Classical mythology tells a story that when the goddess of discord was not invited to a wedding banquet, she tossed a golden apple marked “For the Fairest” in the midst of the party. Soon, it came down to three goddesses vying for the prized fruit: their Greek names were Athena, Aphrodite, and Hera, but later poets would use the names Pallas (or Minerva), Venus, and Juno. The feud between these three led to the Judgment of Paris, the Trojan War, and the founding of Rome. However, I find that these goddesses also made appearances on the world stage in the person of one woman, the late Margaret Thatcher.
Margaret Thatcher is easily one of the most polarizing figures in British politics, not only despised by the left, but dismissed and a source for embarrassment by members of her own party. In America, particularly on the right, so longing for courageous leadership of quality, the icon of the Iron Lady makes for an easy subject of hagiography. Of course, the legend of Thatcher is sustained by the historic details of her story, but when we talk about heroes, saints and goddesses, the details include symbols that become part of the myth.
Born Margaret Hilda Roberts, the future Prime Minister had an austere childhood in which the values of thrift and frugality were instilled by her strict Methodist parents. Much has been made out of her relationship with her father, a green grocer, Methodist lay preacher, and local politician, particularly in that her mother is hardly mentioned at all (it was even deftly addressed in the film The Iron Lady): many think this is important, although few specify how. We know that Mr. Roberts took his daughter to the library every week and instructed her in politics in life in ways that fathers usually do with sons rather than daughters. His daughter would later go to Oxford and study chemistry and we also know that after age sixteen, Margaret had little say to her mother, or of her mother in the following years.
What seems to be implied is an Electra Complex, the daughter’s equivalent to Oedipus, but I see a daughter who springs from her father’s accomplishments in a way that eclipses the mother, just as Pallas Athena sprang from the head of her father Zeus rather than from the womb of her mother Metis. We know little about Metis, but we do know that Pallas practically became lieutenant for her father, keeping his shield and thunderbolt safe, and that she also devised practical things, such as the spool and spindle, the bridle, the olive tree, as well as law, technology, and war strategy.
Indeed, Margaret Roberts the chemist graduate from Oxford would later take great satisfaction of being the first Prime Minister to have been trained as a scientist (far more in fact than being the first woman Prime Minister). Much was later made that the British economy, under her government, was treated as a series of monetarist experiments, not unlike experiments conducted in a laboratory: again, Pallas was a goddess of technology.
Margaret married Denis Thatcher and studied law, and after giving birth to twins Carol and Mark, took the bar examination. Law, much like chemistry, is a subject in which a command for details and facts is essential, and again, Margaret, excelled here. While critics have scorned her final marks as lackluster, the fact that she still attained them ought not be dismissed, particularly when one views footage of Margaret, now Mrs. Thatcher, as a Member of Parliament (MP) which she became in 1959, representing the constituency of Finchley in north London: her confidence and carriage, while in the early years certainly lacking the leonine command for which she became infamous in the 1980’s, are nonetheless intriguing.
As the film The Iron Lady portrays, Thatcher had to work to change her voice, deepen it for gravitas and authority, lest she sound too shrill. As professed Thatcher admirer Joan Collins observed during her studies at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, many acting students from places like Manchester and Liverpool had to lose their accents and attain the respected Received Pronunciation or BBC English; in contrast, today many British leftists and provincials take pride in how they never lost their native regional accents. Regardless, politics is a theatre, and to be a good player, one must speak with a voice that carries respect, and in the class-conscious circles of British society (both left and right), that was not the voice of a middle class matron.
While Thatcher’s voice deepened, she adjusted her attire and hair to suit her role as leader. She was known for always traveling with her hairstylist, something in stark contrast with German Chancellor Angela Merkel or Hilary Clinton, the latter who seemed to take particular pleasure in the freedom of no-nonsense hair. Also contrasting with Clinton, Thatcher was known to only once wear a pant suit, and that was when she was on an oil rig and for the purposes of dignity did not think a skirt would be sufficient. Yet, this need for dignity need not be dismissed as prudery or Victorian modesty so much as a maintenance of authority: her hair was her helmet; her makeup, war paint; her wardrobe, armor.
