‘That bloody woman’ had a softer side we rarely saw
We may not have found the new “Iron Lady” in Theresa May, but it’s clear where Ken Clarke got the idea to call her a “bloody difficult woman” from. As the penultimate episode of Thatcher: A Very British Revolution (BBC Two) charts, the Tories had to work out how to fix the “TBW (that bloody woman)” factor.
That was what they called the electoral problem emerging due to Mrs Thatcher’s public image, as pollsters had picked up that her tough persona was rubbing some voters up the wrong way. This episode sought to explore how much that steely persona had come to consume her personally, going behind her tough veneer to show her sensitivity to the jibes.
Although Mrs Thatcher revelled in being known as the “Iron Lady” and was happy to chide her critics publicly as “moaning minnies”, she was hurt when confronted by suggestions that voters found such behaviour too much. When David Frost brought it up on TV, she dismissed it, lamenting that what she read in the newspapers “doesn’t have anything in common with what I am”. When one of her aides – Michael Dobbs – laid out the research showing the problems voters had with her, she – as he recalled – threw his charts across the room.
It was decided to bring out a softer side by fixing her up for lighter interviews, in which she got teary-eyed recalling her upbringing and – to quote the interviewer Miriam Stoppard – came across “just like another girlfriend”.
But such gloss did not stop those close to her from suffering: Mrs Thatcher’s daughter Carol was ordered to hide in a cupboard when a civil servant, Robin Butler, visited their flat – as he recalled – so as not to be an embarrassment because she was wearing jeans.
Such absurdity was just the tip of the iceberg, as this episode charted how she upset her own party chairman – the ultra-thatcherite Norman Tebbit – by failing to stop press speculation that she distrusted him in the run-up to the 1987 election campaign.
Although she won a third term, it was clear that she had burned so many bridges that – as her deputy, Willie Whitelaw, is quoted as saying shortly after her win – she would “never fight another election campaign”. Dobbs’s hurt was still clear when he recalled how Mrs Thatcher snubbed him as the Tories toasted her re-election. “Margaret, you didn’t need to do that” he sighed dejectedly.
After that, Dobbs had a break from politics to write House of Cards, his literary saga of betrayal and ambition. Given how he was treated by Mrs Thatcher, and what went on next after she expressed her hope to “go on and on”, we can all see who inspired him: “that bloody woman”. Asa Bennett
‘They can’t DO that!” gasped my seven-year-old daughter as we watched a refuse truck full of plastic waste disgorging its load off the top of a cliff. She breathed a sigh of relief when the camera pulled back to reveal the waste was being tipped into vast bins and not the water.
But, as Hugh Fearnley-whittingstall told us, that one truckload was, well, a drop in the ocean. The human race is tipping this much plastic into the sea every minute of every day.
Celebrity chef and campaigner Fearnley-whittingstall teamed up with former Watchdog presenter Anita Rani to look at the amount of plastic used in the homes on an average street in Bristol. When the families attempted to buy loose produce from supermarkets, they found they were being charged a premium. In plastic, the ingredients for one family’s spaghetti bolognese cost £8.77. Unpackaged, it cost £13.03.
When Rani confronted a Tesco spokesperson, she was offered only vague plans for reform.
Meanwhile, Fearnley-whittingstall tore into the absurdities of recycling in the UK, where over 400 councils use 39 different policies. And we ship mountains of it to Malaysia, where some of it is just burned anyway, leaving local children choking.
The greatest insanity highlighted by the programme was our addiction to bottled water. Fearnley-whittingstall showed us people who think that it’s better for them than tap water. Cue a trip to a lab to show the mineral content in the bottled water was roughly the same as the tap stuff.
One empowering thing we can do is carry our own water bottle. Cafes and petrol stations haven’t made it easy for us to fill them up on the go. But Fearnley Whittingstall found that persistence and politeness kept him hydrated. And really, what’s more embarrassing: asking the guy at the petrol station if you can use the tap, or watching tides of plastic waste wash up on the world’s beaches? Helen Brown