By Andy Brooks
The Iron Lady: (12A) 104 mins. Dir: Phyllida Lloyd. General release.
MOST OF the left groaned when
they heard that the movie moguls were going to give Lady Thatcher the Hollywood
treatment with a star-studded cast and Meryl Streep as the leading lady
herself. The Tories meanwhile sat back expecting an epic of Churchillian
proportions. What they actually got was a bitter disappointment.
Margaret Thatcher is portrayed as a
half-mad old crone, shunned by her children, who holds imaginary conversations
with her long dead husband, which trigger flash-backs to her long-gone days of
glory.
The film has not surprisingly been dismissed
as a “disgrace” by Tory grandee Norman Tebbit and “left-wing fantasy” by her
children. The focus on Thatcher’s
dementia has been criticised as a cruel invasion of the privacy of an elderly
woman, with some justification. Nevertheless it’s the artistic device that the
whole movie revolves around.
Though it is
by no means a conventional biopic, the film does tell a story. In a sequence of
scenes we see Thatcher rise from her student days at Oxford to struggle to
overcome Tory male chauvinism in her quest for high office, the defeat of the
miners and, of course, the Falklands War. All of this is set against a
background of strikes, IRA bombings and riots on the streets, using newsreel
footage from the time.
But what does
the film tell us? Well it’s the tale of how one woman overcame male prejudice
to become the first woman prime minister in British history, leading the
country from 1979 to 1990, only to be ignominiously dumped by her own party
when her popularity slipped. The moral of the story is perhaps only in its
ending.
Maverick Tory MP
Enoch Powell famously said: “All political lives, unless they are cut off in
midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of
politics and of human affairs”. It was certainly true of Powell himself, who
played the race card in his own failed bid for power. It’s equally true of Thatcher,
Major and Blair as well as every British prime minister we’ve had over the past
100 years or so.
Thatcher may
well be an icon to the ruling class. But so are all the others, Labour and
Tory, who followed in her footsteps when they went to Downing Street.
The great reforms of the post-war Labour Government were indeed partly due to
the overwhelming demand from working people for a better life. But they were
also the product of a bourgeois consensus on the need to boost production by
pumping state money into ailing industries, while buying off and diverting
working people down the dead-end of social democratic reform to head off the
communist movement that had massively
grown throughout Europe during the struggle to defeat
the Nazis. This tactic was followed by
the bourgeoisie throughout Western Europe during the
Cold War.
By the 1970s the bourgeoisie as a whole, in Britain
and in Europe, were no longer prepared to pay their
share in maintaining state welfare and that consensus ended. Thatcher simply
represented the class the Tories serve and she did nothing that would not have
been done by any other Tory leader at the time.
Margaret
Thatcher led the Tories to victory three times in a row, spearheading a
bourgeois offensive against the unions, the National Health Service and the
welfare state, whose consequences we still live with today.
Yet in the Iron Lady the rage of the victims of the
Thatcher era is used only as a backdrop to her life. But perhaps the portrayal
of Thatcher as a lonely, neglected old woman symbolises more than immediately
meets the eye.
