Thatcher’s return to the limelight
Born early in former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, I was treated to a barrage of violent opinions about her while growing up. One uncle would fly into expletive- ridden rage when her name came up; another had a mini “Spitting Image”-style sculpture of her on his mantelpiece. To this day, my mother fumes that she and my father left the United Kingdom for the United States just before Thatcher managed to turn Britain from a strike- ridden dump into a dynamic and prosperous world power fit for the modern age. And so on.
Even then, it was hard to form one’s own opinion of Lady Thatcher, so divisive a figure was she. It wasn’t until I was much older, and she was long gone from office, that I learned for myself what an exceptionally perceptive, surprisingly moderate, pragmatic — and flawed — leader she actually was.
Today’s youngsters are even further away from the Britain of Thatcher. But as the U. K.’s political moment continues to splice into venomous binaries about austerity, wealth, capitalism, empire and Britishness, millennials are just as subject to violently opposing depictions of her.
Now, however, thanks to Season 4 of Netflix’s The Crown, which covers the years 1979- 90 and begins next month, those who missed out on the Thatcher years will have a chance to form an impression of the Iron Lady based not on a Marmite portrait but on one that reveals her complexity.
It’s too soon to know exactly how she’ ll be depicted, but the program has been exemplary in its subtle portrayals of characters from Princess Margaret to Prince Philip, showing their demons, struggles, kindnesses and cruelties.
That the beautiful Gillian Anderson was cast in the role, in part because at the right angle she is a spitting image of Thatcher, must surely diffuse any sense of her as a monster. Indeed, Peter Morgan, who writes The Crown, was fascinated by Thatcher as an embodiment of a generation of women born in the interwar period and shaped irrevocably by the Second World War.
Morgan was struck by her similarities to the Queen, with whom the prime minister was alleged to have had frosty weekly meetings.
“When I found out that they were born only six months apart, that was a big breakthrough for me,” Morgan told Vanity Fair. “Because of their generation, they had a lot of things in common: they’re both very resilient, very committed, work incredibly hard, have an extraordinary sense of duty. They both have a strong Christian faith. They’re both girls of the war generation who switch the lights off when they leave a room. But then they had such different ideas about running the country.”
This being The Crown, the portrait is unlikely to focus entirely on Thatcher’s interpersonal struggles with the Queen, or to fetishize her character. We are likely to be treated to her handling of several intense political flashpoints, and in Thatcher’s premiership there were many.
From her steadfast monetarism to the decision to go to war over the Falkland Islands to the battle and eventual triumph over the miners to the handling of Irish Republican Army terrorists, any decent portrait of Thatcher must see her down in the trenches, waging political war and winning.
If this season is anything like the previous three, it will at the very least send millions to the former prime minister’s Wikipedia pages to learn more and, possibly for the first time, see her as neither all good or bad but a deeply human mixture of both.