Martial armor was certainly on the mind of Thatcher in early spring 1982, when Argentina seized the Falklands Islands, a remote outpost in the South Atlantic. Here, the macho Argentine junta, desperate for some popular goodwill, invaded the isles that the British had held since 1830. One might not fault the junta too much, for not only had the Thatcher government’s tight budget necessitate a cut in defense of the Falklands, a recent nationality law in Parliament stripped the islanders of British citizenship, and the British had even discussed the possibility of a leaseback option, by which sovereignty of the islands would inevitably go to Buenos Aries. However, for a rightwing military junta to take those islands by force was utterly unacceptable: even the leftwing politicians in Parliament would not countenance this sort of aggression. With some unofficial strategic help from the U. S. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger (but no official help from the Secretary of State, Alexander Haig) and as well as Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, Britain was able to win back the Falklands.
The overt act of aggression of the Argentines might remind one of Poseidon attempting to take Attica, and the Atticans then turning to Pallas Athena. Athena countered Poseidon and bested him: Attica is now known as Athens, so named for the goddess whose images populated the city. Commanding from her base of civil authority in London, taking messages from Washington, New York, and all over the world, Thatcher was the Pallas of Westminster, a goddess of war by strategy, and she was able to defeat the blustering bully in the South Atlantic. So her regime was secured and a second election victory the following year was assured.
Of course, sometimes the weapons of Athena can be enhanced by the tool of a goddess of love, namely charm, often dismissed as a frivolity. While dealing with world leaders, ranging from King Hussein of Jordan, Danish Prime Minister Poul Schlüter, and Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, Thatcher often charmed her foreign counterparts, certainly even flirting with them. To most Americans today and but also to her contemporary critics and enemies, the idea of Thatcher as a Marilyn Monroe figure is absurd, which is why François Mitterrand’s observation that the Iron Lady had the mouth of Monroe is so memorable. And yet, there are several anecdotal stories in which after a long day in the Commons or during a private meeting in Downing Street, Thatcher would kick off her shoes and curl them up on the couch and have a drink: very confident, rather informal, this is certainly flirtatious behavior. Even those with whom she had little political agreements, such as Bishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, spoke of her charm. By thinking of her as a love goddess, we do not think of her as a divine courtesan like Cleopatra on the Nile, but as a proper and engaging coquette, well groomed, quite decorous and upright with a touch of the ribald but never the vulgar: she was Venus on the Thames and her Cyprus was the House of Commons.
Charm was certainly lacking in many characters among the women’s movement in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Gloria Steinem might have been articulate, appropriately dressed, even groomed, but she was bland and plain, bordering on dowdy, even ugly. Photographs of Hillary Rodham show a similar looking woman: to wear makeup, to do anything cosmetic, even with the hair, was a heretical affront to the feminist cause in the years before Farah Fawcett instigated an explosion in curling iron sales. At the time, beauty and glamour were dismissed as misogynist tools by which patriarchy repressed women. Also when a man would do so much as open a door for a woman, something for which he was instructed from early boyhood to do in order to be grown up and civilized, his act of decency and gallantry would receive savage and scathing responses. Good manners were injured in those years and memories of those uncouth harridans no doubt inspired the image of the “Feminazi”; when a modern woman insists on pay equal to a man’s but does not think of herself as a “feminist”, she is thinking of that type of humorless woman.
In contrast, Margaret Thatcher enjoyed and even exploited her femininity. As a woman, she utilized the gender roles and a gentleman’s deference to a lady’s dignity to her advantage: she would let the men who served her stand when she entered or left a room. Outside of the Cabinet and on the world stage, we think of the cordial friendship between Thatcher and Reagan, two political soul mates, in which she enjoyed his plainspoken vigor, warmth, kindness, and personal passiveness that bordered on masochism and he honored her intelligence and spirit, as well as her demanding presence that bordered on sadism: in many ways, it was a chaste romance, as there is absolutely no evidence that either of them were improper or disloyal to their spouses. Beyond Reagan, we again look to Mitterrand, who confessed to finding her in part appealing, and he had to disagree with her not only as a Frenchman to her English womanhood, but also as a socialist to her conservative. Her femininity and charm worked with Mikhail Gorbachev, with whom she certainly disagreed with more than Mitterrand, but still found him to be a man with whom she could do business.
