Cynicism and Boundaries

All's Fair in Politics and Celebrity
by Theodore Dalrymple 

If, as the French historian, Pierre Nora, recently put it in a newspaper article, the whole of human history is a crime against humanity, how is one to assess the significance of a single criminal act? And yet the human mind is so framed that it is inclined to see in such a single act all the deceit, evil and delight in cruelty of which Man is capable. One death, said Stalin, is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.

The report of a single dreadful crime is enough to plunge one into despair about the possibilities of human nature. For example, I read recently in a British newspaper a report of a man who picked up an achondroplastic dwarf in a pub and slammed him down on the ground so violently that the dwarf is now paralysed from the waist down and will spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair. Whether or not the final injury was intended by the assailant (was it worse if he did or he didn’t intend it?), the act was of insensitivity so gross that it makes one shudder. Of what would such an assailant not be capable? How is it possible for a human being even to conceive of such conduct as a possibility, for the thought of it to cross his mind, let alone for him not to know that it was inexcusably wrong?

But perhaps we have become so accustomed of late to shifting the boundaries of the excusable and inexcusable, in a kind of amoeboid movement such that, while something is brought into the protoplasm of the excusable, something else is extruded from it, that we no longer really believe in the categories of the excusable and inexcusable at all. Too swift a change in boundaries leads to cynicism about the very notion of boundaries.

Certain character traits are more compatible with a world without boundaries than others: and these are precisely the traits that the British people are fast making their own. Reticence, for example, is now condemned by them as dishonesty and treachery to the self, an unhealthy psychological repression that is incompatible with freedom, and that leads to personal disaster in the end. A kind of incontinent frankness about everything is now admired, even if it is combined with an increasing resort in public life to euphemisms and stock phrases without definite denotation.

Perhaps our loss of belief that there should be boundaries explains why the criticisms of the recent film about Mrs Thatcher, Iron Lady, were so beside the point. The real criticism of this film is very simple: that it should not have been made. Whether it was well or badly acted, accurate or inaccurate, plausible or implausible, dramatic or dull, is therefore irrelevant. That so few people saw this fundamental criticism that rendered all others supererogatory is itself a symptom of just how many boundaries we have removed. We are like those who are blind to the fact that smashing dwarves onto pub floors is simply inexcusable.

That a film should never have been made does not prevent it from having excellencies or other defects. Among the former, as has been universally acknowledged, is the performance of Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher, a real tour de force. She convinces not only as the woman in her prime, but in her decline also; I think (without knowing anything of how the film was actually made) that Meryl Streep must have spent quite a long time observing – and how intelligently! – the behaviour of old ladies in nursing homes. The accuracy of her acting is both remarkable and admirable. My wife, a doctor who specialises in the treatment of the old, felt as she watched that she was back at work.

There is no film about Mrs Thatcher that could be made that would not be criticised as being politically too sympathetic or too unsympathetic towards her; and it is very unlikely than any could be made either that would not also be criticised on the grounds of some historical inaccuracy or other.

For example, it has been objected that Iron Lady depicts Dennis Thatcher, falsely, as having been resentful of his wife’s political ambition, to which she was prepared to sacrifice the wellbeing and happiness of her family. This is certainly not my interpretation of the way in which the relationship between Mr and Mrs Thatcher is portrayed by the film. It is true that when, in the film, Mrs Thatcher announces to Dennis her intention of running for the leadership of the Conservative Party he accuses her of putting her political ambition first, etc. But, supportive of her as he undoubtedly was, it is surely implausible to suppose that he never ever, in all the years of her political career, uttered such a thought. The outburst does not weaken, but rather strengthens, the impression of the man that is given: by and large humorous, tolerant, charming, modest and dignified, which was certainly my impression of him on the occasion or two on which I met him. It no doubt helped that, in his own sphere, that of business, he had been a successful man; and the film manages a task that is much more difficult to achieve than that of portraying an unhappy marriage, namely the portrayal of a happy one without resort to mere sentimentality.

The political criticisms of the film depend, of course, on your view of Mrs Thatcher. Some critics thought that the political and economic problems that she faced were not sufficiently laid out; but this, it seems to me, is equivalent to the demand that a performance of Macbeth should be preceded by a disquisition on the society of mediaeval Scotland.

It is only natural that anyone who has lived through a recent historical period portrayed in a film should have his own version of it which will not exactly coincide with the film’s. Among other errors, The Iron Lady portrays Britain as being class-ridden and therefore hidebound, a crude and widespread, and therefore influential, mistake. A class society can be a perfectly open one. If the Tory party had been quite as it is depicted in the film before the ascent of Mrs Thatcher, her ascent would have been inexplicable; and while her ascent was undoubtedly a reward for her enormous determination and strength of character, it is important to remember that, in the Twentieth Century, she was far from unique. Lloyd George, Ramsay Macdonald, Harold Wilson, James Callaghan and John Major were Prime Ministers all of modest or even humble background (their attainments are another question). Indeed, it is even possible that, in the name of egalitarianism, we are transforming a class into a caste society.

