Brian, Maggie, Keir - and me

This is what we need now

Steve Coogan and Harriet Walter as Brian Walden and Margaret Thatcher

That manic gleam in the eye. That hectoring voice. That smile that showed, or appeared to show, a belief that ran though her marrow, veins and soul that she was right.

It all came flooding back as I watched Harriet Walter tell Steve Coogan, in Channel 4’s recent drama documentary Brian and Maggie, that she was “concerned with getting on with the job”.

I didn’t watch Brian Walden’s interview with Margaret Thatcher when it came out. I wasn’t a political obsessive in those days and anyway I had other things going on in my life. It was 1989. I had left my job as a press officer at Faber and Faber. I was, instead, training to be a missionary on a council estate in Merseyside. Yes, an unlikely career move for a 25-year-old with two degrees in literature, but that’s another story (and one I tell in my memoir, Outside, the Sky is Blue).

I didn’t have a TV at the time or a smartphone (because they hadn’t been invented) or wi fi (because ditto). I was living in a world of Bible verses and “words of knowledge” from “the Lord”. I wouldn’t say it was exactly a cult, because fundamentalist Christianity isn’t meant to qualify as a cult, but I’d say it was enough of a cult for me to recognise that America is currently in the grip of one.

Damn. I was hoping to write one Substack newsletter without talking about America, so let me get back to the point.

The point is that I hated Margaret Thatcher. As an evangelical Christian, I wasn’t meant to hate anyone but the Devil, but sometimes it was hard to tell the difference. Margaret Thatcher had spent the past decade trying to change my country and she had done a pretty good job. She had, for example, crushed the miners. She had castrated the unions and their bosses. (Looking back at the power cuts, the train strikes and my father’s despair at having, yet again, to sleep on the floor of his office, I should probably have admitted that she sometimes had a point. )

She had told us that there was “no such thing as society”. She had echoed the anthem that was wafting over the Atlantic that “greed is good”. She had given us Loadsamoney, taffeta ball gowns, champagne-popping in the City and consumption that was very conspicuous indeed.

Loadsamoney. I couldn’t get a photo of the Harry Enfield character, so this will have to do.

Not, I should say, among people I knew. My father would still offer guests half a glass of Liebfraumilch. It never occurred to him that people might want more. At university, I lived on carbohydrates in a house with no central heating and with mushrooms on the walls. The salary for my first job, after two degrees and a vocational diploma, was £4,850, which is about £17,230 now. It certainly didn’t allow for much popping of corks.

But the climate, it was clear, was changing. Even if we didn’t strut around like Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, there was a feeling that we should all aspire to this brash, new world where the aim was to be richer than your neighbours.

I hated this idea. I still do. I hated Margaret Thatcher’s certainty. I hated her philosophy: that our lives were like shops and that our job on this earth was to maximise the profit of that shop. It was a philosophy that seemed both pinched and flashy. Cut your coat and flash your bling. The important thing was self-reliance. People could come to your shop, they could spend in your shop, they could add to the turnover of your shop. What mattered was their “added value”. It was all about maths.

In this world, it was all about what you owned. You could even own shares in the water your neighbour used to wash his car. 1989 was the year the water companies were privatised.

I wonder how that turned out?

I haven’t changed my views about Margaret Thatcher’s philosophy or about the damage she did to this country. That shift from the collective to the individual appears to be permanent and social media has, of course, made it worse. But as I watched James Graham’s docu-drama about the interview that played a key part in ending her political career, I felt, as a Californian might say, conflicted.

As a piece of television, it was a mixed bag. I love James Graham. I loved his play Ink, about Rupert Murdoch and the launch of The Sun newspaper. I loved This House, about the parliamentary turbulence that led to the Thatcher premiership and Best of Enemies, about the TV debates on the ABC network during the 1968 presidential nominating conventions, between William F Buckley Jr and Gore Vidal.

(I had dinner with Gore Vidal in the Nineties, when I was working at the Southbank Centre. He was as funny as you’d expect.)

