There is No Alternative (16 page)

Neil agrees. “Yeah, yup. No, honestly, she had that characteristic, so that there was a very widespread feeling, at many times, that ‘She was wrong, but she was strong.'”

Why, I ask him, were the British so susceptible to that characteristic? I don't venture a theory, but he seems to think I'm advancing one. “I think that's pop psychology went mad,” he says. “I think that's complete bullshit. I think there's a certain amount of—”

“You think
asking
the question is bullshit, or—”

“I don't think that countries, mature countries have national moods like that, looking around, sucking our thumbs, waiting for cuddlesome old mothers. That's just not the way it works.”

Now, I haven't said anything of the sort, and the fact that he spontaneously injects the word “mother” into our discussion of Thatcher—and then dismisses the relevance of the word he introduced with such disproportionate indignation—strikes me as re-vealing,
not about Thatcher or about the British nation, but about Kinnock himself. In fact, I encountered among almost all the male politicians to whom I spoke an almost violent antipathy to what seems to me an obvious psychological observation, one that anyone with the remotest degree of insight into human nature would accept: The way people react to a very powerful, middle-aged woman is apt to suggest something about their relationships with their mothers. I am not exactly casting a laser-light of fresh psychoanalytic acumen on the situation by suggesting this. Yet every time I even hinted so, the man to whom I was speaking reacted as if I had just said that I sensed a blockage in his heart chakra. I am not sure what to conclude from this, except, perhaps, that men who rise to the top of the power game tend to be men of action, not introspection.

“There
is
a segment of the Conservative Party,” Kinnock concedes, “whose main contacts with females in their formative years was with a matron at their public schools, and I don't think you'd be stressing psychology too far to say that there were some who regarded her as Maggie the Matron, and were consequently
exceedingly
joyous if she showed them any kind of favor or even notice. Now, I wouldn't say it was more than a segment, and I certainly wouldn't say it was true of all the ex–public schoolboys. But some.”

“Yes,” I agree. “I've noticed that among some of the men I've spoken to, some of them are still nursing wounds, still nursing injured pride about slights from her, how she didn't notice their brilliant report or whatever—”

“Yeah, it's poisonous. I'm almost relieved by the fact that my dislike of her was absolutely constant. It never varied. I never needed a damned thing from her.”

Several more times during our conversation, he tells me that he simply couldn't figure out how to attack a middle-aged woman without looking like a cad. He says this as if menopause were an illegal weapon. “The feeling I'm getting,” I say to Kinnock, “is that you did not feel that she played fair.”

“Oh, Christ, this is politics!”

“I know.”

“No, this is not boxing under the Queensbury rules, and it's not association football! This is a blood sport!”

“Well, then, how come you weren't willing to really
stick
it to her? I mean, you're saying, ‘I didn't want to use discourteous language, I didn't want to be seen attacking a woman older than me,' but if this is a blood sport, why didn't you?”

He sighs. I feel a bit cruel now, as if I'm not playing fair myself, but I really do want to know how he explains this to himself. “Well, like I said,” he answers at last, “it would have been politically disadvantageous—but in any case, it would have bloody
demeaned
me to have done that. If you're doing it, you know, toe-to-toe with a fellow about your age, or even if he'd been a bit older than myself, that would have been—”

“So you're basically saying, ‘I couldn't hit a girl.'”

“Well, I
know
I couldn't hit a girl—”

“Yeah, but you know, she happened to be the
prime minister
. And you felt that you couldn't hit back
?
Because she was a
woman?
”

“Not that I couldn't hit back, I mean, I did hit back!”

I am left, in the end, with two images—a small boy of about three, red-haired, pink-faced, hiccupping as he fights back tears, staring into the looming face of an impossibly large woman in an apron.
If you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding! How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?

And then, the image of a beleaguered middle-aged man with a thin fringe of wispy pumpkinish hair, lying on the psychotherapist's couch.

“My mother,” he is saying, “was a
formidable
woman.”

Let's return now to John Hoskyns—remember him, the wiring diagram? We have been talking about economics and the miners'
strike over lunch at the Travellers Club, but it is time to repair to the tea room, where his wife, Miranda, has arrived to join us. I have spoken to many men who knew Thatcher, but thus far no women: Miranda is the first. She is also the only interview subject to show even the remotest curiosity about me. She wants to know about my family, how I came to be a writer, why I live in Istanbul. Her feminine curiosity makes her to my mind an interesting witness. It suggests that she might pay attention to things in a way powerful men tend not to do.

I tell Miranda that I am so glad she joined us. I had been hoping for a woman's perspective on Thatcher. She laughs, seeing right through me, and turns to her husband. “She's hoping to get some
gossip
!”

“Gossip?” says John, as though it would never have occurred to him.

“Yes!” says Miranda.

John raises an eyebrow. “We never used to talk about anything except economic theory, did we? The Laffer Curve featured largely.”

Miranda permits herself a Mona Lisa smile. “If you're occasionally allowed amongst these august presences,” she says, “you can be a fly on the wall, as it were, as a wife. Which is awfully useful.”

“Let's start with your first impressions of her.”

“Well,” she says, “I was very left-wing, in the early '70s. John and I used to argue. I was an artist, and all of my friends—”

“I'll absent myself while she makes these confessions,” says John, chastely sipping his coffee. “I mean, she was an absolute
Marxist
.”

