Britain’s first female prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, was a remarkable woman. Mind you, it is pretty remarkable that — being a woman — she got the job at all, as this enthralling biography explains.
It is very different today. Britain’s Conservative Party is led by a black woman and three women have been prime minister of the country, but in the 1970s, when this daughter of a grocer from the boring, backwater Lincolnshire market town of Grantham rose to lead her party, and then her country, Britain had a very male-dominated, elitist and snobbish political class.
The Incidental Feminist provides a refreshingly rounded picture of a complex and easily caricatured character who was admired and lauded by many but despised and hated by many others.
Our paths crossed during several radio interviews when I was reporting on the EU and Nato, and she would attend summits with other leaders.
Whether it was in boring institutional buildings in Brussels and Luxembourg, on the lawn of the historic Fontainebleau Château near Paris, inside Dublin Castle, on the Island of Rhodes or in wintry Copenhagen or the Hague (when SA featured strongly on the agenda), we would sit opposite one another and I would try to trick and outsmart her.
It never worked.
What I did learn was that this remarkable woman was more than a two-dimensional cardboard cutout and, occasionally, I could snatch a glimpse through the impeccable coiffed appearance to the flesh-and-blood human, the woman beneath the mask.
This was most apparent when she attended an EC Summit in Dublin in 1990, at a time when she was still the IRA’s primary target. Indeed, so fearful were her advisers for her safety that she did not spend the night in Dublin, being whisked back to the British mainland by helicopter for a few hours’ rest before returning to Ireland the next morning.
She seemed unusually fatigued and, while far from frail, she was not as robust as her “Iron Lady” nickname might have implied.
Though she does not shy away from a wider analysis of Thatcher’s persona, Tina Gaudoin analyses how the Tory leader was able to carve out such a remarkable political career without banging the gong for the feminist cause, or not very loudly, anyway.
While she did have strong and caring relationships with her female staff, Thatcher’s political appointments were almost exclusively of men, and she favoured the posh, well-educated types, ideally those with an upright posture, good looks and a distinguished war record.
“The fact that she was a female does not diminish her successes, nor, for that matter, does it excuse her failures. Rather, it requires us, with the benefit of hindsight, to take another, more nuanced look at one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century,” writes Gaudion.
“We are all familiar with the diametrically opposing Thatcher narratives: one endorses her as perhaps the greatest politician of the twentieth century and the other condemns her as the architect of a Britain dominated by privatising elites, blinded by greed and competitive consumerism, grown careless of the welfare of those less fortunate.
“What is so often forgotten, in the heat of debate, is the plain and simple fact that Margaret Thatcher was a woman, operating in what, at the time, was almost exclusively a male-dominated world. You might well say it still is.”
The British media has seized on suggestions in this book that Thatcher may have had affairs, most notably with fellow Conservative Sir Humphrey Atkins.
Certainly, she was not immune to flattery and not above turning on the charm, and I have chatted with a senior British TV political journalist who was smitten with her.
It was Jacques Santer, a former prime minister of Luxembourg, who let slip that one French president had said of Thatcher that she had “eyes like Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe”. I heard this attributed to Jacques Chirac, but Gaudoin suggests instead that it was François Mitterrand who made the remark.
Thatcher had a reputation for being humourless and socially awkward, which might have been due to mild autism, and this is certainly a theory given some weight in this book.
She was a big fan of opera, which again was something that came as a bit of a surprise to me, as I had been indoctrinated into the vision of Thatcher as a workaholic, with little time for the finer things in life.
Perhaps less surprising was the confirmation that she was extremely interested in fashion and in her earlier years had been a real movie buff.
Having trained as a scientist before turning to the law and then politics, Thatcher is credited in this book as having been an early convert to the green agenda.
“She was, in fact, the first global leader to countenance the veracity of the climate change theory after hearing about it at the inaugural UN Environment Conference in Stockholm, and then by having it explained in greater detail by diplomat Sir Crispin Tickell, who had studied the subject at Harvard,” Gaudion writes.
Returning to the title of this absorbing and entertaining book, it is the almost inadvertent pioneering of feminism which, for many, may be Thatcher’s most enduring legacy.
“Whether we like it or not, as women we all, to a greater or lesser extent, stand on her shoulders,” Gaudoin claims.
“We only have to look at the history books, read the novels and watch the movies of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, when she was making her political way, to understand that, for women, the past was truly a foreign country.
“And yet, we judge the first female leader of a G7 nation, her actions and her policies as if they were taking place in real time — today.
“Margaret Thatcher was a paradox: a woman from the ‘wrong’ class, who succeeded in a world almost entirely dominated by upper-class men, whilst bringing few women along with her.
“As bossy as she was brave and as seductive as she was strident, she confused, bemused and battered those who still held on to outdated stereotypes of what a woman could and should be.”
She suggests that Thatcher had absolutely no compunction about using her feminine wiles to get what she wanted, “relished her femininity, was addicted to the glamour of clothes, the seduction of Hollywood, and had a magpie eye for detail — political or otherwise”.
Possibly her biggest challenge was as a war leader, taking her country to war against Argentina in 1982 after the invasion of the Falkland Islands.
“That Margaret Thatcher was playing against the female type cannot have escaped anyone. That she led from the front and won (if there are ever truly any victors in war) certainly destroyed any number of traditional female stereotypes in perpetuity…. Thatcher showed the world that women had an equal right to be hard, tough and even nasty.
“In short, Margaret Thatcher was a ‘badass’.”
Undoubtedly, there are many in SA who can never forgive Thatcher for her reluctance to see off the apartheid regime, for her stubborn resistance to tighter sanctions on the country.
However, she must have spent many happy visits to SA once her son Mark moved to the Cape, and one would hope that she came to better understand the country and appreciate the optimism and upliftment of the transition to democracy.
Whether you loved her or hated her, there can be no doubt that Thatcher made a huge difference economically and politically, and in proving that even in class-ridden, postimperial Britain, a woman could get to the very top.
This study of the world’s most successful incidental feminist suggests that the women of Britain, and further afield, have a lot to be grateful for.
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