A harsh portrayal of a callous woman

HIS name was Peter, and he wore hard years on his face.

He had left Kerry in the 1950s and ended up in London. When I met him, in the mid-1980s, he was employed by a firm in King’s Cross that made and sold concrete. Peter cleaned in the yard, hosing down the bays where trucks filled up with concrete. It was a dirty job, but paid well for unskilled labour.

I was working a summer job, and at break we retreated to a shed at the back of the yard that smelled of tea and damp clothes and onions. There, one morning, Peter told me of his admiration for Margaret Thatcher.

I was surprised, if not shocked. In Ireland, Thatcher was the devil incarnate. She had shown callous disregard for the hunger strikers and their families. Her position on the demands of the prisoners was intransigent in those surreal months of 1981.

Her attitude to Ireland and its ‘troubles’ resonated with that of one of her predecessors, Winston Churchill, a figure much reviled here. We loathed her.

Here was Peter, a member of the Irish immigrant tribe, which wore a deeper shade of green than those back home, expressing admiration for her. Peter was also of the working class in London. How could somebody drawn from that stratum of society have any time for a political leader whose agenda was to smash the trade unions?

Thatcher had been accused of dividing Britain, between north and south, the unionised workforce and employers, those who believed in society and those who championed the individual.

The passions she evoked found many forms. One political strain was vocalised by Elvis Costello, who penned the song, Tramp the Dirt Down. The title is a reference to dancing on her grave. One verse begins: “When England was the whore of the world, Margaret was her madam, when the future was as bright and as clear as the black tarmacadam.”

Now, this immigrant Kerryman was telling me how great she was. Peter spelt it out in plain language to this greenhorn just off the boat.

“She stopped fleecing the working man,” he said. “She let us keep our money rather than taking it all in tax, like the other crowd. There’s some who don’t like what she’s doing, but for anybody working, it means a better life.”

His opinion would have been highly disputed by members of the unionised workforce, particularly in the state sector. One of Thatcher’s main projects was privatisation of state services. But Peter’s opinion would also have found favour with the large swathes that re-elected her to power twice over her 12-year tenure as prime minister.

I thought of Peter the other night when I went to see the biopic of Thatcher, The Iron Lady. As with the woman herself, the portrayal of her character has sharply divided opinion. Some think it does her justice, particularly in how it dealt with the forces that were raged against her. It’s easy to forget that in the 1970s, the unions in Britain ruled with an iron fist in a manner that came close to smothering any entrepreneurial spirit. It’s easy to forget that being a woman in a man’s world back then required balls of steel.

Thatcher took that on, but she also lacked any basic empathy for those at the sharp end of her politics. In this, she resembled the chief executive of a company chasing only the bottom line, rather than a politician whose primary function is to better the lot of all citizens.

She showed a ruthless streak in prosecuting the Falklands war. Not unlike George Bush some 20 years later, victory in a needless war thousands of miles from home catapulted her, in 1983, to an unlikely re-election. The movie deals with her role in the war in terms of her principles, with scant reference to the human cost, which may accurately reflect her position at the time.

But to this viewer, The Iron Lady is guilty of exactly what its subject was often accused of — a complete lack of empathy for the vulnerable.

David Cameron has a point when he says that the film should not have been made while Thatcher was still alive. The script is based around Thatcher’s latter years, during which she has suffered from dementia. Her earlier life is delivered in flashbacks.

In her demented state, she converses on a daily basis with her dead husband, Denis. While the portrayal is somewhat sensitive, it does raise the question as to whether somebody who is still alive should be depicted in this manner. Would a filmmaker have been as quick to portray her battling out her final years if she had a debilitating physical illness?

Thatcher is 86. She is highly unlikely to ever see the film, or even if she did, to fully grasp it. Her family declined an invitation to attend the premiere.

Unfortunately in today’s world, biopics such as The Iron Lady serve for many as a substitute for proper examination of a historical figure’s life and career.

Here, so much emphasis is placed on her declining years that her legacy, whether positive or negative, is done a disservice. None of which is to take away from the performance of Meryl Streep, which conforms to her usual high standard.

The politics is dealt with only in a superficial manner. This is a missed opportunity, because one major element of her legacy has echoed all the way down to the debt-laden, turbulent economies of today’s western world.

Thatcher and her kindred spirit, then US president Ronald Reagan, began the deregulation of financial markets in the 1980s. They were pursuing an agenda that saw the market as the ultimate self-regulator.

In doing so, they discarded the caution that had informed capitalism for the 50 years after the Great Depression. It was as if they and their fellow travellers felt that the dangers of unregulated markets could be ignored, and it was time to move onto a new paradigm.

And so the yuppie entered the public square in Britain, flash, brash and turning a quick buck while he mocked the grey, cautious banker of old. Over in the USA, Gordon Gekko, the anti-hero of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, cut a swathe through the markets, proclaiming that “greed is good.”

The ultimate destination of this philosophy has been arrived on both sides of the Atlantic over the last four years. Deregulated markets begat a jungle where vast fortunes could be made by traders and their ilk using obscure financial instruments.

To sustain itself, that, in turn, begat a system where huge quantities of debt were shoved into the undergrowth for years, before crawling back out to bring the whole edifice crashing down, as it has.

Thatcher’s supporters have claimed that she would have abhorred the obscene salaries that are paid in the financial sector.

That may well be true, but the system that brought the western world to its current station has its origins in the philosophy she and Reagan embraced, as a means to further their world vision.

The Iron Lady should not have been made now, in regard for basic empathy. But the re-introduction of Thatcher to the public, albeit on the silver screen, is timely in terms of a morality tale. It’s just a pity the filmmakers never bothered to examine that element of her life or legacy.