Politics
The Mummy returns. Margaret Thatcher will continue to haunt the left as much as she does her own party until her legacy is properly understood. Suzanne Moore on our fear of an unlaid ghost
Published 17 March 2003
Thatcher, Politics and Fantasy: the political culture of gender and nation
Heather Nunn Lawrence & Wishart, 224pp, £17.99
ISBN 0853159629
The extent to which the left as a whole has not come to terms with Margaret Thatcher is evident in three myths that continue to permeate it. First, that Tony Blair really is Margaret Thatcher. Second, that Margaret Thatcher was really a man. And third, that we don't miss her at all. I may be exaggerating slightly, but you hear these thoughts regurgitated (albeit in a more sophisticated form) in almost any discussion of the state we're in. It is eerie to be considering her at this moment in time, but then she has never been properly pushed to the back of our minds. After all, as early as 1988, Jacqueline Rose wrote that one of the things Thatcher stood for was "the desirability of war".
Crucial to her persona was the representation of herself as being at perpetual war, and on every level: personally, politically, doctrinally, nationally and internationally. The iconic image of her remains the one of her test-driving a Challenger tank, in Germany, white headscarf blowing in the wind, and this is the image with which Heather Nunn starts her book. It remains as startling now as it was then. Whether Blair has ever been able to conjure such a resonant image remains in doubt, because Thatcher is still the reference point by which we in this country judge strong leadership.
One of the joys of this book is how it reminds us of Thatcher's incredible self-dramatisation and sense of theatre. "I stand before you tonight in my green chiffon evening gown, my face softly made up, my fair hair gently waved . . ." (the Iron Lady speech, from 1976). She really was a drama queen. Somehow she implicitly understood that, as Ru Paul has it, "Honey, you're born naked; the rest is just drag." And she could drag up any way she wanted - butch or femme.
Obviously there have been many works on Thatcherism and on the woman herself, but conventional political analysis and biography will only get you so far. Much political writing trudges along with an innate but misplaced sense that politics is a rational affair that divides neatly into the categories of "issues" and "personalities". The quirks of political personality are exposed but how they might meld with the unspoken desires of the electorate is not the terrain of conventional political thought, which mostly assumes that voters are as rational as their representatives.
I have never understood how anyone who has spent even a single day at Westminster, either as a journo or a politico, can maintain this position, but they all do. I am always struck when I meet politicians, who may be honourable, admirable and well-meaning, that they belong to the least self-aware group of people that I have ever encountered. It is always surprising to me that a great many more don't find themselves having Ron Davies-type "moments of madness" on Clapham Common, because they are so unconnected with any kind of inner life.
Nunn's approach is different. She borrows heavily - from psychoanalytic and deconstructive methodology - in an attempt to understand Thatcher's appeal. This is a particularly effective way of looking at the contradictions that Thatcher so successfully embodied and embraced. Nunn takes it for granted that fantasy structures public narrative and it is, therefore, necessary to explore the nature of the fantasises that are called upon. Other writers such as Susie Orbach, Andrew Samuels and the indispensable Jacqueline Rose have also melded psychoanalytic theory with public politics in a similarly productive manner. Conventional leftist political thought is almost entirely redundant in explaining such a transgressive figure as Thatcher, because it cannot get to grips with her appeal to so many women - that, for instance, she was a warrior and a revolutionary, or that she was able at once to display an almost "hyper-phallic masculinity", as well as play the housewife card when she chose. The left cannot begin to comprehend the way she played charades with gender - governess, Iron Lady, nanny, warrior, queen - and the ways in which she was able to dramatise her desires because of her fantastic "performativity". (She understood gender as essentially a performance.) Thus she was able to appeal to our varying social identities as taxpayers, as mothers and as workers, too. She was able to give women a public language in which to express want and resentment, and was able to fuel female engagement with militarism, nationalism and state authority.
All this makes feminists very uncomfortable. Yet not only could Thatcher command enormous authority from the way she moved across gender identities, but she operated almost entirely through negativity, repeatedly conjuring images of exclusion, chaos and anarchy in her speeches. Just outside or sometimes even within the heart of society there were always dangerous forces lurking that had to be battled. Nunn reminds us of how "she staged imaginary scenes of endless punishment and endless transgressions". We were at the edge of darkness.
The unconscious appeal of this deeply punitive discourse was, as Nunn argues, very enjoyable. The failure of public law, the breakdown of society that she made us feel was ever-present, allowed us to have it both ways - the excitement of chaos and the thrill of harsh discipline. If you are in any doubt that this is not an amazingly effective way of hooking people in, you will never begin to understand the appeal of a newspaper such as the Daily Mail, which understands so well the titillation that fear produces.
In a wonderful chapter, "The Nation Rampant", Nunn explores how, during the Falklands war, Thatcher became the "ferocious super-ego" of the nation and embraced nuclear weaponry. While the women at Greenham Common emphasised the nurturing side of femininity, Thatcher was blithely comparing herself to Churchill and even, at times, to Napoleon. But there were limits to her discourse. Given that she saw the family as an enclosure, with its various members only as potential consumers, she had no language with which to deal with our heightening awareness of sexual abuse in the 1980s. She simply resorted, as the right continues to do, to the language of individual wickedness during the Cleveland child abuse scandal of 1987-88.
Yet, all these years later, Margaret Thatcher still haunts the left as much as she haunts her own party. She is, as she herself quipped, "The Mummy returned". She is the unhinged, vengeful madwoman in the attic, the unlaid ghost. The left's visceral hatred towards her (who can be bothered to hate John Major in quite the same way?) may be explained by the usual ramblings about monetarism, privatisation and widening inequality; but they cannot mask entirely the misogyny and sheer class prejudice that she undoubtedly provoked. Nor, far more uncomfortably, can the projection on to her of violent fantasies of greed, war and selfishness entirely excuse us from the way that they sometimes meshed with our own.
The point of all this is remarkably simple and has become a psychological commonplace. There is a psychic compulsion to repeat something that has not been properly understood. As Freud said, the ghost will reappear until "the mystery has been solved and the spell broken". The analysis of Thatcherism that recognised the need to appeal to the aspirations of ordinary people gave us new Labour. The moral of this tale may well be: be very careful about what you wish for.
Heather Nunn shows us that the unconscious of politics is as important as the "real" stuff on the surface. The huge resistance to this idea in standard political discussion helps, I would contend, to keep us not only powerless, but destined compulsively to repeat ourselves.
If we think that Tony Blair is just the same as Margaret Thatcher, we really haven't, as the counsellors say, "moved on" at all.
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