She’s been dead for 10 years but I rarely read the news without thinking of her. More than any other figure of recent history, Margaret Thatcher created modern Britain, in all its dysfunction and despondency. Housing misery, asthmatic public services, crumbling infrastructure, badly privatised industries such as the waterworks, which once belonged to us and now belong to foreign companies that pump sewage into our rivers. Love her or loathe her, we still live in Thatcher’s Britain.
And so, looking over the revamped National Portrait Gallery’s new seven-panel mural to great British women, which takes pride of place in the gallery’s reopening this week, I was a little befuddled. Where is she? Alongside artists, writers and monarchs are women politicians, rendered in a Pop Art style: the first openly lesbian MP, Maureen Colquhoun, first black woman MP, Diane Abbott, and the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst. But no Thatcher. She has been “disappeared”.
When I asked the gallery about this, they pointed me to a phantasmic blotch of slate blue hidden in the top-right corner of the mural. Any of us wishing to conjure Britain’s first woman prime minister, they said, can simply “imagine” her in this silhouette space.
Here on full display is the awful historical inconvenience that is Mrs T for the liberals and lefties who run Britain’s galleries and museums. It grates so much that the first woman PM was a Right-winger that they would rather just forget her. It’s not a new instinct. In the Eighties, when Thatcher was PM, dons at Oxford refused to award her the honorary doctorate traditionally given to Oxonians who reach 10 Downing Street.
As you can tell, I am antagonistic towards Mrs T and her successors. I reject their worldview, a strange bricolage of liberal individualism mixed with harsh authoritarianism when it comes to dealing with opponents (striking workers, the unemployed). In my native Merseyside, it caused lasting trauma.
But erasing Thatcher will get you nowhere. The revolution she effected may have done harm but we are still living with it. To turn her into such a figure of odium that she cannot even take her place among the most important women in our history is cowardly. It is running away from a fight that must be had, over the quality of her ideas.
