In keeping with this blog's tradition of being bang up to date with cultural events, I have finally got round to seeing The Iron Lady, two years after its release. And I began writing this blog having no idea that its subject had died the same day.
Watched with my wife and daughters, The Iron Lady provided a prime opportunity for a family row, thankfully averted by all parties' disinclination to have one - we were on holiday and, after all, a debate about whether Mrs Thatcher cut spending or raised it is hardly incendiary when compared to arguments about putting the loo seat down or leaving off the top of the toothbrush.
(Mrs Thatcher in fact raised public spending by about 1.4% p.a. per year in real terms, although in some years there were cuts, and some of the rise was attributable to the recessions at the beginning and end of her term.)
The Iron Lady occupied two hours pleasantly enough, without providing much political insight. It focused instead on Thatcher's increasing dementia and her conviction that her deceased husband Denis was in fact still in the land of the living. This was poignant, but of course speculative. I doubt very much whether the director, Phyllida Lloyd, knew much more about Thatcher's mental health than you or I, but even if she knew a lot more, it was bound to be wrong in parts. Moreover, Mrs Thatcher was still alive when the film was made, as were her children, one of whom, Carol, features heavily in it.
It strikes me a being intrusive and distasteful to show on screen someone living suffering from a mental illness, all the more so since her kids were still having to deal with its consequences. It's a small point perhaps - the Thatcher children don't have to watch it, and the subject may well have been insufficiently compos mentis - but I thought the skill with which the film was made (Meryl Streep fantastic, and Olivia Coleman as Carol very nearly as good) couldn't disguise its essential tawdriness.
What about Thatcher herself? I hated her while she was in office, like almost everyone of my class and politics did. I suppose my feelings have softened somewhat since. Mrs Thatcher demonstrated that the Government runs the country, rather than the Trades Unions, which strikes me as an unequivocally good thing. The Unions have their members' interests at heart, which is fair enough, but those don't coincide with the interests of the country as a whole.
Thatcher did her best to demonstrate that the UK needed to pay its own way by encouraging business (a message just as relevant today), but faced with competition from the Far East there was precious little she could do about it. The high interest rates she used to strangle inflation pushed up the value of the pound and wrecked British exports. I think the worst thing she did was run a government which presided over two severe recessions. The poll tax was unfair and a political disaster, but it wasn't exactly the slaughtering of the first-born.
The tragedy of the miners strike was that although other taxpayers couldn't realistically be expected to subsidise coal production indefinitely, the closure of the pits had the effect of wrecking whole communities. Brassed Off doesn't lie. These were terribly hard choices, but much easier to make when they weren't your communities or your voters. I regularly gave money to the miners, but felt the strike was probably wrong. Ultimately no country can afford to keep uncompetitive industries going forever.
So farewell Maggie T. Like her or loathe her, she was a conviction politician who had a shrewd grasp of the direction industrial decline was leading the country; and moreover had a far better understanding of the lives of ordinary people than today's brillcreemed PR puppets.