However, not all of Aphrodite is dulcet and bright. In Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia described a woman with great verbal strength and will and connected her with the Bald or Bearded Venus. Paglia pointed to Bette Davis’s performance as Margo Channing in All About Eve and Elizabeth Taylor’s as Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: the quips, arguments, the chewing of scenery—Thatcher did all that and would have done Margo or Martha proud. Many political enemies and rivals like Neil Kinnock were immune to Thatcher's feminine charms and brutalized by her language, but looking to the classics, one finds that some could resist the power of Aphrodite and that her powers, both dark and bright, were not absolute, but they provided the social lubrication of manners, charisma, flirting, even verbal combat, which carry a message and mission closer to success.
The classics hold that the queen of the gods was not Zeus’s daughter-lieutenant or sex goddess but was the jealous Hera, whom the Romans called Juno. A force of regal rage, Juno was a character bent on revenge, as when she was denied the Golden Apple and when she visited troubles upon Aeneas on his quest that would eventually lead to the destruction of her city Carthage. There are stories of Thatcher’s pettiness and vindictiveness, such as against her school headmistress that almost succeeded in preventing young Margaret from taking the necessary Latin that would get her to Oxford. “You are frustrating my ambition!” young Margaret protested, but with her father’s help, she got her Latin and years later, adult Margaret no doubt took great pleasure in correcting the Latin of that same teacher at a public event. Oxford itself became a target of Thatcher’s revenge: previously, standing Prime Ministers would receive honors from Oxford, but due to opposition to her budget cuts, the university establishment refrained from honoring her for years, despite it being her alma mater. Her response: she gave her papers and archives to Oxford’s ancient rival Cambridge.
However, Juno was not merely an angry woman slighted: she was a queen. In the case of Margaret Thatcher, as Prime Minister, she deferred to her own Sovereign, Queen Elizabeth II. Much speculation has been made about the relationship between these two powerful figures of the British state: their love for their fathers and the impact their respective relationships with these men seem to be what little they shared in common. While Thatcher was a product of her class and generation and was fiercely loyal to the monarchy as an institution, there are rumors that she dismissed the Queen as one that would vote for the Alliance (of Social Democrats and Liberal Party, the predecessor to the current political party of the Liberal Democrats). Being very correct and patriotic as a monarchist (and reputedly curtseying lower than anyone), Thatcher said little about her relationship with the Queen and only mentioned the monarch a handful of times in her memoirs.
As for Her Majesty herself, being ceremonial head of state and society, the Queen’s role was made easier during times of political consensus, and in postwar Britain, consensus indeed ruled the country: Butskellism was the unofficial system by which successive Conservative governments did not undo the advancement of socialism put in place by the previous Labour governments. Thatcher’s defiant shredding of that consensus certainly rocked the boat by which much of the Queen’s reign had sailed since 1952.
Despite Thatcher’s own assurances, we can be fairly certain that the two did not agree in matters pertaining to the Commonwealth, specifically on the approach to addressing Apartheid in South Africa. As Liberal Democrat peeress and Thatcher contemporary Shirley Williams had noted in a documentary for the Telegraph, there is no evidence that Thatcher was herself a racist. She was, however, quite indifferent to anti-colonial liberationists and revolutionaries, yet after the Second World War, most revolutionaries were Marxists, and she was explicitly anti-Marxist. The Queen, though no Marxist herself, enjoyed her role as unifier of disparate countries that were formerly part of the British Empire that was now the Commonwealth of Nations, an entity which included successful Western democracies like Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, also bizarrely included many single-party countries under the yoke of Marxist despots, and several among whom the Queen often enjoyed a friendly rapport.
