January 1988,‘I little thought that we would become the longest serving Prime Minister of this century.’26 And most famously, the following year, again on the steps of Downing Street: ‘We have become a grandmother.’27
The cult of Maggie
By the middle of the decade Mrs Thatcher had become an institution, a seemingly permanent part of the national landscape, around whom there grew up a personality cult unlike anything seen in Britain before. For a start she gave her name to an ‘-ism’ as no previous Prime Minister had done: a relatively clear, if sometimes contradictory body of ideas, attitudes and values to which her personality gave unusual coherence. She exerted a hold on the national imagination that went far beyond politics. Old and young alike could not imagine life without her. When elderly patients were asked by psychiatrists to name the Prime Minister, it was said that for the first time in forty years they always got it right. Meanwhile, small boys were reported wistfully asking their fathers: ‘Dad, can a man be Prime Minister?’ To her admirers she was ‘Maggie’, to her opponents simply ‘Thatcher’ – but both held her responsible for everything, good or bad, that happened in what a flood of books inevitably called the Thatcher decade: half the population believed that she was single-handedly saving the country, the other half that she was single-handedly wrecking it.
Love her or hate her, she was inescapable, like a force of nature. Alternative nicknames proliferated, invented by Julian Critchley, Denis Healey and others:‘The Great She-Elephant’, ‘Attila the Hen’, ‘Catherine the Great of Finchley’, ‘the Maggietollah’ (by analogy with Iran’s Islamic revolutionary dictator, Ayatollah Khomeini), or just ‘That Woman’. But all were too contrived and none replaced the simple ‘Maggie’ which in itself contained all the different personas she had adopted. There is a wider range of resonant role models available to a woman politician than to a man, and Mrs Thatcher played them all, from housewife and mother (even, to the troops in the Falklands, a pin-up), through a variety of female authority figures to domestic battleaxe.When her enemies tried to turn these images against her, they only enhanced her aura of power. The domestic battleaxe bullying feebler men fitted into a well-loved British comic tradition immortalised in music hall and seaside postcards; while the image of the cruel queen – Rider Haggard’s chilling
The media were equally fascinated by the feminine side of her personality: they were always on the lookout for tears or other signs of weakness which might reveal ‘the woman within’. She famously wept twice on television, once when Mark was lost in the desert in 1981, and again in 1985 when telling Miriam Stoppard about her father’s deposition from Grantham council. Yet to the despair of feminists, Britain’s first female Prime Minister did nothing to feminise the male world of politics. She never had any truck with equal opportunities or political correctness. ‘What has women’s lib ever done for me?’ she once demanded.28 The virtue she admired above all others and claimed for herself was strength. ‘If you want someone weak,’ she once told Jimmy Young, ‘you don’t want me. There are plenty of others to choose from.’29
Yet at the same time she was very feminine, and derived much of her power from exploiting her femininity. ‘I like being made a fuss of by a lot of chaps,’ she once remarked.30 Whether by calculation or instinct, she was skilful at wrong-footing men who did not know how to argue with a woman as bluntly as they would have with another man. They never knew whether she was going to mother them, flirt with them or hit them over the head – metaphorically – with her handbag. Her handbag (that most feminine appendage, carried by practically every woman from the Queen downwards) became an important component of her image. Other Prime Ministers have had their identifying props, like Churchill’s cigar or Wilson’s pipe, but Mrs Thatcher’s handbag became much more than that. It was the physical symbol of her authority, like a royal mace or sceptre, which announced her presence. It was also a miraculous receptacle, like Mary Poppins’ portmanteau, from which she could seemingly produce at will the killer quotation or statistic to win an argument. And above all it became an active verb, so that when she belaboured some offending minister she was said to ‘handbag’ him. Nothing more potently embodied a woman’s dominance over a Cabinet of men.
She enjoyed denigrating men while asserting the superiority of women. Yet she found very few others of her own sex worthy of promotion either within government or the wider public service. Janet Young, the only other woman to sit briefly in her Cabinet, was sharply disparaged in her memoirs as not up to the job.31 Lady Young in turn commented that Mrs Thatcher simply did not like women.32 She claimed special virtue for women, but liked being the only one. Increasingly as she got older she did not encourage other women to follow the example of her own career, but told them that their special role was as home-makers and mothers, bringing up the family. She supported the right of women to be lawyers, doctors, engineers, scientists or politicians, she told the Conservative Women’s Conference in 1988. How could she not? But, she went on, ‘many women wish to devote themselves mainly to raising a family and running a home. And we should have that choice too.’33
She recognised that clothes were of huge importance to a woman politician, an asset if chosen with care, a liability if worn badly. ‘She was convinced,’ Nigel Lawson wrote, ‘that her authority… would be diminished if she were not impeccably turned out at all times. She was probably right.’34 From about 1985, however, as her power grew, so her style of dressing became more commanding. Charles Powell’s wife Carla was credited with getting her into what was called ‘power-dressing’, following the styles set by the matriarchs of the American TV series
By now she was extraordinarily dominant on television. An academic study of her technique showed that she intimidated even the most experienced interviewers by turning the tables and attacking them, refusing to be interrupted, while accusing them of interrupting her. She put them on the defensive by using their Christian names. ‘She tends to personalise issues and take questions as accusations,’ Donald McCormick commented. For instance, he once dared to suggest that she was inflexible. ‘Inflexible?’ she retorted. ‘I am inflexible in defence of democracy, in defence of freedom, in defence of law and order and so should you be, so should the BBC be and so should everyone else be.’36
And yet she hated television. She rehearsed intensively for major interviews, and when she got to the studio she had to be handled very carefully. ‘She needs settling like a horse, highly spirited’, Gordon Reece told Woodrow Wyatt. ‘She gets nervous if people surround and crowd her. She must be kept calm.’37 As she once told Ronnie Millar, ‘I’m not a performer, dear.’38 Like everything else in her life, she only taught herself to dominate by willpower and hard work.
Above all she still needed very little sleep. Four hours a night was perhaps an exaggeration, but she could certainly go for several days on that little, and never slept for more than five or six. She sometimes caught up a bit at Chequers at weekends, but during the week she rarely went to bed before two o’clock, and was up again at six. She dominated the Government by sheer physical stamina.
Her health was generally robust, though she did suffer from colds and a number of minor ailments which never laid her low for long. She never put on weight, although she took no exercise; but she took a number of vitamin pills and was widely believed to have some form of hormone replacement therapy to keep her young. She had three minor operations while she was Prime Minister: one for varicose veins in 1982, the second for a detached retina in 1983; and the third to correct a contraction of the fingers of her right hand, Dupuytren’s contracture (also known as ‘coachman’s grip’), in 1986. She had a painful tooth abscess during the June 1987 election, and generally her teeth gave her increasing trouble. She also – inevitably in her sixties – needed reading glasses, but did not like to be seen wearing them in public, so her briefs for Prime Minister’s Questions and speech scripts had to be printed in large type. She would never admit to any hint of weakness. She was particularly annoyed, therefore, when she nearly fainted from the heat during a diplomatic reception at Buckingham Palace in November 1987, giving rise to speculation that she was finally cracking up and a spate of articles offering pseudo-medical advice that she should slow down.39 She was sensitive to any suggestion that she
