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Authors: Gillian Shephard
The Real Iron Lady (20 page)
She also appeared on a BBC programme in November 1986,
The Englishwoman's Wardrobe.
She was asked to discuss her clothes, and the viewer was treated to a sartorial history lesson during the course of the programme as she said things like, âThis is very special, a silk dress, we take great care of this, it has to be dry-cleaned, I wore it all the way through the Falklands.' She also confided that her underclothes came from Marks and Spencer.
I have a particular memory of this because some years later, I was asked if I would take part in a similar programme, but for radio. With deep misgivings I did so, although what possible interest my wardrobe of M&S and wellington boots could have aroused, history does not reveal.
Lady Warnock, a prominent academic responsible, among many other achievements during her distinguished career, for the Warnock Report, watched the Prime
Minister on the BBC television programme, and found it âquite obscene. The clothes showed a woman packaged together in a way that's not exactly vulgar, just “low”â¦' (Young,
One of Us
). This comment is uncharacteristically harsh from Lady Warnock. But many other women were fascinated to watch Margaret Thatcher discussing such feminine matters. Lady Warnock's sharp criticism does illustrate one truth, however, and that is that a woman Prime Minister is criticised not just for her policies and demeanour, but also, simply, for being a woman.
More than twenty years after she left office, there are indications that, at last, commentators, including feminists, are beginning to understand that fundamental fact.
Take the comments of India Knight, a columnist for the
Sunday Times,
writing on 20 November 2011, ahead of the release in January 2012 of the film
The Iron Lady.
Here is a horrible and profoundly discombobulating thought: what if Margaret Thatcher was really quite â cough, choke â impressive all along? What if she wasn't in fact the one woman it was OK for feminists to hate (a problematic concept in itself)? What if she and her terrifyingly freakazoid, outsize balls of steel, to go with her terrifyingly outsized, freakazoid politics, were more worthy of our admiration than of our disgust and contempt? Believe me, this thought makes me feel iller than it makes you feel. But it is perhaps a thought worth entertainingâ¦
Much of my generation hated her; some of us still
believe that everything that is broken about Britain today is the direct consequence of something that she personally took the hammer to â the underclass that she created by not only destroying jobs but also by selling off social housing, for example.
I bore you with my politics only to try to convey the violent dislike in which she is still held by many people my age, more than twenty years after she left office⦠(âA feminist icon (even to a leftie like me);
The Times,
20 November 2011)
But here India Knight takes an unexpected turn. She continues,
In a world that is forever fretting about women and the workâlife balance, it is unexpectedly refreshing to look up at the screen and see someone who just gets on with it, as we all have to do, whatever our jobs are. So now, on top of everything else, you find yourself sympathising with Thatcher over the question of children and work and her regrets at not having spent enough time with the former â regrets that, to be honest, we will all have when we're eighty. Just like Maggie.
In
The Iron Lady,
the parallels between today and the 1980s are deliberate and striking: high unemployment, London roaring with demonstrations and street protests, the urgent need for economic reform. You can almost hear cinema audiences, come January and the film's general release, muttering, âAt least she had a plan; at least she got things done.'
She points out that in the film
The Iron Lady,
History has been rewritten to make it look as if there were no other female MPs when Thatcher first took her seat, allowing for a marvellous shot of a blue dress and hat in a sea of grey suits, like a hydrangea surrounded by dull old bits of rock.
It hasn't, however, been rewritten when it comes to the snobbery and prejudice that she encounters all along the way, from an early meeting with a braying, old-school Tory selection committee, all strangulated vowels and sniffy disdain, to her later dealings with the equally strangulated brayings and prejudices of her own Cabinet.
Could it be that at last feminist opinion is realising the scale of Margaret Thatcher's achievement, merely in becoming Britain's first woman Prime Minister? Can feminists, and other critics for that matter, begin to separate perfectly legitimate criticism of her policies from their personal criticism of her as a woman? And can feminist opinion makers at last accept that, unlike them, she did not simply rail against an unfair world, but against the odds, beat it, got there, did it?
I am given hope by an article by Caitlin Moran, one of today's most prominent young feminist writers. In it, she describes the difficulty faced by all women in the public eye. Her comments also apply to much of the hostile comment endured by Margaret Thatcher throughout her career.