Thatcher’s early encounter with revolutionaries happened when her government took to rectifying the problem of Rhodesia, a former colony whose Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) made it both an international pariah and diplomatic embarrassment for the British. Under Ian Smith, Rhodesia attempted to keep white minority rule while allowing limited representation for the native African people: it was not Apartheid as practiced by the South Africans, but it was not a native majority rule that was favored by successive British governments, both Labour and Tory. The British, while successful in keeping other countries from recognizing Rhodesia’s independence—only South Africa and Portugal engaged with the wayward colony—UDI was an embarrassment for London. The Bush War continued, with fighting that entangled neighboring Commonwealth countries of Zambia and Botswana, and later former Portuguese colonies Angola and Mozambique, now independent with the death of Salazar. Despite such odds, Rhodesia also had fairly successful lobbyists among the Conservative MP’s that were sympathetic to imperial nostalgia and generally hostile to revolution. It was assumed that Margaret Thatcher would be receptive to overtures from the Rhodesian lobby, but instead took very seriously Britain’s role as imperial overseer of the elections by which the former colony became Zimbabwe and the revolutionary Marxist Robert Mugabe became leader of the new independent country.
There is little doubt that Thatcher disliked Mugabe and she appears to have been concerned that Nelson Mandela in South Africa would be a similar character; in fact, for a long time she insisted the latter be labeled a terrorist. History now shows that while his successors might have more in common with Mugabe, Mandela himself proved to be a man of extraordinarily magnanimous character, a fact to which Thatcher readily conceded, despite obvious political disagreements with him (dismissing his politics as outdated collectivism). However, during the 1980’s, many figures on the Right, including President Reagan, accepted the notion that while Apartheid was abhorrent, the revolutionaries fighting the white minority government were Soviet tools in the Cold War: in this, the South African lobbyists were more successful than their Rhodesian counterparts. Denis Thatcher also had business ties with South Africa and he convinced his wife that sanctions, which were sought by the Commonwealth, would be unsuccessful. Additionally, anti-apartheid politician Helen Suzeman, a lone Jewish woman in a South African Parliament dominated by Calvinist men, expressed opposition to sanctions and disinvestment, pointing out that many black South Africans were employed by foreign interests, an important consideration in a country that did not offer a safety net or welfare for blacks. Accordingly, Margaret Thatcher would resist attempts for sanctions at Commonwealth meetings, reportedly even crying to protest that she was being mistreated, not only by the African leaders from Nigeria and Zambia, but also those from Canada and Australia: these are details which do not quite mesh with the Iron Lady myth or a Pallas of Westminster legend, but one can imagine a Venus on the Thames shedding tears when she would not get her way.
The Queen, always present at Commonwealth summits, would be concerned that this organization, dismissed by some Thatcherites as merely an ornament of the past, would split. In fact, in 1986 there was a leak from someone on staff at Buckingham Palace that the Queen was upset with how the Thatcher government was handling the matter of South Africa and the Commonwealth. Much ink was spilled in the press over this controversy, since the monarch must always be seen as apolitical and above party politics. In time, the matter was smoothed over in the papers, while for the rest of Thatcher’s time at Number 10, both HM and PM maintained what appeared to the cameras to be a perfectly correct Constitutional relationship.
It has been speculated that the Queen did not appreciate how as the years went on, Thatcher became more regal in bearing. In 1982, after the Falklands War, Thatcher received a victory salute, an honor considered reserved for the Sovereign rather than the political head of government. The Royal Family was also said to be irked when Thatcher announced to the press that her son’s wife gave birth to a child: “We have become a grandmother.” Some argued that Thatcher merely said “we” rather than call attention to herself by saying “I”, but using regalia is a way any woman calls attention to herself, and for a politician with a mission and message, it must be serious attention indeed. One thinks of the Prime Minister in Poland and the Soviet Union, attired with spectacular furs and smart clothes that made her a striking contrast to the drab world of communist Eastern Europe: there she was, decked in queenly glamour, a confident beacon of Western liberty and free enterprise. No male leader could do that, not even Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan. Certainly no female leader could do that either: it is absurd to think that Hillary Clinton, Madeline Albright, or Gloria Steinem would so much as use lip gloss, much less a sable cap, as part of her regalia in the court of world opinion, be it the shipyards of Gdansk or on live television in Moscow.
We must not dismiss this usage of wardrobe and cosmetics as superficiality: by presenting herself as this modern queen (with due apologies to Her Majesty), Thatcher elevated her cause and her country, as Juno Britannia. It was a well dressed and well-spoken Thatcher whose negotiations with Deng Xiaoping led to the Sino-British Joint Declaration for Hong Kong, a settlement that enabled the former colony to continue to be one of the most successful economies in the world: a politician dressed like an American feminist from the 1970’s or a grunge rock poet from the 1990’s could have participated in negotiations on the world stage, but would not have spoken well for cause or country. Was Thatcher always so prim and proper? Absolutely not and we have anecdotal stories and video footage showing that she was not always pristine, but the record leaves us with those regal images illustrating the symbolism by which history and mythology often intersect.