Graham is fascinated by politics and the media and the link between the two. Which is lucky for me, because so am I. The TV debates between Buckley and Vidal (brilliantly played in the West End by David Harewood and Charles Edwards) led, arguably, to Fox News and what we’re seeing in the US now. Graham’s dramatization of the Walden-Thatcher interview is not in the same league. Steve Coogan is superb as Walden. Harriet Walter is mesmerising as Thatcher. The trouble, unusually for Graham, is the script. Some of it’s clunking, with great chunks of dialogue-as-backstory and gobbets of explanation. Still, the central story is clear. It’s one of an unlikely friendship between a Labour MP turned political interviewer and Britain’s first female prime minister and of how one interview turned it sour.

What struck me, watching Brian and Maggie, was how civil interviews were then. Until the interview in 1989 that ended their friendship, they were not all about gotcha-moments. They were about asking thoughtful questions and listening to the answers. The interviewees were even allowed to speak. I can hardly bear to listen to Radio 4’s Today programme now. Without Mishal Hussein, it just feels like a vehicle for the hefty egos of its presenters. There seems to be a rule that political interviewees can never be allowed to complete a sentence.

The other thing that struck me was that Margaret Thatcher now seemed to me to be a titan. She had a vision. She had a brain. She could think quickly and present strong arguments. She had a set of beliefs that guided her. As soon as she opened her mouth, it was clear what they were.

The actual Iron Lady. (Not quite as coiffed as she later became.)

When I think of the British prime ministers of recent years, what I feel most is a sense of embarrassment. David Cameron was plausible. I didn’t like him or his politics, but he was at least good at acting the part. I don’t think I could say that of anyone since.

Theresa May was excruciating. She took on a task she didn’t believe in – “delivering Brexit” – and made everything worse.

Boris Johnson lied from the moment he woke up to the moment he sank his substantial body next to Carrie’s (or whoever’s) in his bed. His Brexit, which he didn’t believe in or understand, has made the average Brit £2,000 (and the average Londoner £3,400) worse off.

Liz Truss is clearly not well, so let’s leave it at that.

Rishi Sunak’s key note was petulance. He expected other people to think like him and they didn’t and don’t.

As for Keir Starmer. Oh dear, Keir Starmer. I joined Labour to get him elected leader, or anyone who wasn’t tied to the student politics of the hard left. I think he works hard, has inherited a mess and has vague aspirations to make the country better and fairer. I have no idea what he really believes about anything, but at least he is none of the above.

And he isn’t Farage. The favourite leader of the favourite party, according to several recent polls. If that doesn’t chill your blood, I don’t know what will.

The other good thing about Keir Starmer is that he isn’t a sociopathic white supremacist fascist. He has to pander to one, like every leader of every country in the world. But he isn’t one. He hasn’t asked a rich friend to fire all civil servants unless they sign up to a white supremacist creed. He hasn’t sent an army of young men with online names like “Big Balls” to steal the data of tens of millions of citizens. He hasn’t threatened to steal or invade five countries.

A low bar, but still.

I have to admit that I’m struggling to engage with the politics of my own country. Our hospitals, our homes, our cities, our schools, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This stuff should matter more than the whims of a former reality TV star, but for me, at the moment, they don’t. I wake up on edge. I go to bed on edge. Oh, just another statement that an entire people will never be able to go back to the land they are being told they have to vacate. Just another random tariff that will rob hundreds of thousands of people of their jobs. Just another statement about another country’s fate, including, on Monday, that Ukraine “may be Russian some day”.

I didn’t want to write about America today, but I can’t think of anything else. My focus is shot. My nerves are shredded. I try to force myself to think about Margaret Thatcher and she just seems like a nice middle-aged lady from a different world.

What I do know is this:

Someone has to do this work. If no one who shares my values goes into politics then we’ll get the people who don’t.

On Sky News on Saturday night, I made a very unfortunate slip of the tongue. Even though I apologised on air as soon as I realised, I spent two days drowning in abuse on social media. One journalist I know sent me a vicious private message. Another encouraged his 56,000 followers to attack me, which they did. I felt sick whenever I looked at my phone. And this is just after the odd appearance on a news channel. Just imagine being in the public eye every minute of the day.

I can’t help feeling that if I turn my eyes away then things will get even worse. That’s not true, but more than half of America has turned its eyes away and we are all paying the price.

So today I will, at least, acknowledge the Iron Lady’s grit. We are all going to need an awful lot of grit. If we want to stand up for a different vision of the world than the Trump-Musk oligarchy, we are going to have to find more grit, more iron and more steel. There will, of course, be tariffs to pay.