Margaret Thatcher: we disliked her and we loved it

What bound all opposition to Margaret Thatcher’s programme was a suspicion that the grocer’s daughter was intent on monetising human value
Ian McEwan
The Guardian

Margaret Thatcher forced us to decide what was truly important. Photograph: Gerard Fouet/AFP/Getty Images

“Maggie! Maggie! Maggie! Out! Out! Out!” That chanted demand of the left has been fully and finally met. At countless demonstrations throughout the 80s, it expressed a curious ambivalence – a first name intimacy as well as a furious rejection of all she stood for. “Maggie Thatcher” – two fierce trochees set against the gentler iambic pulse of Britain’s postwar welfare state. For those of us who were dismayed by her brisk distaste for that cosy state-dominated world, it was never enough to dislike her. We liked disliking her. She forced us to decide what was truly important.

In retrospect, in much dissenting commentary there was often a taint of unexamined sexism. Feminists disowned her by insisting that though she was a woman, she was not a sister. But what bound all opposition to Margaret Thatcher’s programme was a suspicion that the grocer’s daughter was intent on monetising human value, that she had no heart and, famously, cared little for the impulses that bind individuals into a society.
But if today’s Guardian readers time-travelled to the late 70s they might be irritated to discover that tomorrow’s TV listings were a state secret not shared with daily newspapers. A special licence was granted exclusively to the Radio Times. (No wonder it sold 7m copies a week). It was illegal to put an extension lead on your phone. You would need to wait six weeks for an engineer. There was only one state-approved answering machine available. Your local electricity “board” could be a very unfriendly place. Thatcher swept away those state monopolies in the new coinage of “privatisation” and transformed daily life in a way we now take for granted.

We have paid for that transformation with a world that is harder-edged, more competitive, and certainly more intently aware of the lure of cash. We might now be taking stock, post credit crunch, of our losses and gains since the 1986 deregulation of the City, but it is doubtful that we will ever undo her legacy.

It is odd to reflect that in Thatcher’s time, the British novel enjoyed a comparatively lively resurgence. Governments can rarely claim to have stimulated the arts but Thatcher, always rather impatient with the examined life, drew writers on to new ground. The novel may thrive in adversity and it was a general sense of dismay at the new world she was showing us that lured many writers into opposition. The stance was often in broadest terms, more moral than political. Her effect was to force a deeper consideration of priorities, sometimes expressed in a variety of dystopias.

She mesmerised us. At an international conference in Lisbon in the late 80s, the British faction, among whom were Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Malcolm Bradbury and myself, referred back to Thatcher constantly in our presentations. Asked to report on the “state of things” in our country, we could barely see past her. Eventually, the Italian contingent, largely existential or postmodern, rose up against us. We had an all-out blistering row that delighted the organisers.

Literature had nothing to do with politics, the Italian writers said. Take the larger view. Get over her! They had a point, but they had no idea how fascinating she was – so powerful, successful, popular, omniscient, irritating and, in our view, wrong. Perhaps we suspected that reality had created a character beyond our creative reach.

Not all writers were against her. Philip Larkin visited Downing Street where the prime minister quoted approvingly one of his lines to him – “Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.” Accounts vary. She may have got it slightly wrong. Quotation being the warmest form of praise, Larkin was naturally touched.

We might speculate that an adviser had offered Thatcher a selection of good lines, or that she had asked to see some. But the choice captures her perfectly. For a start, she had a superb memory for a brief, and she would have had no problem memorising quickly any number of lines. Larkin’s evoked the treacherous mind (of an adversary, of a cabinet colleague) helplessly exposed to her steely regard. One turns with gratitude to Alan Clark’s diaries for a fine description of being summoned to No 10 and being subjected to just such an examination.

When the late Christopher Hitchens was a political reporter for the New Statesman, he corrected the prime minister on a point of fact, and she was quick to correct Hitchens in turn. She was right, he was wrong. In front of his journalist colleagues he was told to stand right in front of her so that she could hit him lightly with her order papers. Over the years, and through much re-telling, the story had it that Thatcher told Hitchens to bend over, and that she spanked him with her order papers.

The truth is less significant than the alteration to it. There was always an element of the erotic in the national obsession with her. From the invention of the term “sado-monetarism” through to the way her powerful ministers seemed to swoon before her, and the constant negative reiteration by her critics of her femininity, or lack of it, she exerted a glacial hold over the (male) nation’s masochistic imagination. This was heightened by the suspicion that this power was not consciously deployed.

Meryl Streep’s depiction of a shuffling figure, stricken and isolated by the death of her husband, Denis, may have softened memories, or formed them in the minds of a younger generation. The virtual state funeral will rehearse again our extravagant fixations. Opponents and supporters of Margaret Thatcher will never agree about the value of her legacy, but as for her importance, her hypnotic hold on us, they are bound to find common ground.

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