There is no obvious solution to this particular problem of a female leader’s voice except of course more women members of Parliament – after the 1987 general election, there were forty-one women to six hundred and nine men. But another lingering problem, the problem which will not go away (to judge from Geraldine Ferraro’s experience) – how resolute can a female leader be expected to show herself against a nation’s enemies? – was solved for Mrs Thatcher from an unexpected quarter: the Soviet Union, ironically enough the most likely candidate at the time for the title of Britain’s enemy.
In January 1976, just under a year after she had been elected leader of the Conservative Party, Mrs Thatcher made a major speech in London which described the Soviet Union as a serious threat, both military and political, to which threat it was vital that the West should respond with strength and confidence. It was the Soviet Union’s response, attacking her as the ‘Iron Lady’ in Red Star, the official journal of the Red Army, which presented Mrs Thatcher with what rapidly became, for good tactical reasons, her favourite sobriquet. It was immediately given wide prominence, not only in the Western Press, but by the victorious victim herself. ‘I have the reputation of being the Iron Lady,’ she would say on US television at the time of the Falklands War. ‘I have great resolve.’ (A cartoon in the Daily Express of her visit to the United States on this occasion showed Mrs Thatcher as Boadicea, long sword raised, iron breastplates prominent, with President Reagan at her chariot wheels in a cowboy hat.)34
Even if Mrs Thatcher had been variously dubbed ‘Iron Maiden’ and ‘Iron Lady’ by Majorie Proops in the London Daily Mirror as early as 1973, it was the Soviet Union’s adoption (or spontaneous invention) of the phrase which gave it exactly the endorsement which Mrs Thatcher needed to emerge as a Warrior Queen, at any rate in the estimation of Britain’s ‘enemies’. As Bruce Arnold wrote in a hostile work, Margaret Thatcher: A Study in Power, published in 1984 (that memorable line ‘the female of the species is more deadly than the male’ acts as the epigraph), Mrs Thatcher’s baptism as the Iron Lady ‘effectively created the political reputation on international affairs which, by their dismissal, her Labour opponents had denied her, up to that point’.35 ‘The Iron Lady of the Western World! Me? A Cold Warrior?’ she was able to riposte publicly. ‘Well, yes – if that is how they [the Russians] wish to interpret my defence of values and freedoms fundamental to our way of life.’36
What propaganda had so felicitously – from Mrs Thatcher’s point of view – begun, war itself was to confirm. Certainly the fact that the Falklands campaign would be the crucible of Mrs Thatcher’s reputation as a leader was appreciated in advance. In the House of Commons in the opening debate following the Argentinian invasion, on 3 April 1982, Enoch Powell (no longer a member of the Conservative Party) actually referred to the phrase ‘Iron Lady’ in order to add: ‘In the next week or two this House, the nation and the Right Honourable Lady herself will learn of what metal she is made.’ It is said that Mrs Thatcher nodded her head in agreement.37
Another observer of the political spectrum hostile to Mrs Thatcher, Anthony Barnett, author of Iron Britannia: Why Parliament Waged its Falklands War (the epigraph this time was merely the biblical name JUDITH in heavy black type), wrote cogently that Mrs Thatcher remained ‘a misfit’ until the 3 April debate ‘elevated her into the war-leader of a bipartisan consensus’. An important inside testimony, on the other hand, is that of Patrick Cosgrave, the author of three successive biographical studies of Mrs Thatcher, since he worked for her as her Special Adviser for four years. In 1985 Cosgrave wrote that not only did the period between 2 April and 14 June 1982 show the Prime Minister at her most typically daring and resolute, but ‘the war in the South Atlantic will undoubtedly be seen in the future, as it was at the time, as bearing witness to Margaret Thatcher as most truly herself’.38
As a result of the British campaign in the South Atlantic to recover the Falkland Islands from the Argentine invader saw Mrs Thatcher’s personal popularity as a leader jump from 36 per cent approval in March 1982 to 59 per cent after the war – a staggering leap. There can be no starker illustration of the continuing potency of the image of the Warrior Queen in a nation’s consciousness. As for the armed forces themselves, and the men who lead them, they have been described as responding to her as a war-leader ‘in a way that hasn’t been known since the time of Elizabeth I, with a passion and loyalty that few male generals have ever inspired or commanded’. For the army at least Mrs Thatcher began to have her own mana as a goddess: an apparition transcending that of the Armed Figurehead, for example, holy or otherwise, because of its sheer personal strength. It was suggested (by Selina Hastings in the Sunday Telegraph) that in view of ‘the aphrodisiac pull of power itself … for the armed forces she is far and away the favourite object of sexual fantasy’.39
