Warrior Queens: Boadicea's Chariot (54 page)

And then there was that special rapport which Golda Meir had with the ordinary soldiers of Israel, something bringing her close to Isabella of Spain or Tamara of Georgia. When Golda Meir wept at the Wailing Wall on the fifth day of the Six Day War for the sacrifices of Israel’s youth, the soldiers watched her and wept too.
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There is however one twentieth-century female political leader who has had to be extremely cautious at any overt suggestion of queenship – warrior or otherwise. That is not to say that the subject in all its emotive strength does not arise.
Margaret Thatcher, then aged fifty-three, became Prime Minister of Great Britain in May 1979, the first woman to occupy the position, as five years earlier she had been the first woman to lead any British political party. By this date, Queen Elizabeth II, a mere six months younger than the new Prime Minister, had already been on the throne for over twenty-seven years.

‘This nation loves a monarch’, a committee of the House of Commons had advised Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell in 1657, suggesting that he should regularize his position by accepting a crown himself. In the words of Secretary Thurloe advocating the same course: ‘it’s the office which is known to the laws and this people. They know their duty to a King and his to them.’
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Certainly the British love their monarchy, and certainly they love their present monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, who regularly tops polls as the most admired British woman. They also know their duty to her: just as she knows hers to them, the Queen’s conspicuous sense of duty being among the qualities which have endeared her to her subjects in the course of a reign whose span, at the celebration of her golden jubilee in 2002, surpassed by several years that of her illustrious predecessor, the first Elizabeth. It is Queen Elizabeth II who enacts the role of the Holy (Armed) Figurehead to her people in her frequent ceremonial appearances at military parades, naval reviews and so forth; of which her presence for many years in uniform and on horseback at the Trooping of the Colour is probably the best-known.

Under the circumstances one can understand the alarm, both public and private, which Mrs Thatcher displayed at any suggestion of encroachment on the royal role on her own part. She was obviously well aware of the resentment she might have unleashed.
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‘You don’t do that to me, my dear, I’m only in politics’, she observed hastily to an unwary Spanish tourist who curtseyed to her, when the Prime Minister was glimpsed on a shopping tour in 1987.
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But, once again, the issue is not so simple. The existence of queens regnant in British history, and the tradition of national prosperity under two of them, the long-reigning Elizabeth I
and Victoria, means that every British schoolchild – the one who knows about the knives on the wheels of Boadicea’s chariot – also knows that it is not out of the question for a woman to rule Britain, much as Mrs Gandhi benefited from Hindu traditions of powerful women in religion, literature and history, despite the theoretically inferior position of women in Hindu society.

In January 1988, when Mrs Thatcher became the longest-serving Prime Minister in twentieth-century Britain, there was a plethora of commentaries and comparisons: but after lip-service had been paid to Prime Minister Asquith – whose record she had just beaten – the main comparisons were made unashamedly to British reigning queens. As Robert Harris wrote rather despairingly in the
Observer
: ‘It is not sexist to use a regal analogy to describe her impact on the country. It is not particularly facetious. It is simply the nearest thing we have to an historical parallel.’ Lord Hailsham, Lord Chancellor in Mrs Thatcher’s government for eight years, openly described his premier as being in the same category as Mary Tudor, Elizabeth I, Queen Anne and Queen Victoria, favouring Elizabeth I especially ‘in her handling of men’.
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So Mrs Thatcher, without visibly seeking it – rather to the contrary – did benefit from that tradition expressed long ago by Tacitus concerning the Britons and Boadicea: ‘they did not discriminate against women in matters of command’. There is a kind of justice in this. For Mrs Thatcher also had to contend with many of those problems special to the Warrior Queen – or Queen Regnant – which have been mentioned throughout this book.

The female voice of command, which grates on the male ear for reasons which are as much psychological as physiological, is one of these problems, from Boadicea’s allegedly ‘harsh’ voice onwards. The disadvantage to Mrs Thatcher of her female lightly timbred voice in a massively male-dominated House of Commons – which means of course deep-male-voice-dominated – is not one to be dismissed lightly, since it entailed exactly that kind
of screeching in making herself heard most disliked by men (and many women).

Mrs Thatcher acknowledged this herself: ‘Yes, I do have to shout to make myself heard,’ she admitted in an interview in 1986, ‘and sometimes I say, “I am not going to shout any more like I did last time, I will just stand there until they are quiet”.’ In the same year the Labour Shadow Minister Gerald Kaufman drew attention to what he called Mrs Thatcher’s ‘fishwife’ act in the House of Commons: ‘screaming away in a shrill, strident voice, with her face absolutely contorted’. The Liberal leader David Steel made the same point – and independently used the same epithet: ‘I don’t personally like her House of Commons style. I don’t think that the “fishwife” approach … is at all effective or impressive.’ It was however in vain that Kaufman hoped his own comment was made ‘in an unsexist way’: for the point is indeed a sexist one, whether intended as such or not, in that no man could possibly be subject to the same criticism. (One cannot help recalling Leonardi Bruno’s quattrocento advice to Battista Malatesta about a woman who ‘increases the volume of her speech with greater forcefulness’: she will appear ‘threateningly insane and requiring restraint’.)
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A man bellowing to make himself heard in the House of Commons, as many men do, does not sound either to his own side or to his opponents like a ‘fishwife’ – that traditional English misogynist term of abuse going back to the fourteenth century – let alone as though requiring restraint.

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.)
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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’.
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‘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.’
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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.
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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’.
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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’.
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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.’
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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.
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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’.
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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.