Tim Farron’s revelations, made during an interview as part of ITV’s series on party leaders, have an air of … well, “unreality” sounds patronisingly mild and “bullshit” sounds rude. Try to think of a word between those two coordinates. Describing his teenage bedroom, he said: “I had pictures of strange sorts of leftwing politicians. I remember I had a Mrs Thatcher picture. I had a John F Kennedy picture. I had a [Liberal leader] Jo Grimond picture.” Parking the fact that Grimond, while undoubtedly a heartthrob, first served as Lib Dem leader before Farron was born, and later as a safe pair of hands (after the Jeremy Thorpe scandal) for three months when Farron was six, who does that? Who makes a collage of strange sorts of leftwing politicians, plus Margaret Thatcher, and sticks it above their bed? It’s like trolling your own subconscious.
Yet it’s all too easy to disbelieve a thing you don’t understand: in fact, the Maggie-above-the-bed trope has enough purchase in real life that it has become an oblique thumbnail character sketch. David Mitchell once invited his fellow panellists on Would I Lie to You to guess whether or not he was nerdy/alienated/kitsch/bank manager-ish enough to have had Thatcher on his bedroom wall as a teenager (two of the three thought it true; in fact, it was not).
Iain Dale – the LBC broadcaster, publisher and former Tory politician – has an oil painting of Thatcher in his office that is slightly larger than life, a confusing scale. “I didn’t realise how big it was when I bought it,” he says, in his defence. “I just saw it on eBay and couldn’t believe how cheap it was” (£180 – it has since been valued at £20,000. He’s obliquely framing this as an investment, but it makes me wonder what his search term was, if not “portrait of Margaret Thatcher as a giant”). It’s Henry Mee’s practice version of the painting that sits in the House of Commons. Dale didn’t have the prime minister on his wall in his youth (he had Heather Haversham, from Brookside), but has always held her as an icon. “I think the fact that she was an outsider in a world of men did have an effect on me. I always felt like a bit of an outsider.” It’s much easier to find role models as a misfit leftwinger; Tories have Thatcher, Ayn Rand and that’s about it. Yet Maggie’s kitsch value is universal across the spectrum. I was moved to take a selfie in front of it, which I have never done before or since.