Like Athena rescuing Attica from Poseidon, or the verbal Bearded Venus shredding the scene, or Juno bent on revenge, the combative Thatcher is the image most associated with the late Prime Minister. Argument, garish assertiveness, bombast: the 1980’s was the bold decade of New Wave music and Andrew Lloyd Webber, with synthesizers blaring and cymbals crashing. Looking at the materialism and consumerism of the time, one can see evidence of aspiration and opportunity, but also notes how they fueled leftist critics who point to the unemployment and civil unrest of the Eighties: Britain’s manufacturing industry and mining towns were casualties of Thatcher’s policies. Countering this criticism, Thatcher would argue that the welfare state must no longer burden the taxpaying citizen and that individuals had to take responsibility for themselves.
Consider the basket case Britain was in the 1970’s: the grainy film footage of the three day work week and the Winter of Discontent does not show a country that stands impressive against the glitzy Britain of Culture Club, privatization, and the Big Bang of 1986. The glitz and Technicolor glamour came at a price, with years of high unemployment and damaged industries that never recovered: certainly parts of England prospered, but much of Wales and Scotland suffered. Could mining towns have recovered, without the mines? Growing up near a town that was dependent on a major employer (the railroad) whose departure would have devastated the community, I can easily imagine the difficulty mining towns suffered during the infamous miners’ strike of 1984-1985, and ponder what it would mean to the town if the mine closed. After closure of the mines, these towns received subsidies from the British government and later from the European Union, but those payments were only temporary and rather than use the money to start up new industries, the money was spent elsewhere (the local pubs, mostly), so when the payments ceased, there was nothing to show for it. It is easy to be judgmental with townspeople for not investing or starting new companies to update the communities for the service-based economy that was the Thatcherite goal, but as critics of Thatcher would say, society is not a laboratory for experiments and those mining townspeople were not the type to think of starting new companies, or think to become that type that would. The desolation and bitterness of the pit closures endures, and perhaps one might understand the glee with which many people celebrated the news of Thatcher’s death, but one is also correct in saying that other opportunities were available but apparently were not recognized: compassion (scathingly dismissed by Thatcher as patronizing) insists that we appreciate that others have suffered, but discerning judgment and hindsight suggest that had other choices been made, prosperity would have resulted.
When Thatcher was thrown from the leadership of the Conservative Party in 1990, she was replaced with the relatively affable John Major. A milquetoast compared to Thatcher’s virago, Major maintained much of Thatcher’s legacy while trying to be himself, just as George H. W. Bush maintained the successes of Ronald Reagan while trying to be his own man. The 1990’s were not as loud or brash as the 1980’s, but they also did not revert to the dark years of the 1970’s. Even when Labour came back to power in 1997 (under the banner “New Labour” and stripped of much of its native socialism), Tony Blair did little to alter the course of Thatcherism: neither Blair nor his successor Gordon Brown even so much as restored free milk to schoolchildren, a policy which Thatcher had ended in 1971 when she was Secretary of State for Education and Science, for which she earned the name “Margaret Thatcher, Milk Snatcher.”
When she left Number 10 Downing Street in November 1990, Thatcher stated that Britain was a much better place than when she became Prime Minister in 1979. Much of Britain had improved, but as indicated by the malicious pettiness expressed from nameless yobs, disgruntled unemployed miners, washed up actresses and pointlessly asexual musicians, hers was not an unambiguously successful legacy. The acquisition of things, which demonstrated middle class aspirations and spurred economic growth, instead more often illustrates banal materialism and empty lives. In many ways, the rugged individualism celebrated during the Thatcher years did not instill a sense of personal responsibility but seems to have bred a feeling of entitlement that lacks a sense of community that had been part of British society in previous generations. When Thatcher said “There is no such thing as society,” it was a call for people to take care of themselves and not expect support from the taxpayer; instead, those words are now viewed as a symptom of social ills like apathy and greed rather than a condemnation of sloth.
