Thatcher on the Edge of Madness

One of my favorite stories in respect of Margaret Thatcher concerns the prime minister’s visit to a sitting of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal. This must have been about 1990. I wasn’t in the meeting, having already become editor of the Forward. The Journal had issued editorials critical of Mrs. Thatcher for agreeing to give back to Communist China not only Hong Kong’s New Territories that Britain had had under lease but also Hong Kong Island itself, territory that Britain owned outright — every bit as much as it owns, say, the Falklands.

When Mrs. Thatcher entered the editorial board, she was seated on one side of an oblong table. Without waiting for further ado, she launched into an unvarnished defense of her policies on Hong Kong and chastised the editors for their critique, at one point characterizing the editorials as “hurtful.” Then she leaned her capacious bosom forward slightly, stared at the editor across the table, and demanded: “Do I make myself cleee-ah?”

The editor of the Journal, Robert Bartley, who knew that Mrs. Thatcher knew that the newspaper’s editorials on Hong Kong were as right as rain, didn’t bat an eyelash. On the contrary, he displayed, in the memory of the paper’s chief editorial writer, Daniel Henninger, “one of the largest Bartley Cheshire cat grins of all time.” The prime minister settled back, flashed an amiable smile, and commenced to answering the editors’ questions in cheerful terms.

I was thinking of that encounter during a showing Monday of “The Iron Lady,” a marvelous dramatization of Mrs. Thatcher’s heroic life. We saw the movie at a showing at which Harvey Weinstein, whose company made the film, offered a few brief remarks, noting that the movie has been criticized and praised by both liberals and conservatives. Mark me down as in the camp that loved it. I’ve always been a sucker for bio-pics, including the recent crop dealing with Britons. I enjoyed “The Kings Speech” and “The Queen” (though “Secretariat” even more). “The Iron Lady” has moments that are right up there with the best of them and certain elements that could be called brilliant.

The film opens with an aged and frail Baroness Thatcher — played brilliantly by Meryl Streep — in her apartment, having breakfast with her husband Denis. He, long since dead, turns out to be an apparition, fleeting in and out of the baronness’s dementia, as the movie tells the story in a series of flashbacks. It is a daring concept that is carried off convincingly not only by Miss Streep and but also Jim Broadbent, as Denis, not to mention the director, Phillydia Lloyd.

The character-illuminating scenes are well chosen. In one, the young Margaret Roberts, played by Alexandra Roach, and her parents are sheltering from the London Blitz under some beams in their grocery, when her father remembers they left the butter uncovered. It is young Margaret who darts out into the danger to place a glass lid over the precious pound. Another depicts Thatcher’s last moments with Airey Neave, the one-time war hero who headed her office and, in 1979, was slain by an Irish liberation faction in a car bombing as he left a car-park at Westminster.

Another powerful scene depicts Thatcher in the war room during the Falklands fight, when she ordered the sinking of the Argentine cruiser ARA General Belgrano. It was an attack in ambiguous circumstances, in that the Belgrano was outside the declared exclusion zone. The attack Thatcher ordered not only sent more than 300 Argentine sailors to their doom and demonstrated that the Iron Lady fully grasped the laws of war but also helped secure the victory that turned the political tide in Britain in her favor.

The film then portrays Mrs. Thatcher’s increasing compulsion to control, climaxing in a scene in which she — seeming on the edge of madness — humiliates her cabinet as a gathering of weak individuals. This precipitates the rebellion against her from her fellow conservatives that ended her rule. It’s powerful stuff, and fair enough, I suppose. But if the movie seems more admiring of her will than her policies, it also misses what I, as one scrivner who covered her from a distance, think of as her crowning moment.

This was her visit in 1988 to communist Poland, where she insisted, against the wishes of the Soviet puppet regime, on meeting with the leadership of the free trade union, Solidarity, which had been organized at Gdansk. She entered the city by boat, the first western leader to visit the beleaguered labor union members, and was greeted with what the Associated Press characterized as a “tumultuous” welcome by 20,000 Poles, shouting “Long Live Thatcher.” She was taken to a meeting at St. Brygida's Parish Church near the shipyard.

What an astounding, deeply satisfying thing it is that the Western leader the shipyard workers chose as their hero was Margaret Thatcher. They'd formed a free trade union behind the Iron Curtain and adopted as their hero the one-time grocery-store-clerk turned tribune of free markets who pulled Britain — and, by example, Western Europe — out of the doldrums of the 1970s and set so much of the stage for the triumph of capitalism over the Soviet empire. The truth is that as wonderful as “The Iron Lady” is in the film, the real woman was even more triumphant — something that history has made perfectly clee-ah.