One reporter's Thatcher is another director's Iron Lady

I’m haunted by her. Not by her in the flesh, but her as portrayed by Meryl Streep. Make no mistake, Streep does become Thatcher in celluloid. Let nothing detract from the scale of her achievement. An American woman of 62 becomes Thatcher at 48, and Thatcher at 80 – completely convincingly, vocally, physically.

It’s strange because I am myself the right age to have reported her from the beginnings of her power to her political end. As a cub reporter I caught her final year as education secretary and moved to TV reporting as she became Tory leader. By 1979, I was “live” outside Downing Street as she became prime minister – a snatch of my doorstep report makes it into the Iron Lady movie. I was there again in 1990 as she wept with Denis in the back seat of the Jag as she departed Downing Street for the last time as premier. In between I interviewed her perhaps a dozen times – mainly as a diplomatic correspondent reporting European summits and meetings with Reagan, Gorbachev and more.

I always presumed that she knew my name because Bernard Ingham (press secretary) had whispered it in her ear…possibly with the pre-fix – “frightful b******”! In fact her husband, gorgeously portrayed by Jim Broadbent, did go on the record describing me as “that pinko”!

But though Jim and Meryl shone, for me the film did not. I felt I learned nothing new, and I had hoped to. Perhaps there is no more to be learned. Certainly my sense was that she was as she was, precisely because she was a woman in a “man’s job”.

The film does play to this but without analysing why men were so retreated and subservient in her presence. Many of the Cabinet around her had never experienced a woman in power – the last they had known had been matron in their boarding schools. Hence my suspicion was that they feared that as she glared across the Cabinet table, she was saying in her head and in theirs “Geoffrey have you washed behind your ears?” Or, “Kenneth…those finger nails…” She was breathlessly intimidating and seductive at one and the same time. It was a most infernal combination.

I lost every interview I ever had with her – reduced to a pimple… which I feared, I had missed, and she had spotted, under my chin.

I wanted more of that from the film…more account of how she did it…how she persuaded men, in particular, of her “rightness”. “Is he one of us?”, did not surface in the film. Nor “the Lady’s not for turning”. But then this was not a biopic, but rather an over coherent and linear journey through dementia.

My mother suffered from dementia and was never as linear nor as lucid. Most of Mrs Thatcher’s recollections in the film were actually a reasonably correct account. Whilst Mrs T believed, in the film, that Denis was still alive, eight years after he’d died, my mother was convinced her own long-dead parents were still in the house where she was born and that she herself was there too, still around twelve years of age. In the film, Mrs Thatcher never loses the sense of having been prime minister.

In the end, the Iron Lady falls between a fantasy study of her dementia and an account of assorted high points in her time as PM. It is remarkable centrally for Meryl Streep’s wondrous portrayal, and Jim Broadbent’s staunch yet sensitive supporting role.

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