Then-PM Thatcher in 1981 greeting Strom Thurmond. Note how unremarkable everyone else’s evening attire was, compared to Strom’s.
I was very proud of myself yesterday for knowing who Lilly Pulitzer was when the news came that she’d died. Even though I only knew it because we had passed her shop while walking up King Street in Charleston on Saturday (and you couldn’t have picked a more glorious day for it), and my wife noted that she’d always found her designs appealing, and I briefly thought that at least the colors were appropriate to the day and time of year.
But I didn’t have to reach at all when I got the news this morning about Margaret Thatcher. All sorts of things came to mind. Of course, being who I am, the very first thing wasn’t “Lady Thatcher, who with Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II helped bring down the Soviet Union.” Although it probably should have been. No, my first thought was, Now that the occasion has actually arrived, is Elvis Costello still eager to tramp the dirt down, or has he calmed and forgiven a bit? The latter, I hope. I’m a huge Elvis fan — he’s easily my favourite musician to emerge in the last 35 years — but what applies to so many in the arts and pop culture also applies to him: Enormously talented as he is, it’s probably best if he not delve into political commentary. That song was a bit… intemperate. Overwrought, even.
The newspapers, of course, immediately strove to strike the right note. Speaking of “strike,” though, the BBC seems to have committed a rather awkward typo (according to the Twitter feed “@HeardinLondon) in an early mobile version of the story, at right. But on the whole you could see the papers had done what newspapers have traditionally been relied on to do: Thought about it ahead of time. Here’s how The Guardian captured the moment:
Margaret Thatcher, the most dominant British prime minister since Winston Churchill in 1940 and a global champion of the late 20th-century free market economic revival, has died.
Her spokesman, Lord Bell, said on Monday: “It is with great sadness that Mark and Carol Thatcher announced that their mother Baroness Thatcher died peacefully following a stroke this morning. A further statement will be made later.”
That got me to thinking: Well, is that what she was? Was not, for instance, Tony Blair as “dominant” in his own time, reshaping the Labour movement, defining the Third Way, leading his nation in war in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq? Perhaps not. Perhaps that’s just me being as big a fan of Tony as I am of Elvis. I mean, it’s not like The Guardian is carrying water for the Tories. And they’re a lot closer to it than I am. So I accept their judgment.
Official Britain seems to agree as to her stature. The Times reported:
Margaret Thatcher is to have the same funeral status as the Queen Mother and Diana, Princess of Wales, Downing Street announced. They had ceremonial funerals, which have many of the trappings of a state event.
The last Prime Minister to be accorded the accolade of a full state funeral was Winston Churchill, and there has been some agonising among the authorities about whether Baroness Thatcher should receive the same honour.
Her funeral, which will have military honours, will take place at St Paul’s Cathedral, Lady Thatcher’s choice. Royalty will attend but whether the Queen will go is not yet known.
Hmmm. I should think Lady Thatcher would not have actively wished a “Diana funeral,” but she’d be happy to have one like the Queen Mum.
In any case, a solemn moment, and I agree wholeheartedly with Labour MP Tom Watson, who Tweeted, “I hope that people on the left of politics respect a family in grief today.”
Hear that, Elvis?
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I believe it was Lincoln who said “Give me a General who will fight!”. Margaret Thatcher was such. She didn’t try to compromise – she fought. In that vein, she and Churchill were cut from similar cloth.
However, (as you say above) Blair was more into harmonizing right and left, which made him a champion of the “Third Way”. That certainly has it’s own merit, and he was perhaps bold in a different way.
However, I wouldn’t put Blair in the same category as Churchill and Thatcher.
“I hope that people on the left of politics respect a family in grief today.”
I guess Donna Brazille didn’t get that memo:
“Okay, what did the #ironlady do to advance Great Britain and the world? Did she leave lasting footprints for women in politics? #justsayin”
https://twitter.com/donnabrazile/status/321258338958602241
Since Churchill, meaning in the time between her and Churchill, probably yes. Tony Blair was better, though.
The thing that marked her and Blair both was boldness. They each charted their own course. They led their parties, and the nation, rather than following or going with the flow. Thatcher did so against the dramatic backdrop of the Cold War, while Blair was destined to lead in less monumental times.
We speak of Lady Thatcher’s boldness, determination and iron will in regaining the Falklands. And that was definitely a dramatic stroke, with all sorts of overtones of history — the brave Tommies boarding the ships in England, with the band playing “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,” the long sea voyage, the amphibious landing, the most notable sea battle since WWII…
But in a way, what Blair did in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq was bolder. What Lady Thatcher did evoked history and the days of empire; what Blair did charted new ground, in terms of defining the role of a leading Western power in the world. PM Thatcher was showing that Britannia still had the old stuff; Blair was reshaping international relations.
And from what I know, each was just as bold in terms of domestic politics, requiring other members of their respective parties to get in line behind them or get left.
Best PM was Hugh Grant in “Love , Actually”. He stood up to President Billy Bob Thorton AND got the girl. (and let’s not get into a Keira Knightly beauty ranking contest)
That suggests we should have a “Top Five Fictional PMs.” That one will take some thought.
But one I think will definitely make the list is Jim Hacker, of “Yes, Prime Minister.”
As for “Love, Actually” — the thing that really strikes me seeing it now (that is, I saw it again around Christmas) is that a markedly younger Andrew Lincoln, whom we now know as Rick Grimes from “The Walking Dead,” played the guy who was hopelessly in love with Keira Knightly.
Oh, and remember, Hugh Grant’s character had a comment about Thatcher. Agonizing over the fact that he has the hots for a staffer, he looks at a picture of Maggie and says, “You have this kind of problem? Yeah… of course you did, you saucy minx!”
