Margaret Thatcher still evokes strong feelings
The name of Margaret Thatcher arouses strong emotions in Abi Morgan, the award-winning screenwriter whose script for the new film, The Iron Lady, examines the controversial legacy of the former British prime minister.
Morgan grew up in the north of England when Thatcher’s economic policies were destroying entire communities. She remembers the dancing in the streets when Thatcher fell from power in 1990: “I knew her legacy, and that she was someone who was hated.”
But Morgan also knew she was dealing with an iconic figure in the movie, opening Jan. 13. As director Phyllida Lloyd puts it, “Margaret Thatcher is the most significant female political leader Great Britain has had since Elizabeth I.”
Morgan says one interesting result of the film’s release is that it has reopened the debate about Thatcher.
“People are talking about how much they hated her. People are also talking about how much they hunger for a leader like that, and I find that interesting.”
That hunger has been triggered by Britain’s current economic crisis, and mounting doubts about Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron’s leadership. Nevertheless, the hostility against Thatcher remains intense. A year ago, when false reports of her death began circulating, there were expressions of joy on the Internet.
Thatcher, unshakable in her belief that she was right, believed Britain could go any of three ways: the right way, the wrong way, or her way. Early in her regime, when her austerity program was causing widespread misery among the poor, she famously declared that “the lady’s not for turning.”
Her fearlessness symbolized her controversial reign — whether it was defying the “wets” in her own party, destroying the powerful miner’s union, or continuing to wage relentless war against the Irish Republican Army, which had attempted to assassinate her at the 1984 Conservative Party conference in Brighton.
There was also her momentous decision to go to war against Argentina after it seized the Falkland Islands in 1982. That victory, more than any other, allowed her to present herself as a great leader — a significant achievement, given that her popularity in the polls had been dropping — and to ensure another Tory victory at the polls.
“I think what’s interesting is that she’s been fossilized a little in the public psyche,” Morgan says. “That’s partly because she burned bright, and then, after her career ended, she hasn’t done the political circuit in the way that Bill Clinton has, or Tony Blair. Because of her dementia, she has withdrawn from public life.”
In scraping away the barnacles, the film revisits Thatcher’s triumphs, but also examines her essential solitude.
The latter is there in those scenes of Thatcher surrounded by male colleagues at a cabinet meeting — scenes that parallel images of Elizabeth I and her entirely male circle 400 years ago. But this loner image goes all the way back to her childhood, as the exceptionally bright daughter of a grocer who saw in Margaret a proxy for the son he never had. It certainly is a factor in her defiance of the social and political establishment during her rise to the Conservative party leadership.
“She was trying to find her way in a world that was a very privileged, very upper class, very wealthy, male domain,” Morgan stresses. “She was fighting on every front.”
That was enough to make her unpopular.
“Slimeballs always hate a strong woman,” cantankerous British columnist Julie Burchill wrote in 2004. How true. The opposition Labour party was at its worst when it launched a “ditch the bitch” campaign in 1983. But there were also enemies within the sexist Old Boy establishment of her own party.
One notorious moment from the days when she was education secretary in Edward Heath’s Conservative government involved a luncheon at 10 Downing Street, and a Tory power-broker’s drunken query as to whether there was any truth to the rumour that Thatcher was actually a woman.
Columnist Burchill, a journalistic gadfly who was brought up a Communist and has written for the ultraconservative Times and Daily Mail, as well as the left-ofcentre Guardian, sees Thatcher as a mistress of illusion who — like De Gaulle in France — could make her country “feel big,” even while proving incapable of erasing the deficit or fighting crime.
Burchill has also pinpointed the contradictions in Thatcher. For all the Iron Lady’s attempts to paint herself as an old-fashioned grocer’s daughter, the reality was somewhat different: To vote for her was akin to purchasing what you thought was a bland Cliff Richard LP and finding the Beastie Boys inside.
“I think she was iconic, because she was a female prime minister, obviously . . . and she was open to satire and parody,” Morgan says.
She hopes she has written “a respectful, heartfelt, fair portrayal.”
Yet this award-winning screenwriter embodies the very contradictions that continue to affect public perceptions of the Iron Lady’s greatness.
Morgan is candid about her dislike of what Thatcherism represented. Morgan has lived in areas decimated by the Thatcher era. “That was always a critical cause for me, so I think, in writing the film, I carried that with me.”
So always, even in chronicling Thatcher’s many achievements, a strong political chorus was running counterpoint in her brain: “This was a woman who destroyed the country.”