For us on the British left, there are no one, not one, historical personages that so united us in scorn and hatred that that young Chemist from Finchley. It is irrational in its intensity and quite remarkably vicious still. I do not excuse myself from this. I really do hate her with a passion. I recognise that she has become totemic and representative of not just what I view as a malicious, hypocritical and corrupt government but also of two other burning concerns of the left in general.
Firstly, her ideology, and it should go without saying she is probably the most ideologically driven leader of any major political party in British history, is a perverse and degrading view on mankind as a social actor and political creature. The extremity of the property fetish, as some materialist ersatz for a soul, is to make humanity as limited and sociopathic a creature as the vulgar self-interested automatons of Bolshevik Marxism or the Blud und Kultur containers of Volkisch and quasi-Volkisch pseud-science.
Secondly, her triumphs, and they were total and crushing, demonstrate how hopeless the left as a power house of ideas and action had become. After 1979 and 1983, her revolution, and I do mean that, made pre-existing socialism an alien niche property in Britain.
Thus, Mrs Thatcher, daughter of a Grocer and local politician, wife of a successful business man, mother to two children, wilful employee and local Tory activist, took on monsterous proportions. From the Milk Snatcher (an almost Fagin like clinche) to the warmonger to the Union breaker and the harbinger of mass soul destroying unemployment, riots and upheaval, the actual woman has been subsumed.
Given her status as the last great dominating politician of ideas and policy, it is unsurprising that dramatists have taken to her so much. On the early efforts, The Falklands Play was the most ambitious at getting close to the actual woman and the actual politics, the weltanschuuang of the time. In comparison, the Comic Strip farce on the GLC, a hilarious mixture of agit-prop and Rambo, gave a mocking clarity to the hyperbola of both sides.
In the last year or two, two dramas have been appear on our screens. Both seek to look at the actual, rather than the demon. The first, 'The Long Walk to Finchley' starring the mind renderingly beautiful Andrea Riseborough as the lady herself was a quite stylistic, character driven affair. It mostly revolved around Thatcher's early struggles to be taken seriously as a potential MP. Whilst it tried hard to capture some essence of the drive, it was light on what made the woman so formidable, her ideas, her conception of society and her political morality.
In contrast, the sequel 'Margaret' is a far more political animal indeed. A huge ensemble cast including the great Roger Allam surround a electrical performance by Lindsey Duncan as a real breathing, passionate ideologue and acolyte of 'doing'. The personal is lightly done with skill and the politics is never dumbed down. It manages that most difficult of balancing acts in historical drama, highlighting the eventually important and maintaining a tension of uncertainty over the end. It also captures a human mania, for power, ideas and virtue.
As mentioned, the ideologue, the driven 'man of the moment' is authentically portrayed. It also encompasses the ruthlessness and the fury of those around her, most impressively by Michael Maloney playing an almost chilling John Major (I know, most unlikely coupling eva!) and a finely foul-mouthed Alan Clark. But just as impressive is the way it expands on one of the recent revelations about Thatcher. Her remarkable humourlessness. Now one might say this is minor, but it actually is sturdily handled and an very insightful point. Thatcher could not understand fun, laughter and humour, it was beyond her capacities as a human being. The well known antidotes of her script writers struggles to get her to time her delivery and understand their jokes testify to this.
Rather then suggest this is an underlying cause of her own will to power and lack of compassion, I suggest something more cathartic to us haters of the left. Humourlessness and holding ideas as holy and sacred does not go together. One might mention Danton or Heydrich or Bukharin. I am merely reassured that a figure as divisive and at times vicious as Thatcher was denied the transcendental relief of humour, of the joke, the giggle and the pun. When much in the world is unjust, brutal and violent, the gallows humour of the flock provides an escape more innocent and yet just as transporting as the most religious of epiphanic episodes. There is a small justice in that. And I prefer that to wishing another human being dead. Life is funny like that.
In conclusion, I say watch 'Margaret', one might not like such elite drama/big man history, but this is one of the very best