That’s going to be a tough one. I can’t think of five movies I’ve seen with a fictional Prime Minister that had enough of a role to merit being an actual character. Other than Grant in “Love Actually”, the only other fictional PM character that I can think of is the Prime Minister in “V for Vendetta” http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0434409/
In V, John Hurt played a really evil PM that ended up being the high chancellor in a dystopian England. Not really comparable to Grant’s light-hearted PM. Other than those two, I got nothing.
Tough category.
Good point. I can think of one other good one off the top of my head: The hapless PM in the original British version of “House of Cards.”
Most of the British fiction I encounter stays away from inventing a PM, even though I read a lot of fiction that deal with the British government. In John le Carre’s books, for instance, the highest official you deal with is Oliver Lacon, who seems to work for the Foreign Secretary, who is unnamed. And in the Aubrey/Maturin novels that I read obsessively, the highest official you hear about is the First Lord of the Admiralty — who, in at least some of the novels, is an actual historical figure, Lord Melville (the brother of Jack’s semi-fictional friend, Heneage Dundas). And of course, Maturin frequently interacts with the Duke of Clarence, but he’s not fictional, either. I think there was a reference to Pitt once, but he doesn’t appear as a character.
I don’t get why the the American Right (which equates taxes with socialism) construct such hagiographies of this women. Lets not forget that Baroness Maggie raised taxes on the British working class during an economic downturn (not to mention gutting the entire manufacturing sector in Northern England and Scotland). She raised the VAT (think sales tax) from 8 to 15% in order to makeup for the lost revenue from her cuts in the top income tax rates. And she lost her premiership in 1990 when she passed a very unpopular poll tax proposal which lead to riots in Trafalgar Square and to her Tory successor eventually repealing the tax. I would love to know Grover Norquist’s opinion of her given the fact she was a serial tax-hiker.
Maggie was PM back when conservatives were conservatives, instead of nihilistic, anarchistic, government-hating libertarians.
Back then, conservatives believed in the bedrock institutions of society (that’s sort of the core of what being “conservative” means), and understood that governmental institutions were no less critical than the private sector, and that they had a responsibility, if they were elected officials, to be good stewards of those institutions — not to try to bleed them to death and run them into the ground.
That meant you had to have taxes. A true conservative understands that taxes are a fact of life. Sometimes you raise them; sometimes you lower them.
My mind still reels at the utter arbitrariness of these people who ALWAYS vote for tax cuts, and NEVER consider a tax increase (or anyone who would do the opposite, if you can find someone like that, which you can’t). That’s as arbitrary as going into office promising to always vote “no” on bills that come up on odd-numbered days of the month, and “yes” on the even-numbered days. It means they have no intention of analyzing the actual situation in which a proposal is put before them, or what would be the wise course of action.
So true. I’m reminded of Carroll Campbell’s “one-stop shop” for government services, one of the central ideas in his campaign for governor in 1986. It was a good idea if you cared about government efficiency, as opposed to just drowning the government in the bathtub.
Boy Brad you sure do have a soft spot for “Milk Snatcher” Thatcher.
So you, as a “true” conservative, are fine with shifting the tax burden from the wealth on to the backs of the working class? In a recession? Because that is what she did when she lowered the income tax rates and nearly doubled the VAT rates.
Maybe that is why Thatcher presided over nearly a decade of over 10% unemployment in the UK.
Just looked again at that picture of PM Thatcher and Thurmond. The three women in that photo seem to be the product of a combined 48 hours or more in the salon. How about those hairdos? Was it the fashion at the time, or just among their particular set?
Life was much easier for the men in the picture. All Strom had to do was rub the Tang into his hair and comb it back…
OK, in case not everyone gets that… the Tang reference was to one of Dave Barry’s best-ever columns. I can’t seem to find a link to the original, but here’s a 1994 piece by Maureen Dowd quoting from it:
That’s from back in the days when I really enjoyed Maureen Dowd’s columns. I thought she started getting sort of stale about 10 years after that…
I found the original Dave Barry column! Here it is. You should definitely read the whole thing. Again, it’s about the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, which as you recall turned into a total circus, which is how Dave covered them.
In case you don’t go read the whole thing, which you should, I’m going to give you a bigger chunk of it:
The hair was par for the course for women whose hairdos were frozen circa 1963. Women who were in their fifties or older in the 80s, that is, over 30 when the youthquake hit. They just kept getting a weekly shampoo and set at the beauty parlor, while younger women styled their own hair.
And while those ladies were stuck in the past, ol’ Strom was sporting those stylish sideburns…
No Virtual Front Page today, but I did want to share this interesting piece in the NYT about the Thatcher legacy, “Thatcher Freed Market Forces, and Europe Is Still Adjusting.” Although it’s an analysis rather than news, it’s actually leading their site, which shows how important the editors think it is. Excerpts:
In their hagiography of Thatcher the NYT seems to omit some of the nastier bits from her time in office. No mention of the fact she called Nelson Mandela a terrorist and went out of her way to prevent implementation of international sanctions against apartheid South Africa. They also seem to omit the fact that she was close friends with the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, even saying in 1999 that he was trying to bring democracy to Chile when he overthrew the democratically elected government.
And as for Thatcher being a defender of human rights and an opponent of communism, how do you explain the fact that she provided the Khmer Rouge with military training and technical assistance?
And this is just on foreign policy.
From the editorial in The Guardian:
More than 20 years after her party disposed of her when she had become an electoral liability, British public life is still defined to an extraordinary degree by the argument between those who wish to continue or refine what she started and those who want to mitigate or turn it back. Just as in life she shaped the past 30 years, so in death she may well continue to shape the next 30. These are claims that can be made about no other modern British prime minister. She was in many ways the most formidable peacetime leader this country has had since Gladstone.