Currently, every time a woman in the public eye does something, she doesn't do it just for, and as, herself. She does it on behalf of 3.3 billion other women, too. She is seen to represent her entire gender ⦠in a way men just aren't. (âNo more opinions about women',
The Times
magazine, 15 September 2012)
Moran pleads that women should be judged for what they do as individuals, and not as representatives of their gender, because, as she writes in her incomparable style, âwe don't have time for another 100,000 years of women being held back by pinheads'.
Jill Knight puts the same thought another way.
Looking back, it seems surprising that Parliament took almost 100 years to go from having no women at all, to having the 143 we have today, in 2012, even though the few women who did make it throughout those years proved their competence â they were not just good, they did excellent work as chairmen, Whips, Privy Councillors, Peers, Speakers, Secretaries of State, and even as Prime Minister.
Virginia Bottomley sums up Margaret Thatcher's achievement:
I shall always feel privileged to have worked for a woman who so profoundly altered Britain and our place in the world. Equally she transformed opportunities for women simply through her personal
example, splendidly undertaking a hugely demanding role that no female had previously secured in this country.
And that is the point. Critics ask what Margaret Thatcher did for women. The answer, in brief, is that she proved a woman could become Prime Minister of Britain, and in so doing, she pushed the barriers forward for all women, not just in this country, but throughout the world.
T
he end of Margaret Thatcher’s career, when it came in November 1990, seemed very sudden. In fact, the storm clouds had been gathering since at least the tenth anniversary of her becoming Prime Minister, in 1989. There had been a lunch at the Savoy to mark the occasion, and I remember the whole parliamentary party streaming back along the sunny Embankment to get back to the Commons for the start of business at 2.30. Some were saying at that time that it might be wise for her to step down at the height of her popularity, and it is true that within the constituency and the country she had become a very controversial figure. Many felt that she had slain her dragons and that it would be better to have a less confrontational figure in charge of the party. There was undoubtedly plotting inside and outside Parliament, although I was too humbly placed to be aware of just how much.
There was much tut-tutting when Sir Anthony Meyer,
the gentlemanly but eccentric MP for Clwyd North West, announced in the autumn of 1989 that he would stand against her in the annual leadership election. Most of us felt this was ridiculous, but of course he was a stalking horse, and a forerunner of events to come.
Michael Heseltine was on the back benches when I arrived in the House in 1987; he had resigned eighteen months earlier over the Westland debacle. He made occasional appearances, strolling through the lobbies with his blond mane visible above the general scrum. There were those said to be ‘in his camp’, like Julian Critchley, Michael Mates and Keith Hampson, but apart from the odd rude reference to ‘she who must be obeyed’ from the naughty Critchley, much of what went on was well below the surface.
The challenge, when it came in the autumn of 1990, electrified the party and the country. Some colleagues, like Emma Nicholson, immediately declared for Heseltine. Edwina Currie equivocated. During the period leading up to the first vote, the Conservative women MPs had arranged a dinner to discuss policies for women. It was cancelled because loyalists like Jill Knight would not sit at the same table with Emma and Edwina.
Margaret Thatcher’s team included Peter Morrison, her PPS, and John Moore who had left the Cabinet only a year earlier. On the night before the first vote, they were in the Tea Room, not their usual habitat. I asked if they needed any help in garnering support for Mrs Thatcher. ‘Oh, no thanks,’ they chorused in unison. ‘We have
everything under control.’ It did not feel at all like that to me. I knew no one who had been canvassed for their support, and to this day I believe she was let down by her so-called campaign team. When the result came, it had to be broken to her while she was at an international gathering with President Mitterand at Versailles, in the full glare of worldwide media attention.
Janet Fookes had helped officiate at the fateful count. She writes,
I was also fated to see her downfall in a very particular way, as I was asked by the then Chairman of the 1922 Committee, Cranley Onslow, to help with counting the votes in the leadership election in November 1990, where she just missed securing the majority she needed to avoid a second vote. I had been surprised and a little nervous at being invited to take part in the procedure and when I had to retrieve a few ballot papers that had fallen to the floor, I felt more keenly than ever the awesome responsibility in ensuring that the count was conducted impeccably, ending as it did the remarkable career of our first British woman Prime Minister.
