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No one walks quite like Margaret Thatcher. She scurries with her knees bent, the handbag swinging like a tightly wound metronome. In the recently released film, The Iron Lady, Meryl Streep captures Thatcher’s walk just this side of parody. We see the elderly Thatcher darting across a corridor, unseen by the machinegun-toting policemen who share her home—or keep her prisoner, as her husband Denis Thatcher remarks. The way she moves, she might be the clockwork Iron Lady. She is certainly a shell of her former self. Thatcher is suffering from dementia and her beloved husband is long-dead, a hallucination who is Thatcher’s sole companion in a lonely old age.
The Iron Lady is framed as a series of reminiscences in Thatcher’s failing mind. The key internal drama is her struggle with hallucinations. She knows that the ever-present Denis is a symptom of her dementia, or madness as she unfashionably insists upon calling it. Yet if she succeeds in banishing Denis then she will truly be alone (Thatcher discounts her loyal daughter, Carol, played affectingly by Olivia Colman. She always preferred the company of men, we are told). Such a sad, quiet tone inevitably casts a pall over her life. There are grand events, of course. We see the murder of Thatcher’s chief of staff, Airey Neave, and the attempted killing of Thatcher herself by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), the decision to sink an Argentine destroyer in the Falklands War, and her final deposing by disloyal ministers. These events are given an operatic grandeur by director Phyllida Lloyd—music swirls, leaves fall, courtiers weep—but they are snapshots that lack the urgency of a continuing unfolding drama.
The film may have its failings, but it is a bona fide commercial success with sell-out screenings across the United Kingdom. It has also provoked a national debate on Thatcher’s legacy. Thatcher remains as divisive a figure twenty years after the end of her Prime Ministership as she was in her pomp. She is either loved or loathed, and if one is English—and even more so if one is Irish or Scottish—then it is impossible to assess her reign with a cool head. The film allows us to look at her again and ask what her real story is—perhaps especially because the film fails to find its own answer.
Reviewers have wondered if Thatcher’s success is a feminist story. She was the first woman to become a prime minster by winning a general election (Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir were appointed in backroom deals, in the absence of suitable men). Phyllida Lloyd argues that the film is feminist in its way, because it puts the story of an old woman at the centre. However, Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore reflects the view of many when she writes that no matter how much she admires Streep’s performance, good women “strong and true” will not identify with the film. Feminism is a politics based on sisterhood and solidarity and Thatcher never sought female allies, indeed, she often did without any allies at all, but simply cracked on regardless ( ‘to crack on’ is part of a lexicon of old-fashioned, understated English verbs that get a revival in screenwriter Abi Morgan’s subtle script).
[caption id="attachment_55228932" align="alignleft" width="233" caption="Meryl Streep as the The Iron Lady, with handbag"]
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Perhaps, instead, we should see her success as part of a class struggle. The best biography of Margaret Thatcher, One of Us by Hugo Young, places a great deal of weight upon her relationship with her father, a shopkeeper and small-town politician. On this view, her enemies were the vastly more privileged aristocrats and squires of her own party who hoped to govern by making as few waves as possible, cooking up deals in private and presenting an imperturbable face to the voting public. Thatcher could not do imperturbable: even after professional vocal training took the strident corners off her voice she was still the most shrill and intense figure in British public life. More crucially, she felt her party’s quietism had succeeded only in managing the decline of a once great nation. Her aim was to restore the greatness to Britain.
The Mayor of London, conservative politician Boris Johnson, combines the class and feminist interpretations when he claims that Thatcher’s struggle was against male complacency. It is this side of Thatcher that has proved so inspirational to American Republican activists who view her as a rightwing rebel against the politics-as-usual attitude that afflicts Washington. In this sense, she is almost more American than British: a valued politician whose attitudes are shaped by strong Protestant Christianity. In The Iron Lady, this side of her philosophy is rather bizarrely given voice via a misquotation from Gandhi: “Watch your thoughts because they become your words ... your words become your actions ... your actions become your habits ... your habits become your character.” She believes wholeheartedly in the power of individuals to shape the destiny of nations simply by doing the right in their everyday lives. In short, she believes in the heroism of small lives in small towns. The irony is that her own northern town was too small for her: her drive, conviction and ambition made her a world figure.
In Abi Morgan’s script, Thatcher declares that the problem is that everyone wants to ‘be’ something, rather than ‘do’ something. The tragedy for Margaret is that she was ultimately trapped by the pressure to be the Iron Lady. In the end, she was beyond all reason, incapable of confronting the world except as an unbending and unforgiving colossus in perpetual motion—handbag in hand.