There is also Section 28, a law passed by Parliament which stated that a local authority “shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality” or “promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.” As MP, Margaret Thatcher had laudably voted to decriminalize homosexuality, something which certainly helped put an end to blackmail and extortion, but her government’s passing of Section 28 in the late 1980’s, when AIDS was spreading and so much ignorance was still prevalent, is not something that I can celebrate. I wonder if it was pandering to a certainly passionate religious lobby, not unlike what President George W. Bush did in 2004 when he tried to get the federal government involved in the issue of gay marriage, although it’s doubtful that traditionalists were quite as powerful an entity in 1987 Britain as their American counterparts were in the United States seventeen years later: the Brits have long been more secular than Americans. I like to imagine how a right-leaning gay politician would be as a Thatcherite, and such an Iron Lad would not pass a Section 28. However, this imaginary Iron Lad would be a success because he excelled in a country with liberty and a free enterprise economy, and as Andrew Sullivan pointed out in his obituary for Thatcher, the affluent gay scene of modern Britain is a part of Thatcher’s legacy, and I say that is definitely in spite of Section 28.
I think also of personal betrayals by Thatcher. When the ousted Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his family were seeking a place to settle, as leader of the Opposition, Margaret Thatcher had purportedly promised asylum to the exiled emperor, but after winning the 1979 election and becoming Prime Minister, she did not keep her promise to the dying Shah. A few years after the Shah’s death, it was Thatcher’s American counterpart and ally Ronald Reagan who would let the widowed Shahbanou settle with her children in the United States.
Another person betrayed by Thatcher was Freddie Laker, the airline mogul who revolutionized air travel in the 1960’s. The commendable entrepreneur was certainly someone that Thatcher wanted in a service industry economy, but Laker was at odds with the state-run British Airways and took them to court in the United States: rather than help a man who supported her politically, Thatcher kept her eye on privatization and wanting British Airways free of legal troubles, she reportedly got President Reagan’s Justice Department to throw out Laker’s case. Laker was ruined, but British Airways was privatized in 1987.
However, an ally that Thatcher did not betray was Augusto Pinochet, who in the early years of the Blair government had been arrested in London and whose case for extradition to Spain was argued among the Law Lords in the House of Lords (at the time, Britain did not have a Supreme Court). Herself no longer in the Commons and her party no longer in Government, Thatcher tried to sway sympathy on behalf of a brutal man whose legacy in his country is as divisive than Thatcher’s is in Britain. For a century that included the likes of Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Idi Amin, and Pol Pot, Pinochet might not make the top five list of mass-murdering scum of the twentieth century, but there is also no dispute that atrocities occurred during his rule in Chile, which began with a 1973 coup supported by the CIA; indeed, before he died, Pinochet himself admitted that he had responsibility for those atrocities. However, there is also no dispute that Chile under Pinochet had helped Britain in the Falklands War and it was out of respect for that help that Thatcher argued on behalf of this man whose rule over Chile was perhaps as brutal as that of the Argentine junta from which she liberated the Falkland Islands. That Thatcher chose to be loyal to a dictator to whom she owed political favors rather than a dying head of state in exile or a struggling businessman seeking an honest deal indicates her pragmatism as a politician. It also indicates the ugliness and cold-bloodedness of politics: it is an arena not for the faint of heart or a person of lesser mettle.
If one dares to look closer to home and hearth, one sees Thatcher’s twins Mark and Carol. Mark, evidently his mother’s favorite, seems to have fallen short of his mother’s dynamic persona and even lacks his father’s quiet decency as a businessman: involved in a failed coup, he was deported from South Africa and has been barred from settling in the United States and Monaco. Carol, overlooked by her mother in favor of her brother, managed to make something of a career for herself, but unlike Nigella Lawson, who succeeded at coming out of her political father’s shadow, she will never be free of her mother. One pauses and considers the children of Ronald Reagan, and how his older son Michael, a celebrated figure in conservative media, and daughter Maureen, who took part in Republican politics while her father was in the White House, contrasted with younger son Ronald Jr., who hosted Saturday Night Live in 1985 and wrote for Playboy, and Patty, who wrote a Mommy Dearest-type book about her parents and posed for Playboy: Thatcher’s children seem to be in the middle, of trying to honor their parents and succeeding at embarrassing them. Comedian Russell Brand expressed pity for the Thatcher children, but I think Carol’s philosophical observations about her family are more useful for us: the marriage of her parents was a parallel partnership and after years of working on their careers it would be nonsensical to expect their roles as grandparents to make up for their years of being distant sometimes even absent parents. It is quite sad to reflect on that, when one considers the human cost children pay when their parents’ focus on careers. This is not an attack on working women so much as a consideration of human price that is paid for ambition and success.
