would watch the movie about Thatcher. I have heard of mixed reviews about the movie. One thing for sure: Merryl Streep is a great actor, a legend. I learned more about her watching the Lifetime Achievement Awards and hearing about all her various roles in movies.
I’m of an age to remember the Thatcher administration very well indeed, apart from the numerous social ills she cavalierly imposed on our society her, and the Tory government of the days greatest failure was their gutless and shameful stance on South Africa.
Her abject failure to impose any economic sanctions on the despicable Botha regime, using the pitiful excuse it would harm jobs for black people, even though the vast majority were calling for sanctions.
She was far more concerned with losing trade for Britain, than the suffering black population.
Thatcher has a lot to answer for regarding our “I’m alright Jack, sod the rest” society, she was the epitome of the 80s mantra, “Greed is good” and unfortunately that has translated to the vast majority of back-bench Tory MPs who are more right-wing and extreme Europhobes since her government.
This country has never had a more divisive PM in living memory….any politician that enjoys unfettered support from the Daily Mail certainly needs close scrutiny.