Equally, for those for whom power is not necessarily thrilling (Mrs Thatcher at the time being the most powerful woman in the world), she sometimes seemed like Kali, ‘the grim Indian goddess of destruction’, as she ruthlessly demolished ‘old ideas, policies and personalities’, while at the same time exercised her other talents as ‘the great creative stateswoman, the Blessed Margaret’. This remarkable double-headed comparison to the goddess-destroyer on the one hand and the sainted female was that of the historian and political journalist Paul Johnson on the eve of the Conservative Party Conference in 1987. He warned discontented Tories: ‘Don’t get caught under the wheels of the juggernaut. Blessed Margaret the creative-radical is driving it, but Kali-Thatcher the Destroyer is at hand – if required.’40
Opinions vary about what use Mrs Thatcher actually made of her own unavoidable femininity, consciously or unconsciously, and what difference the whole intricate topic made to her premiership. Commentators of both sexes and all shades of political opinion have gazed at her with fascinated awe: some seeing in Mrs Thatcher that Medusa on the ‘snaky-headed Gorgon shield’ wielded by ‘wise Minerva’, which froze her foes to stone; others viewing her with more admiration as wise Minerva herself, whose own ‘rigid looks of chaste austerity and noble grace’, as Milton pointed out in Comus, were enough to dash ‘brute violence’ without need of any Gorgon shield. But there has been remarkable unanimity among commentators and biographers that it did make some difference. Hugo Young and Anne Sloman, for example, in The Thatcher Phenomenon of 1986, agreed that her style of leadership turned heavily on her being a woman – without being sure how.41
While the independent-minded Conservative MP Julian Critchley described her as deploying her feminine qualities ‘like artillery pieces’, one biographer summed it up more ambivalently thus: ‘she has played the matter of being a woman, and that of woman’s place in modern society, in a variety of not always very clear-cut ways’.42 The explanation for this lack of clear-cutness lies surely in Mrs Thatcher’s own intuition concerning her situation. As the brilliantly instinctive politician she undoubtedly is, Mrs Thatcher realized either consciously, or unconsciously (the effect is the same) that if the issue were to be clear-cut, it would rob her of a great deal of support on the one hand, a good deal of manoeuvrability on the other.
On the one hand she played the role of the ‘honorary male’ with all the aplomb of Queen Elizabeth I, as when in 1979 on a visit to Northern Ireland following the murder of Lord Mountbatten and a number of British soldiers, Mrs Thatcher adopted the red beret and flak jacket of the Parachute Regiment (thus pleasing the regiment itself but not the Northern Ireland Office). This can be directly compared to Queen Elizabeth I’s choice of a silver cuirass and plumed helmet for her appearance at Tilbury, since neither lady actually intended to take to the battlefield. There were to be numerous other carefully organized sightings of Mrs Thatcher in military situations, particularly in the early days of her premiership, where her symbolic presence as a Warrior Queen was hard to miss.
Like Queen Elizabeth again, Mrs Thatcher displayed another interesting characteristic of the honorary male; she had no visible prefe
rence for the advancement of her own sex. After nine years of Mrs Thatcher’s premiership, only one other woman was to be appointed to the Cabinet, and she incidentally a member of the non-competitive House of Lords, not Commons: Baroness (Janet) Young’s two-year stint, in her capacity as Leader of the House of Lords, included the period of the Falklands War, a fact which Mrs Thatcher either had temporarily forgotten, or chose grandly to ignore, when she told her Cabinet on 2 April 1982: ‘Gentlemen, we shall have to fight.’ It ended when Baroness Young was demoted to a minor role in the Government outside the Cabinet. It was percipiently observed that the presence of another woman in the Cabinet photograph spoiled the radiance which the leader alone possessed in photographic terms, making her so clearly unmistakable in her visible female dress.43 At some very primitive level, did Mrs Thatcher resent Baroness Young’s presence?