A strength of the film (in my opinion) is that it emphasises Mrs Thatcher’s early experiences in the Lincolnshire town of Grantham, famous for its association with Sir Isaac Newton and Britain’s first serial-killing hospital nurse. Unfortunately these experiences, while formative, served her for ill as well as good, because they remained too present in her mind.

She thought of the British people as she remembered them from Grantham in 1938: honest, thrifty, responsible, self-reliant and longing for freedom. But decades of decline, the welfare state and easy credit have changed all that; very large numbers of them, far from wanting to stand on their own two feet, are only too anxious to stand on the feet of others. They do not fear debt, they fear the withdrawal of credit. Self-respect among them is the Mauritian of their virtues, dead a long time since; they would rather consume at someone else’s expense than not consume at all. Not realising that these changes in the national character had come about, Mrs Thatcher expected more of economic reform than it could ever deliver; she therefore gave the impression of being an economic determinist, a Marxist through the looking glass, as it were.

She destroyed the power of the unions, all right, a very necessary thing to be done, but she left everything else more or less untouched, except in one catastrophic way: she turned managers in the public sector into pretend-businessmen, with all the perks of private businessmen but none of the discipline that the market place exerts, at least on small businesses. Having an almost mystical faith in the science of management, she created what had not existed before, a self-conscious and morally corrupt Nomenklatura class of the public sector, a class that her successor-but-one, Anthony Blair, quickly and cunningly made his own. We are living with the consequences still.

This does not emerge in the film, but that is no criticism of it, or at least not a very strong one. First, so subtle a development, while very important (and, indeed, the most important aspect of Mrs Thatcher’s domestic legacy), is not easy to convey dramatically; and second. you can’t squeeze everything into so small a compass as a film. The film does, however, convey with considerable skill those of Mrs Thatcher’s qualities that make most contemporary politicians seem like careerist pygmies by comparison: her courage, her conviction, her devotion to duty. It also suggests, plausibly, that these virtues run riot were the cause of her downfall. Power exercised successfully and for any length of time eventually clouds the judgment. But no one with a half-open mind would emerge from this film despising Mrs Thatcher.

The wrongness of the film lies elsewhere: in its depiction of Margaret Thatcher’s dementia, for which there is neither artistic nor historical justification. It is intrusive and prurient and nothing else.

It is not pretended that she was suffering from dementia at the time she stood down from office; and, of course, she is still alive. Had she died, however, there is no reason why a film about her career would have been told through the hallucinatory memories during her state of decline. It is the fact that she is still alive that gives the artistic device its spice, if I may so put it; it is of interest only because she is still alive.

If her condition is as depicted in this film, she could not have given her consent to it (advance consent is no consent, in my opinion). If, on the other hand, she is not as depicted in it, it is a gratuitous piece of fiction.

It is cruel, degrading and unseemly to exhibit to the idle gaze of millions of strangers (as the makers of the film must hope) a famously self-controlled woman, who took particular and almost fierce care of her appearance in public, grovelling on the floor in a blue flannel dressing-gown, in the grip of a degenerative disease. This is not Richard II: it is Hello! Magazine with the tact removed.

It cannot be said in the film’s defence that it helps to spread awareness of a fell disease. Even if this were so, it still would not justify it: the end does not justify the means, at least not in this case, because (among other reasons) there are so many other means available. Neither is the film a morality tale, because Margaret Thatcher’s dementia is not a reward or natural consequence of any of her political actions. The film is therefore merely exploitative and salacious.        

By failing to recognise that there are limits to what it is proper for the public to know, and for it to interest itself in, the film adds its mite to the deterioration of public life, not only in Britain, but wherever it is seen. For if public figures are to be treated as if they had no right to private lives, even while they are still living, it is hardly any wonder if only the shallowest, exhibitionist and avid for power go in for public life. And exhibitionism is not honesty, it is coarseness. As it happens, the opening scene of the film depicts the coarseness of modern Britain extremely well. Margaret Thatcher, demented, has escaped from her gilded-cage surveillance for a moment and gone to a convenience store to buy herself a bottle of milk. There, two young men treat her with none of the respect due to age, and push her aside unceremoniously. They would not have seen anything wrong in exploiting Margaret Thatcher’s state of dementia for the purposes of entertainment: because, of course, in Britain there are no higher purposes than entertainment