Thatcher

So Thatcher died. After hating her and everything she stood for these last thirty years I felt nothing. It was totally unlike my JFK Moment upon hearing of her resignation as Prime Minister. Then I was young, in my first job, and sat on the khazi at work reading the paper when Jane, a fiery Glaswegian, thumped on the door to the Gents shouting, “McTodd, have you heard the news? Thatcher’s GONE!” Yes, she actually said GONE in block capitals.

So that was the death of Thatcher’s career. But when it came to the Lady’s actual, physical death this week, as I say, nothing. Oh sure, I jumped with both feet into the virtual bear-pit that is the Twitter, saying some fabulously vile things about her, but those were prompted by Olympic-scale fawning and drooling by Tories and other motley rightwingers. There’s nothing cheers McTodd up more than being really offensive to rightwing arseholes (by the way, if you’re a Tory and reading this, kindly piss off, there’s a good fellow). In fact, it is my ambition to actually cause a Tory’s death through paroxysms of rage induced by reading a tweet of mine.

So Thatcher died. And the media went into overdrive. The BBC News website’s homepage resembled an English version of what Pravda would have been had the old Soviet Union clung on into the age of the internet. Brezhnev and chums must be looking up green with envy, all they had was a dusty party newspaper and one TV channel endlessly playing solemn music. The Lady herself might have found this amusingly ironic, but for the fact that she famously had no sense of humour. As for the Tory press, well, the less said…

Meanwhile, the Tory party appears to have completely taken leave of its senses, creating a veritable Thatcher Death Cult despite the fact that they knifed her in the back in 1989 in the first place, ending not just her career but in a very meaningful way, ending her life. Perhaps they’re attempting to atone for that Original Sin… And with the State Funeral That Isn’t, Cameron has clearly co-opted Thatcher’s death in the brazen hope that some of her metallic glister will reflect on him.

Which prompts me to ponder the meaning of Thatcher. In his Independent column, Steve Harris ably points out how Thatcher’s death speaks volumes about the present. For the Conservatives it’s a reminder of the seemingly ironclad certainties of the Lady, in contrast with Cameron’s apparent weakness. Hence Dave’s eagerness to use her death, even to the extent of enmeshing the monarchy in what next week will be a party political stunt on a grand scale, something the Telegraph (of all places!) columnist Peter Oborne finds deeply disturbing. For Labour it’s a chance to prove that “Ideology mattered… ideas matter in politics.” For millions of others, including me, it’s an opportunity to celebrate the death of someone who in many ways mutilated British society.

The real point to me, however, is that neither side sees Thatcher as a flesh and blood human being. Those celebrating Thatcher’s death do not celebrate the death of a frail old lady. After all, even someone as jaded as I cannot fail to be touched by images such as this:

No, the death they and I celebrate is not that of an old lady, it’s the death of the Iron Lady, the death of a symbol, an emblem of everything we hated and hate about what this country has become. Thatcher started that revolution (though Blair continued it, and which is why, even discounting the Iraq War, he is also reviled by millions). By the same token, when Tories and assorted other rightwingers eulogise and canonise Thatcher, they do not venerate the woman, the human being, they venerate a symbol of power, a symbol of ideological certainty.

The point is that both sides have turned her into an abstract symbol, both have essentially dehumanised her and, in that sense, both sides are complicit in each other’s extremes. Consequently, for Tories to condemn those celebrating Thatcher’s death is therefore both hypocritical and spectacularly unreflective in its total lack of self-awareness.

I cannot help but recall a brilliant observation by the great jazz musician George Melly of his friend Trog’s work as a caricature artist. Trog, otherwise known as Wally Fawkes (and himself a jazzman), had simplified Thatcher

…as an image, reduced [her] to a few lines …a cartoon-strip figure. On the other hand, lesser-known political figures are drawn with near-realism and frequently cross-hatched to achieve sculptural solidity, the logic being that Thatcher… [has] become [an] almost abstract creature, whereas those lesser political figures remain individuals and are depicted as such.

What was true of depicting Thatcher as a graphic figure turns out, oddly enough, to be equally true of Thatcher as a public figure.