For there is the element of chivalry which the woman in a man’s world traditionally evokes (an honorary male perhaps, but not sacrificing any of the prerequisites allowed by society to the female). At Mrs Thatcher’s first Party Conference as Conservative leader, in October 1975, Barbara Castle, a prominent Labour politician in the Wilson government who had yet to see her own party elect a female leader, confided to her diary, possibly not without a small jealous pang, that Mrs Thatcher now displayed a special bloom, produced by ‘the vitamin of power’. In March she had written, ‘Margaret’s election has stirred up her own side wonderfully: all her backbenchers perform like knights jousting a tourney for a lady’s favours, showing off their paces by making an unholy row at every opportunity over everything that the [Labour] Government does.’ Thirteen years later, the official photograph to commemorate Mrs Thatcher’s long-serving record certainly did give her a remarkable air of a Tudor sovereign, in her long gold brocade dress, surrounded by males including Cabinet ministers, top civil servants and her own husband: twenty-six black-and-white (dinner-jacketed) knights.44
Then there is Mrs Thatcher’s celebrated reaction to a question concerning Women’s Liberation, at her first Press conference as Conservative leader: ‘What’s it ever done for me?’ Queen Victoria, among past female rulers, might have approved of this disdain, with her well-known antipathy to Women’s Rights in principle and professional women in practice. But in her own time such contempt earned Mrs Thatcher the justified dislike and disapproval of the Women’s Movement. An editorial of August 1982 in Spare Rib, a leading feminist magazine, criticized the way ‘masculinity’ had been propagated throughout the whole Falklands crisis, military and sexual powers mixed up together as glorious, most notably by the (female) Prime Minister: ‘We are not saying women should avoid positions of power, but that unless we direct our efforts to the good of all women … we are likely to promote rather than challenge the current notions of masculinity.’ In short, there is the ‘very real danger of leading to more Margaret Thatchers’.45
On the other hand, with Mrs Thatcher’s denial of any specifically female qualities went an ability to capitalize on them where necessary – once again, probably successful just because it was instinctive. (One has to admit that even her reaction to Women’s Liberation may, fortunately or unfortunately depending upon one’s view of the subject, have gained her far more support than she lost in Britain in 1975.) Nor can Mrs Thatcher fairly be blamed for capitalizing on her sex, since she has had to suffer a good many slings and arrows on the subject, from the first moment when Labour supporters shouted ‘Ditch the bitch!’ until honourably restrained by women members of the Labour movement.
During the Falklands campaign, insults in the Argentine Press varied from ‘chicken brain’ (because she was a woman) to ‘go back to knitting’ and ‘stay in the kitchen’. Although such outbursts were smoothly dismissed by President Galtieri of Argentina in an interview, once more with Oriana Fallaci, on the grounds that ‘humour and caricature belong to the Latin temperament’, the area of attack chosen was surely significant.f3 47 Under the circumstances, Mrs Thatcher was well entitled to use that metaphorical knitting needle, to which she was told to return, as an offensive weapon.
As early as 1979, on the eve of her first general election as Conservative leader, Mrs Thatcher emphasized the practical value of her female domesticity: ‘I know what it is to run a home and a job …’ and quoted the recent example of Golda Meir for authority, that characteristic technique of the female leader through history, back to Zenobia stressing her descent from Cleopatra. In an important and prominent interview with George Gale in the Daily Express, shortly after the Falklands War was over, Mrs Thatcher directly compared the running of the campaign to household management – something on which she, as a woman, could be presumed to be an expert, or at least by implication more expert than the men surrounding her.48 This was in answer to the question: ‘Did being a woman make any difference?’ ‘It may just be that many, many women make naturally good managers and organizers. You might not think of it that way, George,’ she went on sweetly, ‘but each woman who runs a house is a manager and an organizer. We thought forward each day, and we did it in a routine way and we were on the job twenty-four hours a day.’