“No, I
wasn't
a Marxist. Well, we used to have these violent arguments about politics . . . John and I used to argue at breakfast, and unfortunately his logic was so much stronger than mine that he eventually talked me out of it. So when he sold his company and decided he wanted to go into politics, I was appalled. Because a lot of people wanted him to get a seat. And I was horrified,
because I didn't know how I was going to explain it away to everybody. But I was beginning to understand what he was talking about. And I suppose it was after you met Keith Joseph that I first became aware of Maggie—it must have been about 1975, was it? I think I had seen pictures of her—she was known as Thatcher the Milk-Snatcher. I became aware of her and thought she was pretty awful. I really did. She wasn't my kind of woman at all—”

“‘Pretty awful' how?”

“She represented everything having to do with my own parents' generation. To do with middle-class values, behaving properly, wearing hats—all the kinds of things that I was longing to throw away. Because the '60s—although I was already married and having children—in the '60s, I was
thrilled
with everything being overthrown, you know, all the terrible fuddy-duddy stuff. I didn't want a royal family anymore, you know, freedom for everybody—I really thought it was wonderful! I wasn't involved in it very much, but seen from the outside I thought it was a very good thing. And she represented, as she did to everybody on the Left, the absolute antithesis of that. She had nothing to do with that world of the '60s. And I was in a very uncomfortable position, because I was beginning to see that John was right about what he was saying, or at least my brain told me he was right. My emotions told me he was all wrong, and he didn't
understand
. He kept saying, ‘How do you think somebody like me, who's an entrepreneur, can possibly make his way in the world with taxes and everything like that,' and I kept arguing back, ‘Well, it's your choice, you do it because you like doing it, you don't mind about profits, they don't matter,' you know, all that sort of stuff. I mean—I was pretty silly.”

John nods wisely.

“But he was beginning to persuade me that he was right,” she continues. “So I was in this position of seeing this
awful
woman, knowing that she thought the same sorts of things as he did, and I had to be gradually converted over—and by the time she was likely to win in
1979, I was a terrific fan! I thought she was the most courageous and wonderful woman, and I was
longing
to get to know her.”

“Was there a moment in particular where your feelings began to change?” I ask. “Was it something that she said while campaigning, or—”

“I can't remember exactly what it was, but there was a moment when I realized that she had a courage that nobody else seemed to have. And I admired the courage more than anything. I still deplore some of the things she stood for, but I admired her courage more than
anything
.”

“What do you deplore?”

“She's—quite narrow-minded. She doesn't like women. She doesn't like women who—um—
impinge
on her life in any way. She's absolutely charming to women who work for her, who, you know, waited on her in Chequers, in London. She was delightful with children, delightful. Absolutely charming to children—”

“Genuinely sweet—” says John.

“Oh, genuinely!” she agrees.

“Completely un-self-conscious, not—”

“Oh, absolutely!”

“Not knowing she was being observed, or—”

“Yes!”

“Very touching, that way.”

“One of my biggest memories,” says Miranda, “was this very touching way that she took this little boy, and I was just standing nearby, and she said”—Miranda's voice becomes gentle and coaxing, like Mary Poppins—“‘Now, come along, shall we go to the kitchen? What's your
favorite
food?' And she walked out of the reception, and apparently got his favorite food, whatever it was. It was really lovely.”

“Lovely,” John agrees.

“But she didn't like women,” she says. “And I wasn't the only one to feel it. Nearly all the wives—I mean, I remember Peter Hennessy saying, ‘Those wives are going to get out their knitting needles one day!'”

“Why do you think she didn't like women?” I ask.

“Because they were a threat to her. Because on one level, she was an attractive woman—”

“Yes,” agrees John in the slightly abstracted way of a man who hadn't really thought about it before.

“I mean, there were some men, William Whitelaw, for instance, who found her dazzlingly attractive, and apparently when drunk made passes!” William Whitelaw was Thatcher's deputy prime minister. She found him an invaluable source of support, famously announcing that “every prime minister needs a Willie.” She apparently said this in perfect innocence and had no idea why everyone found it so funny.

“Who did?” says John, suddenly curious.

“William Whitelaw!” she replies, pleased with herself.

“Oh,
really
?” says John.

“He supposedly said to her, ‘I'm in love with you!'”

John looks surprised. “Did you have a long conversation about it with Willie?”

“This is gossip! This is gossip! I didn't, no.”

“Certainly, he got terribly emotional about her,” says John.

“Terribly emotional!” agrees Miranda.

“Saying, ‘She is the
only
—'”

They are talking over one another now, and I can't catch what they're saying. No matter. We have a a solid piece of unsourced gossip: Willie Whitelaw was in love with her. So was her parliamentary private secretary, Ian Gow, according to Alan Clark, who describes Gow's devastation at being supplanted by another in the prime minister's affections. “How ruthless women can be,” Clark laments. “Far worse than men. Ian was completely in love with the prime minister and utterly devoted to her.”
⁷⁸

Miranda too was utterly devoted to the prime minister, and she too suffered her share of indignity. “I mean, I really came to the
point where I really would have done anything for her. I thought she was so marvelous, and she just simply treated me like dirt.” She says this with no rancor—she seems to suggest with her voice that it was just one of those peculiar things about Margaret Thatcher, and nobody's perfect. “And I came to the conclusion at the end that it was because at some of these gatherings and parties, I'd been in a group, with one or two other people, and we were all having a lot of fun. And she thought
she
wanted that fun, with the men, but she didn't want the women there. It was something like that, some peculiar thing—”