New Statesman - The making of Margaret

Did sexism help to shape Thatcher's icy persona? This drama suggests it did Margaret Thatcher: the Long Walk to Finchley BBC4

The writer Tony Saint has described his screenplay - Margaret Thatcher: the Long Walk to Finchley (12 June, 9pm) - as "a comedy . . . a fantasy". But he was nevertheless somewhat put out when newspaper stories about the film in advance of its screening suggested that he had attributed Ted Heath's long and unparalleled aversion to Mrs Thatcher as the result of sexual advances she had once made to him.

I don't blame him. In fact, the film had Mrs Thatcher, having been spurned by one constituency after another in her search for a safe parliamentary seat, making desperate political advances to Heath, which he then mistook as sexual (easily done when you are as repressed as Ted Heath; Keith Joseph could have brushed past him in a corridor, and he would probably have thought he was being asked out on a hot date).

Even so, I am not entirely convinced that The Long Walk to Finchley was a comedy, or even a fantasy, for all that it began as a romp, depressingly similar in feel to other recent, if more shabby, dramas about John Prescott and David Blunkett. Gradually, it hardened into something unexpectedly substantial.

In part, we can put this down to some wonderful performances. Andrea Riseborough was glorious to behold, having perfected both the young Thatcher's strange diction (the legacy of voluntary elocution lessons was that she used to sound like she had an unusually big gob-stopper - or worse - in her mouth) and the peculiar scuttling walk that Alan Hollinghurst describes so well in The Line of Beauty. Sam West can be an awful old luvvie at times, but his Heath was wonderfully knotted. Rory Kinnear took yet another dazzling turn - he is just great, I think - as Denis, playing him as a flashy, Jag-driving berk who, having won his dream girl, was content to let her get on with a career that no other man (save for her father, the blessed Alderman Roberts) was prepared to countenance.

But there was something else going on here, too, and it surprises me, just a little, that it was a male writer who brought it so vociferously to life. I'm talking about the idea that sexism, when you are on the receiving end of it, can drive you mad - or at least, make your behaviour pretty immoderate.

Personally, I think that it's as dumb to start with the feminist reassessments of Mrs Thatcher as it is to cling babyishly to one's own youthful hatred of her, but this film did make you wonder: was it the men who made her first so successful, and then so extreme? Was it the men who guaranteed that the chip of ice in her soul, far from ever melting, only grew to iceberg-like proportions over the years? Because, dear me, they were vile: snobbish, patronising, spiteful. And she was brighter, and more determined, than all of them.

My hunch is that the film had this right. I watched Riseborough's luminous Thatcher being ignored and belittled, and thought of the time when, not so long ago, a man who was interviewing me for a big job on a newspaper smilingly noted that I was one of the few female candidates who had not gone to a certain rather famous public school. Sure, women can be snobs; but misogyny induces men to say things out loud that women only think, and in 1958 there was an awful lot more of it around.

Why does this kind of stuff drive one mad? Well, it's not only that it's frustrating, or unjust. It's that a part of you thinks - or is perhaps encouraged to think - that you are simply imagining it, or taking it personally, or being chippy. Again, more so in 1958 than now. The moment when, by Saint's account, Thatcher realised that she was not imagining it was when another woman - East Finchley's thin-lipped constituency secretary - told her that she was not. It was deeply satisfying, both dramatically and politically (with a small "p"). She turned on the obstructive sitting MP, Sir John Crowder (Geoffrey Palmer), and detailed his inadequacies, at which he looked roughly the way Queen Victoria must have done on hearing of the existence of lesbians. Thus, the worm turned. The only trouble is, of course, that it - though she called herself "the Lady" - was never to turn again.