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3 hours ago
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Now she’s an opera. Yet another myth-making apotheosis lifts Margaret Thatcher to iconic realms, crafting for her an image recalling Elizabeth I. Historian Dominic Sandbrook is writing the libretto of her story, as one Thatcher tribute act trips over the next. This week saw James Graham’s Brian and Maggie drama about an interview that helped tip her towards her downfall. Next week, Radio 4 brings us When Larry met Maggie, Tim Walker’s play imagining scenes when Laurence Olivier coached the ingenue education secretary in the art of wooing and even seducing audiences.
This week marks the 50th anniversary of Thatcher’s election as leader of her party. I started counting but lost track of the myriad actors who have played her, some of the greatest of our time. Harriet Walter was magnificent, as ever. So were Gillian Anderson and Meryl Streep. Lesley Manville was just as fine, as was Patricia Hodge, and I’m sure Frances Barber will be next week in Walker’s radio play. None but royalty of stage and screen are fit to play her.
Many writers of these dramas are just as excellent, magnetically drawn time and again to delve into the nature of the leader who made herself a legend. Like Elizabeth I, she styled herself into the embodiment of an emblem, with the big gold hair, pussy bows, sculpted shoulders, well-trained deepened voice using words by her playwright speech writer, crafted into an image instantly recognisable from afar.
The problem is that good writers and good actors will produce a human drama of depth, subtlety and intelligence in a character, if flawed, an audience must feel for. That’s what a work of imagination requires. Writers will instinctively lean into her well-polished creation as the almost rags-to-riches grocer’s daughter above the shop in Grantham, the many rejections to get selected for seats, the snobbery and sexism of her party’s grandees, who she triumphed over to sweep them to three great victories. But she was not quite such a ground-breaker as the daughter of a very typical Tory alderman, while her marriage to a multimillionaire greatly spurred on her political career. The man she ousted as leader, Edward Heath, came from a humbler background: the son of a maid and a carpenter who, after Ramsgate grammar and fighting in the second world war, knew rather more of the working classes than she did.
Each piece of her life story has been honed into a drama, usually compelling: I watch them all with fascination. But plays can’t really do the stuff of politics: drama likes the rows, contests, defeats and conquests, but political issues are dry terrain, rapidly passed over for spicier themes. The inevitable result is that even astute and politically savvy writers such as James Graham end up whitewashing what Thatcher and her politics actually did to Britain. This 50-year marker comes at a melancholy time when her actions are rebounding on the country with a vengeance. Polls show the policies she was most famed for are those most voters now bitterly regret. Let’s look at her legacy.
The one that most upends her claims to a grocer’s daughter’s thrift is her squandering of North Sea oil proceeds that came onstream just as she arrived in No 10. After too-cheap privatisation, she spent the tax income; had she saved like Norway, her bequest would be a sovereign wealth fund of hundreds of billions.
She inherited a country moving markedly towards economic equality, but her 1980s policies caused top pay and wealth to soar, while the bottom deciles fell back. Inequality has stayed at that high level ever since. Her “big bang” blew the lid off grotesque financial earnings, meaning fortunes for a few, rather than economic stability. Savaging the unions, she caused a sharp drop in wages’ share of GDP. Industry and manufacturing were downgraded. Winning the bitter battle with the miners, due to NUM leader Arthur Scargill’s tragic mishandling, was not enough: she punished mining communities, leaving them to rot without other industry or training, leaving social scars that are still deep 40 years on.
Other parties envied her popular sale of council homes to tenants at knock-down prices as a stroke of political genius to propel her property-owning democracy. Now with 2m council homes sold, many owned by landlords charging astronomical rents, home ownership in England has fallen from 71% at its peak to 65%, moving further from reach of young renters, with the country trapped in a housing crisis.
Who now would celebrate her privatisations of water, energy, Britoil and a host of public goods at well below market price? A total of £5bn in water debts was written off, with natural monopolies never constrained by weak regulators. Railways were privatised by her successor, following her creed. All this failure on an epic scale has taken decades and serial bankruptcies to acknowledge.
Bus privatisation outside London led to a welter of companies cutting routes and pay, higher fares, fewer buses and fewer people riding them. She may not actually have said anyone on a bus aged more than 26 is a failure, but that summarised her attitude.
Outsourcing all manual and much administrative work from national and local authorities was done by her fiat. Lower pay and conditions were the only way the likes of Serco and Capita could profit from taking on these services, another motor driving inequality.
The 1982 Falklands war saved her from the lowest ever polling for a prime minister. It was a majestic success to send a flotilla to the other end of the earth and vanquish what looked like a powerfully armed Argentine dictator. However, praise for her recklessness is like applauding a child for surviving running across a road.
The poll tax that brought her down was not an aberration, but sprang from a profound belief in flat taxes, as she cut top tax rates. That idea of equal taxes she had wisely kept in check until then.
Most of these things inevitably slide away from plays and films. There’s a risk they will slip from national memory, as Conservative thinktanks, such as Policy Exchange, reminisce this anniversary week about “her philosophy and vision … her courage”. They can’t claim economic success for her except for the rich, with no improved national productivity.
Lest we forget, the things she did are doing us immeasurable harm right now. She is not history and certainly not entertainment. She is the unfortunate lived present.
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Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
