In March 1973, Margaret Thatcher sat down for an interview with the Blue Peter presenter Valerie Singleton and a studio audience of school pupils. She was then education secretary. The footage has become notorious, clipped into infamy. Asked “Would you like to see a woman prime minister?”, Thatcher plays the Tory no-special-treatment card – “I don’t think it depends so much whether it’s a man prime minister or a woman prime minister as whether that person is the right person for the job.” The current crop of women, she goes on to suggest, don’t have the necessary ministerial experience to make such a leap.
But watch further. Singleton quotes a claim that women don’t have the “aggression” to reach the top of Formula One. Here comes that mocking Thatcher smile: “I wouldn’t say that I was guilty of lack of aggression, sometimes.” Pity the young boy at the back of the hall, who proffers this: “Say like a person – a man – argues against a woman, she wouldn’t have the chance of fighting back cos she’s a woman.” “Oh my dear … I don’t think that anyone would say that either Barbara Castle or myself lack debating fire.”
Here’s the line that went down in history: “I don’t think there will be a woman prime minister in my lifetime.” Perhaps she believed it. But within two years, she was her party’s leader. Within six years, she was Britain’s first female prime minister.
Forty years later, it’s easy to undervalue the scale of that achievement. We are all Thatcher’s children – looking back at those early interviews, it’s hard to see how the ascendency of this fierce, determined woman was a surprise to anyone. We have seen the election of Britain’s second female prime minister (of whom more later) and this week, the first female defence secretary (Penny Mordaunt, worth watching in the next leadership election).
Easy, then, to forget the centuries of prejudice against women in power – the dark collective dreams about our floating wombs and intemperate blood. John Calvin, writing on the accession of Elizabeth I, accepted grudgingly that God could appoint a woman to rule, but only as a penance for a great collective national sin. (He likened it to national slavery.) The framing of misogyny changes with the centuries: the scale shrinks, but the instincts stick around. Last September, the Sky journalist Sophy Ridge vox-popped a male baby boomer about Theresa May. “Women shouldn’t be in the top jobs,” he cheerfully told the TV camera. “Too many hormones.”
It was a radical act for a woman to seek the office of prime minister, let alone hold it for 11 years. And it matters that the woman was a Tory. No more could social conservatives mutter about the church traditions of male headship.
Not that this should indemnify Thatcher against the left’s criticism. Even those of us who value Thatcher’s economic reforms should recognise the destructiveness with which she took an axe to entire industries; the deliberately divisive rhetoric with which she set the country against itself. Her toxic phrase “the enemy within” was the precursor to Theresa May and Nick Timothy’s “citizens of nowhere” – it was scrapped from the draft of a public speech, but reports had the same effect. Like today’s politicians, Thatcher was an expert in creating division, whatever harmony she may have claimed to foster on the steps of Downing Street.
What would she have made of today’s lot? On climate change and on the European Union, Thatcher’s legacy is contested – speak to any Tory invested on one side or the other of these arguments, and you’ll hear highly selective quotations from Thatcher’s long and varied career. Certainly by 2002, when a book in her name U-turned dramatically on her support for climate science, she was already in the advanced stages of dementia. There are questions about who influenced the hardening statements put out under her name, though her support for General Pinochet was as consistent as it was unconscionable.
Thatcher understood the need for political flexibility. She was more a Cameron than a May, though she would never have committed David Cameron’s mistake and called a referendum on EU membership. Not because of her feelings about the EU, nor because she agreed with Clement Attlee, as she once suggested, that “the referendum was a device of dictators and demagogues”, but because of her horror at the idea of allowing anyone else to take a decision.
Did she fail other women? Certainly, she could have appointed more of them to cabinet. (If the options were mediocre, she appointed plenty of mediocre men.) And it is infuriating to watch Conservatives use Thatcher’s success to claim their party has no more work to do. I once attended a Tory book launch at which a handsy old cove lifted a glass “to Maggie, who never needed a bloody all-women shortlist”. In fact, Thatcher spent years losing selection battles to lesser men. Even the conservative grandee Charles Moore notes in his biography “on her merits, Mrs Thatcher seemed to do well every time, only to lose because of her sex”. Think, whether with regret or with relief, of how many more Thatchers all-women shortlists might have brought the Conservative party.
So while Thatcher refused common cause with the feminist movement, remember she was trying to reach the top of the Conservative party. Perhaps her greatest feminist legacy lies in the way we talk about another woman. Theresa May will go down in history as one of our great failures – though who envies the task set her? – but she will do so as a failed prime minister, not a failed female pioneer. Thatcher wasn’t just the first female prime minister – she was a success as a first female prime minister. In that, she created the freedom for Theresa May to fail.
• Kate Maltby writes about theatre, politics and culture
