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| Meeting my political heroine Lady T in 2008 |
West Midlands MEP NIKKI SINCLAIRE grew up on a Council Estate. It was Margaret Thatcher who persuaded her that a hard-working woman of principle could attain anything. Thatcher told her in person, “Never give up, Nikki.” She therefore rushed to see The Iron Lady on its release. She left saddened.
I feel faintly ashamed to be writing this. I am party to a gross invasion of privacy.
We have all had relatives who in age become mere wraiths of their former selves. Frail, incontinent, drooling, intermittently cogent, nature has flayed them of dignity. This is not how we would wish them to be seen or remembered. It is unjust that they should have this pathetic image superimposed upon an otherwise active, creative life.
Lady Thatcher is no longer in public life. Her private life in decline is no-one’s business.
But Hollywood loves aberrant minds and bodies. Rainman, Forrest Gump, Leaving Las Vegas, Shine... The modern Oscar figurine might as well be an automaton, programmed to lurch, drool and twitch. And Meryl Streep is here going for the Oscar, rather more intently and obviously than Usain Bolt for gold.
Like Usain Bolt, she deserves the prize. This is a magnificent performance. The character which she portrays is totally coherent. We can relate the doddering , stricken old woman pottering about her flat, conferring with to her long dead husband, to the youthful, bullish (some would say ‘muleish’) crusader who took on the Unions, the Argentineans’ and the Masonic, all male establishment - and generally won.
It is much harder to relate this character to our Maggie.
Miss Roberts of Grantham appears to have been transformed into the greatest Prime Minister of modern times by an unseen Fairy Godmother. Certainly here we are give no other insights beyond a few platitudinous quotes from her father. Oxford is mentioned in passing. The long struggle for a Parliamentary seat is erased.
Keith Joseph is also wiped from history. The famous ‘U turn’ speech is absent, facts distorted with Thatcher is yards away from the exploding car carrying Airey Neave, though in fact she was nowhere near. The battles with the then overweaning Unions earn perhaps five minutes, the Falklands war maybe ten. No time was even given to why or how she was named the Iron Lady.
This being a Hollywood film, Maggie’s principal struggle is that of a woman against men, though she correctly treated gender as an irrelevance throughout her career.
This is a film about dementia. As such, it is well observed and poignant. Streep is far too fine an actress ever to allow it to sink into caricature. The story of Margaret Thatcher is just tacked on as a convenient vehicle.
Love her or hate her, none but an idiot blinded by political rhetoric can deny that Margaret Thatcher devoted her entire working life to the service of her people. She acted throughout with a consistency and resolve which testify to total conviction. She derived no perceptible personal advantage from her ceaseless work. She was the last truly enabling politician of the past half century. She transformed the lives of millions – myself included.
She was, in short, one of history’s great women who should be a heroine even for a pacifist lefty.
It is not pacifist lefties who have let her down in this film. It is Hollywood producers eager for a saleable story and a statuette. They have deserved the latter. By confusing their intentions, they have failed to attain the former.