The next day, 21 November 1989, we as junior ministers were consulted by our boss, Tony Newton, on whether we thought Margaret Thatcher should stand down or, as she had put it, fight on. My own view was that she had been irremediably damaged by the vote and the loss of authority that resulted from it. All members of the government were consulted in that way, and the results fed back to her
in individual meetings during the evening with Cabinet ministers at No. 10. Afterwards, she wrote in
The Downing Street Years,
‘I had lost the Cabinet’s support. I could not even muster a credible campaign team. It was the end.’
Frank Field also went to No. 10 that night.
In my final meeting with Mrs T. as Prime Minister, the chemistry between us changed from my earlier audiences with her, asking her to act, to a meeting with a lady, already shrunken and looking anxiously into my eyes as she asked why I had come. ‘It is to tell you that you are finished,’ was my reply. ‘It is so unfair,’ was her retort. ‘I am not discussing fairness, Prime Minister, I am discussing your options.’ ‘It is so unfair,’ came her reply, quickly building into a refrain. ‘You cannot now go out on a top note. The only option available is a high note.’ ‘It is so unfair,’ she echoed. ‘You need to plan your exit tonight. If you are still Prime Minister when you go into tomorrow’s censure debate, your side will tear you apart.’
I was no longer debating with the great lady. It was more of a talk between a grandmother and a grandson. ‘Who will succeed me?’ ‘John Major, of course,’ came my reply. ‘Why do you say John Major?’ she asked. ‘You have been preparing him, haven’t you, in giving him that range of top jobs?’ A puzzled look appeared on Mrs T.’s face. ‘He is very young,’ she said. ‘Time will take care of that, Prime Minister.’
The conversation came to an end. Mrs T. told me that I would be shown out by a different way into Whitehall. I resisted. An unmanned TV camera in Downing Street had recorded my coming in. It would be an even better story if it did not record my exit. The old relationship briefly reasserted itself. ‘You will be leaving by a different exit.’
She knew the media’s habits. The press, who enquired of her private office about who the Prime Minister saw that evening, were given a list of attendees, excluding myself. The Prime Minister believed that any reference to me would be harmful, and, before writing up that evening for publication, I sought her permission in mentioning this last kind Prime Ministerial act.
I was in the House the next day for her valedictory speech opposing the opposition’s censure motion. The beginning of her delivery was through a husky voice as, I thought, she choked back those tears that were ready to fall. Then Dave Nellist, a Labour MP, intervened. ‘If the record is so good, why are they sacking you?’ The Prime Minister was away. ‘I am enjoying this,’ she said.
Much of the House began to file out of the Chamber as soon as she sat down. I went to stand at the Bar of the House. Our eyes met. I nodded approval and her eyes filled up. I turned to leave, wondering if I would ever see a Prime Minister of this rank again.
I am still waiting.
On 17 December 1990,
The House
magazine carried an interview with Margaret Thatcher, conducted by Fiona Millar. This was just two weeks after her whole life and its purpose had crashed into ruins.
In general terms I wouldn’t change any of the policies if I had my time again, and no, no, no, I don’t spend my time regretting. I am just getting on with the next job in hand. There’s a little poem, ‘Does the road wind uphill all the way? Yes, to the very end.’ That’s my life. I’m still going
uphill, and it has been uphill as you’ve seen for the last two weeks. But if you believe passionately and do something that is really worthwhile you will get opposition from people who believe differently, so my life will always be uphill all the way … Principles remain the same; they have a message for present and future generations. To distil that message, to persuade others of its validity and relevance, that will be my continuing purpose.
But her memoirs reveal the depth of her hurt.
I was sick at heart. I could have resisted the opposition of opponents and potential rivals and even respected them for it; but what grieved me was the desertion of those I had always considered friends and allies, and the weasel words whereby they had transmuted their betrayal into frank advice and concern for my fate.
And Harvey Thomas writes the revealing last words.
After she had resigned, around March 1991, she was staying at a friend’s flat in Great College Street. I visited, and we sat around an open fire and chatted. The thing I remember, as we reflected on the events of late 1990 when she stepped down and handed over to John Major, was her very sad comment, ‘I suppose I should have found out which of my Cabinet friends were real friends and which were false ones, shouldn’t I?’