We managed to hurry the conversation on without incident,
but it got me thinking about old Maggie and the reaction to her death. The
media wheeling out their long prepared obits and pull-out specials. The children
on Twitter asking “Lulz, whose this Tatcher?” The paeans of praise from the
right. And of course the vitriol from certain quarters of the left.
In some parts of the country they held parties to celebrate
the death of a frail 87 year old grandmother who left office nearly a quarter
of a century ago. Classless, petty and demeaning, of course, but hardly
unexpected. What I have always found interesting when it comes to Thatcher is that
some of those expressing the strongest opinions were barely alive during her premiership.
Many are the children of comfortably well-off middle-class families. Where does
this deep well of hatred spring from?
Perhaps they were particularly engaged toddlers, imbibing
Marx with their mother’s milk.
Or perhaps there is more to it. I don’t much like Gordon
Brown. I think he did enormous, lasting damage to the country and was not a
particularly pleasant man to boot. But I won’t be dancing a jig when he dies.
This Thatcher hatred goes far beyond her policies.
“Ding dong, the witch is dead”
We cannot escape the obvious. The character of that hatred
is defined by her sex. They call her “hag”, “bitch” and worse beside. What
makes some left-wing activists, self-described feminists, scourges of misogyny and
the imperial patriarchy worldwide pour such scorn on the first female
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom?
Part of the answer I believes lies in the power of mythology,
especially on the young.
For them, Thatcher is not just a politician vehemently
disagreed with. She is the wicked witch. She has been transformed from a flawed
human being into a caricature, a fairy-tale villain. A mythic archetype of the
evil mother.
And myths are powerful, almost primal things, as we
story-tellers who have read our Joseph Campbell know. Myths play a crucial role
in the development and continuation of a society. But they can also shortcut
the critical mind, engaging instead on another, alluringly primitive level.
This has destructive potential.
Perceived and entirely imagined crimes are laid at Thatcher’s
feet. To some, it seems she is guilty of sweeping a post-war collective utopia
aside and replacing it with a hard-nosed world of walk on by. It is easy – and
downright fun – to hurl abuse at her. She has acquired the comfortable aura of
myth. She is barely human. Easier to revile, easier to attack.
In fact, many of those toasting Thatcher’s demise seem to
have no deeper an engagement with her than they have with the Evil Step-Mother
in Snow White. It is a reflex, a knee-jerk of disdain, a panto boo of a
reaction.
The right is guilty too of course in its own way. To many in
the Conservative Party, Thatcher is the paragon of all virtue, the Iron Lady,
the titan which the current political crop can only fail to match. She is the
mythic perfect leader of pure ideology.
This happy mythologising essentially forgoes any messy and
turgid discussion of the time’s wider political and economic context, of human
error or feeling. Lost among it is
the remarkable, flawed and, yes, human
figure, who inherited a dire mess of a country, made hard choices, made
mistakes certainly, and yet changed Britain profoundly.
This myopia is dangerous. Unambiguous, unthinking hatred
satisfies but is an ultimately corrosive force. Margaret Thatcher
the woman is dead. But in truth she had long since decoupled from Margaret
Thatcher the Myth. Perhaps her death will eventually herald a more thoughtful,
genuine engagement with her eleven years as Prime Minister. But somehow, I get
the feeling that alluring myth may stick around a while yet.
