A fresh insight into the humanity of The Iron Lady
What an irony that this grand five-part film marking 40 years since Britain’s first female prime minister came to power should arrive as its second quit in tears. We’ve only got to part two of Thatcher: a Very British Revolution (BBC Two); Margaret Thatcher’s salty goodbye in the back of a car leaving Downing Street is some episodes ahead, but the parallels are there. When Thatcher stepped down, her ministers assured her they would pin the regicide on the floppy-haired blond who had bid to replace her. “No, no, no,” she told them, “it wasn’t Michael Heseltine, it was the Cabinet.”
The recollections of the surviving personalities from Thatcher’s very first Cabinet were the focus of this episode, which traced her path from the election victory in 1979 to her decision to double down on public spending cuts in 1981. It travelled from her St Francis of Assisi moment as she took power (“where there is discord, may we bring harmony”) to her “lady’s not for turning” speech in 1980, a queasy acceleration in character development akin to this bringer of harmony suddenly riding a dragon through Britain’s industrial heartlands.
Thatcher’s dragon wasn’t breathing
fire, however, but anti-protectionist, monetarist policies that decimated the uncompetitive steel, textile, car and shipbuilding industries. Her former press secretary Bernard Ingham popped up to add a sly view of her feelings on the dole queues left behind: “I have no reason to suppose she was never, ever concerned about unemployment, but by Jove she had difficulty showing it.”
John Nott, Secretary of State for Trade in 1979, was the most entertaining contributor. He recalled having to suffer the Etonians who dominated the first cabinet – “they had an attitude of supercilious disdain to Margaret”, while admitting he’d sent his own sons there. He was one of four surviving members, along with David Howell, Michael Heseltine and Norman Fowler, who each contributed to an image of an indomitable woman in a world of men, embracing conflict and committed to her vision. “She wanted to change everything,” Nott said.
Members of her private staff gave a fresher take. They saw her as human and considerate, friendly even. In fact, the triumph of this episode was to bring out the contradictions in “The Iron Lady”, while fixing her subtle shifts of public persona in rarely seen footage. Thatcher enjoyed the spotlight and her delivery of icy put-downs grew more chillingly dramatic as these early years ticked by. The “slaughter of the wets” in her first reshuffle merely hardened her revolutionary course.
The Blitz: Britain on Fire on Channel 5 took a people’s eye view of the horror of the May Blitz of Liverpool in 1941, when the Luftwaffe returned to the skies of the city night after night to drop tons of explosives and incendiary bombs.
The three-part retelling started rather unpromisingly with its trio of presenters – Michael Buerk, Angellica Bell and Rob Bell – lecturing straight to camera from the bombed-out church of St Luke’s, but it gained momentum as it picked out individuals caught up in the bombing and began to develop their stories, tracking their progress with the aid of a ticking clock.
There was stage and screen star Mary Lawson, a household name thanks, in part, to her career, but also to a rather titillating string of love affairs, such as her relationship with tennis champion Fred Perry. Lawson had arrived in Liverpool by train with her husband, Francis “Buster” Beaumont, an RAF officer on a week’s leave. But their romantic break soon turned into a sequence of nights spent with the locals in a cold, underground shelter.
The Second World War is becoming harder to document with “I was there” accounts, for obvious reasons, but surviving relatives filled in the details. Ninety-eight-year-old Flo Richardson, who was 20 at the time of the Blitz, remembered her fun-loving father Alf, a survivor of the trenches and by night a volunteer fireman at the docks – a role which would sadly lead to him suffering a mental breakdown.
As TV, it felt too reliant on a scripted narrative, but it effectively recreated the fear in a city braced for attack, with a sense of danger pooling around Captain Howard Kinley and the SS Malakand – a sitting duck in the docks with its freshly loaded cargo of high explosives. They were left fighting the fire caused by a falling defensive barrage balloon at the end of the episode. The Blitz was no The World at War but it had resonant stories to tell.
Thatcher: A Very British Revolution ★★★★ The Blitz: Britain on Fire ★★★