When Sarah Palin came on the national scene in 2008, many American conservatives were eager to think of the Alaskan governor as a modern-day Maggie: this indicates a longing for that sort of confident leadership which Margaret Thatcher provided rather than any affirmation of Palin’s political aptitude. However, before one dismisses Palin, we ought to think again of Thatcher’s children versus Palin’s children: succumbing to the lure of Levi Johnston aside, it can be readily believed that the Palin children will not be so decidedly distant from their mother when she dies.
Let us again consider the legacy of Thatcher and Thatcherism. The woman’s life was impaired by a series of strokes and she died in a suite at the Ritz hotel in London and her family was not at her side. Thatcher’s former Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson noted that the Prime Minister was not “clubbable”, that outside of reading on subjects like religion, she did not have a hobby. Tory MP Edwina Currie mentioned how Thatcher once said that “home was a place where you go when there’s no work left to be done”, but for Margaret Thatcher, there was always work to be done. Many biographers discussed how she hated to go on vacations; visiting the Queen at Balmoral in the Scottish countryside was always dreaded. Her focus was on work, and when she was ousted from party leadership, that focus was taken from her. Watching interviews she gave just months after leaving power, one is struck by how shaken she was; interviews she gave years later, the anger and bitterness are quite evident. Sometimes people who have lost their focus turn to hobbies or recreation, but as both Lawson and Currie observed, she was not capable of trying either. Being practical, she wrote her memoirs and then went on the lecture circuit, a lucrative option worthy of a world leader whose politics helped others to become millionaires, but one that also allowed for wounds to fester.
Thatcher’s legacy provides us with an example of conviction and confidence, her utilization of charm and glamour, and her strength of character: we must honor all these and if possible, try to replicate them in ourselves. However, her life is also a lesson in caution: just like Andrew Breitbart did not take care of his health, Margaret Thatcher did not take care of hers and to fight as long as she did, and to be as angry, frustrated, and embittered as she so clearly was, it need not be a surprise that she suffered a series of strokes. When we take up the fight in life, whatever cause to which we commit, we cannot ignore recreation, hobbies, or family. Snide leftists, generally prone to ridiculing matters like family values, are quick to point out that the Iron Lady died a sick and lonely woman: while I deplore their sanctimony, being mindful that such sentiments come in part from those envious that Thatcher achieved power as a Tory and without the sisterhood of women (she was not, as Currie observed "a sister") and that she was middle class (again, even the left--or especially the left--in Britain are snobs), I can acknowledge their observation. Rather than condemn the late Baroness Thatcher, which I will not do because I admire her character and her politics, I will thank her for her exemplary good fight and public life and for the cautionary example of her bitterness and private death.
I close with the observation that Margaret Thatcher died on the Feast of the Annunciation, when the Church celebrates the angel Gabriel visiting Mary, the dawning of a new era. For the faithful, Lady Thatcher ended her earthly pilgrimage and entered the greater life. Her funeral on April 17, 2013 allows for the living to pay their respects to her life. I certainly will mourn her passing, but I see it also as time for a new era of leadership, leadership in the cause of liberty; of sound law and order for protection of life and property; for the crushing defeat of tyranny; to honor tradition and piety but reject snide sanctimony; for the celebration of art and beauty; and for the advancement of human heroism. As a gay man with right-of-center political sympathies, I must always expect there to be discord and I take satisfaction in knowing that the Apple of Discord is the fruit which Margaret Thatcher, as Pallas of Westminster, Bearded Venus on the Thames, and Juno Britannia, has left for us to claim.
