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29 January 2025

The riddle of Margaret Thatcher

James Graham’s Brian and Maggie, starring Harriet Walter as the prime minister, is shrewd on the class dynamics that made her – but can’t quite crack her open.

By Rachel Cooke

Champagne! Monetarism! It’s 1989, and at a party to celebrate Margaret Thatcher’s long decade in power, the action is on two levels. While the prime minister stands at the top of a staircase in pearls and a gold jacket, her helmet of hair rising dramatically like Hokusai’s wave, her black-tied ministers and acolytes are grouped on the landing below, looking up: Geoffrey Howe, the foreign secretary, Nigel Lawson, the chancellor, Ian Gow, the MP who’ll shortly deliver the first speech to be made in the newly televised House of Commons. It’s a scene from Shakespeare. Power has gone to the queen’s head, and she will soon be deposed. But it’s inflected, too, with the spirit of Coronation Street. No one ever says it, but Thatcher’s styling, like her resilience, brings to mind Elsie Tanner. And the men’s faces, as pale as moons! Even as their eyes dart like minnows, their mouths fall wide open. They love her, they fear her, they hate her.

The prime minister makes a speech, and when it’s over, another man springs up the stairs to toast her: Alan Walters, the economic adviser whose closeness to her will bring Lawson to resign and thus trigger the beginning of the end. Sotto voce, she reminds Walters of their roots – like her, he was state educated – and then she turns her eye on the crowd. “Westminster,” she says, nodding in the direction of a member of the cabinet, before swiftly picking off the others: “Winchester, Eton, Haberdashers’ Aske’s.” These men, she and Walters agree, are bloated and complacent. They don’t know what it is to have to fight. Lawson’s corpulence, like his hair, which Thatcher regards as unkempt, in particular speaks volumes. No need to say it, but the implication hangs as heavy in the air as the Penhaligon’s Bluebell she dabs on her wrists. Why wouldn’t such an upholstered fellow want lazily to tie the pound to European currencies?

It seems unlikely that Mrs Thatcher ever roll-called the boarding schools of her colleagues like this – or not out loud. But it works brilliantly as a televisual set-piece, underscoring a theme as well as building jeopardy. Ostensibly, the subject of Brian and Maggie, a surprisingly gripping new drama for Channel 4 by the playwright and screenwriter James Graham (Quiz, Sherwood) and based on the book Why Is This Lying Bastard Lying to Me? by Rob Burley, is the demise of the political interview – the Brian of the title being Brian Walden (he is played by Steve Coogan, and Thatcher by Harriet Walter).

And on this score, it’s hugely provocative and a touch melancholy, too. Think about it. In the 1980s, we had Walden, a Labour MP turned journalist, whose forensic, long-form encounters with politicians were frequently revelatory; in the present day, we’ve got Ed Balls, also an ex-Labour politician, soft balling questions in the direction of his own wife on breakfast television (last August, Balls interviewed said wife, Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, about the government response to the riots in Southport – a farce that ITV’s chief executive explained away by saying that Good Morning Britain only had short notice of Cooper’s availability). Graham isn’t wrong to suggest that we’ve lost something, even if he does make Walden’s performances – Thatcher was a favourite interviewee, he her favourite inquisitor – seem a lot more thrilling than they were to most viewers at the time.

The real subject of Brian and Maggie, however, is not TV, but social class: what Walden, the son of a Black Country glass blower, and Thatcher, the daughter of a Grantham grocer, have most in common by Graham’s telling is their sense that they’ve always had it harder than their privileged peers. “Why won’t she yield?” someone asks Walden on the day of what will turn out to be his final interview with her – a head-to-head in which he famously pressed her on the resignation of Lawson, and which she came to regard as a betrayal of their friendship (this is the series’s tense climax). “[Because] we were taught not to,” he replies, in a voice that suggests a certain kind of regret. Brian and Maggie is, in other words, a broadly sympathetic portrayal of Thatcher as a victim of sexism and snobbery as well as the embodiment of political cruelty, and as such it joins the increasingly long line of TV reassessments that began in 2008 with The Long Walk to Finchley by Tony Saint, in which Andrea Riseborough starred as the young Margaret.

For my part, I think such sympathy is right – and like Graham, I come from a place where her name was only ever spat out in disgust (he grew up in a Nottinghamshire mining village; I grew up in Sheffield, where the National Union of Miners had its HQ, and I hated her). Distance changes a lot, and so does experience. The condescension of those around her is beautifully played in Graham’s drama; its ex-public-school boys adore mummy’s strictness until they don’t, at which point she becomes just another infuriating and unhinged female. As a woman with flat vowels I recognise this, because I experience it still.

Lawson (Ivan Kaye) and Gow (Simon Paisley Day) are de haut en bas to just the right degree, their cheap unctuousness straining to hide it. Howe (Paul Higgins) is more honourable, but his slow-blinking eyes suggest nevertheless a sense of amazement that she is there, and he is, well, here. It’s against the order of things. Those who dare genuinely to like her, even if they don’t ever know her, are all cut from the same social cloth: Walden, Walters, her Yorkshire press secretary, Bernard Ingham (Paul Clayton). I had thought I wasn’t in the market for another Thatcher drama, and I worry that both theatre and television are lately relying too much on the past and on impressions of the famous, rather than on new characters, the Willy Lomans and the Yosser Hugheses of the future. But all this feels right: a complexity that, even if it can’t solve the riddle of Thatcher, is suggestive of an embattled psyche.

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And what of Thatcher, as portrayed by Walter? Coogan has Walden’s voice to a T, even if he doesn’t look like him. But then, there’s no  easy route to looking like Walden, whereas with Thatcher, props can do much of the initial work: a wig, a pussy bow, a Launer handbag over the forearm like an anchor hanging heavily from the prow of a ship. Some are already saying that Walter’s performance may be the best portrayal of Thatcher there’s ever been, but I would hazard caution: the competition is fierce.

Sometimes, I thought she hadn’t tried hard enough with the voice, failing to capture the way it comes from the back of the throat, so breathy and rehearsed even in ordinary moments. At other times, though, the aura almost had me flinching: the scuttling walk, the fierceness that borders on religious zealotry, the corvine eyes that settle on a person, as if they’re carrion. I think Walter has some kind of padding below her upper lip – that, or false teeth – and it does the trick, her mouth moving like a ventriloquist’s dummy, or that of someone who’s just had dental surgery. Certainly, it doesn’t seem to matter that she’s ten years too old, at least, for the role.

But then, at the end, a shock in the form of a clip of the real Thatcher, puncturing one’s suspended disbelief. You take in her strange ordinariness, and remember all over again that no impersonation ever really gets there; she is an enigma or a closed book, take your pick. In one of his columns for the Sunday Times, when Walden is in the first throes of his enthusiasm for her (it did eventually wane: in the final interview, he suggested people saw her as “slightly off her trolley”), he writes that great novels will one day be written about her. But this hasn’t happened. At best, she gets a cameo, as she does in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. Taking in the real thing in after two hours of Walter, you grasp both why she is so hard to capture on the page, and why TV and film-makers keep trying to do so on screen. Graham and Walter between them have done their best to crack her open, just as Walden once did. But she remains resistant, as smooth as a formica worktop in the old galley kitchen of No 10.

Brian and Maggie
Channel 4

[See also: A new history of the Brighton bomb attack]

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This article appears in the 29 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Class War