Mrs Thatcher’s reaction to George Gale’s next topic is however a perfect illustration of the kind of manoeuvrability she allowed herself. ‘Was it difficult for a woman to issue orders involving blood being shed?’ he asked. ‘We were thinking in terms of saving lives,’ she answered (without directly replying to the question), ‘but bearing in mind that our people had been invaded by a pretty awful dictatorship. One lived with the agony of the troops who were going down on the supply line on ships. One lived with the agony of the soldiers. But we didn’t look only at the agony: we also looked at the professionalism, the loyalty and the devotion of our troops.’ In a trice, the cosy super-feminine housekeeper has become the dedicated Warrior Queen, the ‘singular exception’ in Gibbon’s phrase, the woman ruling proudly in the man’s world.
So Boadicea marched on in her third modern personification, not the abstract patriotic symbol of empire, not the independent woman, free of shackles which may be political or sexual, but the elected female Prime Minister and occasional war-leader, whose existence continues to enrage, fascinate and inspire, in equal quantities, beyond any capacity of her male contemporaries to do these same three things. The innumerable allusions and comparisons to Boadicea during Mrs Thatcher’s premiership, far from being monolithically favourable in intention (or unfavourable), in fact illustrate just this many-sided aspect of her own image, as well as that of Boadicea herself.
At the time of the Falklands campaign, the left-wing New Statesman in a critical editorial called Mrs Thatcher ‘this Boadicea’ who would have to come back into ‘the real world’ when the war was over. Adam Raphael in the Observer also called her Boadicea at roughly the same date (late May): ‘every time she opens her mouth she castrates one of her ministers’. When the action was over, however, she would need ‘to pipe down’. In 1985 however Woman’s Own magazine interviewed a lady who had just been voted ‘the most feminine woman of the year’ for believing that a woman’s place is not in the office but to stay at home having babies. The happy winner also professed herself a great admirer of Mrs Thatcher. When it was pointed out that this was a contradiction in view of Mrs Thatcher’s manifest career as Prime Minister, ‘the most feminine woman’ was at first nonplussed; then she took refuge in a safe historical comparison: ‘Well, ideally she shouldn’t be there [in office], but she is an extremely exceptional woman and the exceptions will always find their way to the top. Look at Boadicea …’49
The most potent image is a visual one, that of the cartoonist Gale in the Daily Telegraph (the foremost newspaper of Conservative sympathies) on polling day, 11 June 1987. Mrs Thatcher is seen dressed as Boadicea, late-twentieth-century version, in a Celtic robe but with pearl necklace and stud earrings (as Thomas Heywood’s seventeenth-century heroine wore the lambent pearls of her own day). As the leader urges forward her chariot towards the third-term Conservative victory – wh
ich would in fact resoundingly be hers by the next day – the huge knives set in its wheels dominate the foreground of the picture. Meanwhile sundry small male figures in chains from other political parties drag behind; even Mrs Thatcher’s own recognizable jubilant supporters are tiny in stature compared to the dominant figure of the Warrior Queen.
f1 It was not missed. As late as the Second World War, Prime Minister Churchill’s Private Secretary, John Colville, strolling through London in the Blitz to inspect landmarks he might not see again, described Boadicea’s statue as ‘a monument to successful imperialism’.1
f2 There were, for example, long queues in London when it was shown at a converted warehouse in White Lion Street, Islington, in the spring of 1986.
f3 Nor was the ‘kitchen’ reference confined to the Latin temperament. The puppet Iron Lady, as depicted by Luck and Flaw, the British cartoonists, on television in November 1976, had her breastplate and armour created out of colanders and other pieces of kitchen equipment.46
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Unbecoming in a Woman?
Fell, from those funeral flames
A golden mist; which token is, from high gods
Of their unending glory to endure.
CHARLES DOUGHTY on the funeral pyre of Boadicea and her daughters, The Dawn in Britain, 1906
’Tis no less unbecoming [in] a Woman … to conduct
an Army, to give a Signal to the Battle, than it is for a
Man to tease Wool, to handle the Distaff …
GEORGE BUCHANAN, History of Scotland, 1571
Boudica of the Iceni was not a savage and she was a patriotic leader; that is to answer two of the questions originally posed about her in Chapter One. A courageous widow, she led her oppressed people in an uprising against a foreign occupation, having herself – and her daughters – been foully treated at the hands of the conqueror. The details of the uprising were not pretty, as such things seldom are. At the end of it, following a last battle, Boudica met her death, most probably at her own hand and again most probably carrying her daughters with her. She is buried in an unknown grave. All this – the known or supposed facts about Boudica – took place around AD 60.