The definitive verdict on the biopic from former Guardian political editor Michael White, who observed Thatcher up close as a young sketchwriter in the 1970s
It would be easy to imagine saying to Meryl Streep, "I knew Margaret Thatcher. You're no Margaret Thatcher," as an American politician once did to a rival who compared himself to President John F Kennedy. Easy, but wrong. Streep's interpretation of Thatcher in three distinct stages of her career, before, during and after her 11-year premiership, is a remarkable and sensitive achievement. Give the woman another Oscar, the pair of them can share it. Hollywood would like that.
The jibe could be levelled against Phyllida Lloyd's film. The Iron Lady certainly contains a selection of Thatcher's greatest handbaggings – which everyone much over 40 will remember with nostalgic glee or a shudder. We all knew her. But it is background. What cinema-goers will remember from this film is its foreground, a brilliant and thus unavoidably cruel portrait of old age, loneliness and decay, the harrowing fall from greatness. It should have been called The Rusty Lady or – Lloyd and Streep's earlier hit – GrandMamma Mia.
As such it is, despite the frenzied flashbacks and bewildering chronology, a fine piece of work, well worth seeing for Streep's performance and several others, including Jim Broadbent's Denis and Olivia Colman as daughter, Carol. They were the nicest members of that dysfunctional family, the ones who usually got the short end of the handbag. But not even Arthur Scargill or the late General Leopoldo Galtieri of Argentina can be so vengeful as to want Thatcher to see herself with dementia, less Iron Lady more Lady Gaga. She won't, the film is right about that. Mercifully, she is too frail.
It was not a description that crossed anyone's mind when I first met her at some reception in the mid-70s. She had survived the lampooned hats and the milk-snatching as education secretary to see off Ted Heath and his would-be successors to become Tory leader in 1975. In private, the old school, with their country houses and military crosses, were immensely condescending, telling each other not take her wilder utterances too seriously. No 10 would tame her. In Lloyd's film they are seen to whisper a lot. It conveys the flavour of the time.
Thatcher was already famous for passing instant judgments on people she met. I knew I was too young and long-haired, too tentative, too Guardian, to pass muster. On one occasion in the receiving line at No 10 (more formal in those days) she took my hand and yanked me past her with only a perfunctory hullo. Gordon Brown would have done it too, but lacked the nerve.
As the paper's sketchwriter, I came to realise that I did have one advantage during our occasional exchanges. In a small group or at a reception one could make a little joke. Those present would smile or even laugh. Not Mrs T. She didn't do jokes, which put her at a brief disadvantage and caused her to leave a trail of double entendres. "Every prime minister needs a Willie (Whitelaw)" and, during an engineering visit, "I've never seen a tool as big as this."
So Lloyd and the writer, Abi Morgan, have generously credited her with too much humour, mostly in her dealings with her beloved Denis, whom Broadbent portrays as more of a knockabout character (where did that Cockney come from?) than the sub-Duke of Edinburgh type he was. Constantly scolded by the wife ("too much butter, Denis") but still his own gin-drinking man, he was much smarter than Private Eye's "Dear Bill" column could admit, loyal and adoring but also sometimes exasperated.
Thus, when his wife allowed herself to be filmed with a baby calf on a Suffolk farm during the 1979 election campaign, Denis was heard to mutter: "If we're not careful we'll soon have a dead calf on our hands." Sure enough the Mirror rang the farm every day, but Thatcher's luck and discipline held. Far from witnessing a fatal gaffe or calf-killing during the campaign, as Labour prayed, those of us on the campaign plane and bus (only one train, she didn't like them) soon realised she wouldn't put a foot wrong.
It was soft content-lite Thatcher on display, a succession of photo-ops, telly with the sound turned off – and she won. Only then did the fireworks start and only gradually. Lloyd's Iron Lady takes few serious liberties with narrative facts in a series of setpieces: strikes, the Falklands war and Irish bombs, little on Europe or the cold war, no Westland crisis or Kinnock. Keep it simple for American audiences, and after all most of Thatcher's cabinet will be unknown to younger Brits. This film is only about one person.
As such it exaggerates her resolution and inflexibility, as she did herself. Thatcher could be pragmatic, even indecisive, though we hacks rarely saw it. She could also be kind. We didn't see much of that either. Nor did the miners, faltering cabinet colleagues or Carol whom she makes cry in the film without noticing. I can believe that. The script comes close to caricature, but then so did Thatcher. Streep's skill saves the day.
Is it a leftie assassination job? Or rightwing hagiography? Neither. The odd thing about The Iron Lady is that, for a film about politics, it not very political. In handling the politics of deeply divided Britain of the 80s it is blandly fair to both perspectives, Thatcher's and her critics.
Why? Because this is a personal, essentially feminist story, about how a shopkeeper's daughter conquered a very patrician world, how she was torn between ambition and family (ambition usually won), how hard it was to become the first woman ruler of Britain since Elizabeth I – who dispatched her own (female) rival, her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, to the block and instantly regretted it, as Thatcher might have done.
Yet here, as in life, Thatcher, housewife and statesman, is not a satisfactory feminist icon. She could have promoted women (only Janet Young served briefly in her cabinet), but didn't. As the film rightly notes, she preferred men and wanted women to win on merit, as she had done, not on gender alone.
Her father, Alfred Roberts (disconcertingly we last saw Iain Glen, who plays him, in Downton Abbey as press magnate Sir Richard Carlisle), is her hero. Lloyd and Morgan get that right. She promoted ideological proteges, all men, but to enhance her isolation we do not see that.
As good sisters Lloyd/Morgan also eschew another aspect of Thatcher's power: her sexual allure and willingness to use it, just as Barbara Castle – Labour's Thatcher – did. Politicians of her generation fancied her ("whisky on her breath tonight") and she always kept some eye candy, a Humphrey Atkins or Cecil Parkinson, in cabinet. Even Alan Clark, a serious womaniser, once told me how she had squeezed his little finger as they parted. He clearly felt gallant about it – though not even Clark would have tried it on. Ronald Reagan? Perish the thought. Streep's Thatcher having a button sewn on the plunging neckline of her evening dress as she berates the cabinet wets is as close as we get.
In 1966, the year David Cameron was born, Winston Churchill's doctor, Lord Moran, was roundly denounced for publishing The Struggle for Survival, his account of the wartime leader's turbulent health from 1940 to his retirement in 1955. But at least Moran had drawn a veil over his last years and Churchill was dead at the time. In our intrusive, impatient age, they erect statues to the living and film their painful decline as clinically as if it was a decayed pit community.
The Iron Lady is tribute of sorts, but a strange one.