Margaret Thatcher has never been a neutral subject. Even now, three decades after she left Downing Street, her name alone can turn a polite dinner into a bar-room brawl. Whisper it in Yorkshire and you’ll likely receive a plethora of expletives. Drop it into conversation in Chelsea and you may still be asked to rise for a toast. She is a politician who has become a myth, and a caricature, but also, conversely, for many, an icon. And yet, for all the noise, there’s a startling lack of curiosity about Margaret Thatcher. I’m not talking about her as “The Iron Lady” – a tower of toughness, stripped of nuance and femininity – there’s plenty of that. No. I’m talking about her as a woman first and a politician second.
Her rise was improbable, to say the least. For a start, she was in politics despite being born neither posh nor male. When she came of age, the game was predominantly played by upper-middle-class men, with rules designed to exclude all others. Her lower-middle-class status as a grocer’s daughter and her gender aggressively and determinedly worked against her. Before her, there was almost no example of female leadership at the top of British politics, or indeed international affairs. BMT (before Margaret Thatcher), only three women had led countries anywhere in the world. And two of those came from dynasties – Indira Gandhi of India and Sirimavo Bandaranaike of what was then Ceylon.
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Thatcher remains, to many in the Conservative Party, a heroic figure(Getty Images)
Perhaps it was no coincidence that Golda Meir (the third) was also the daughter of a shopkeeper, who worked, as Margaret Thatcher did, in her family’s grocery store – not in Grantham but on Milwaukee’s North Side? The latter’s election as the leader of the Conservative Party in 1975 was a first, and despite being derided for her voice (which she famously changed), patronised for her clothes and being dismissed as “a housewife”, she refused to soften or conform.
Beyond the speeches and the handbags, she was also navigating the private realities that women face: the messy business of love, sex and parenting, the pressure of appearance (though she took delight in dressing well), the silence around the struggle of the menopause. Perhaps also some neurodiversity. Still, she fought her way to No 10.
Women who have a “Marmite narrative” – the type that you either love or loathe, but absolutely cannot ignore – have always fascinated me. Years ago, while I was in my career infancy at Tatler, I remember meeting Raine Spencer, the much-maligned stepmother of Princess Diana. In the press, she was painted as a grotesque caricature, but really she was far more interesting than her tabloid image suggested: intelligent and quite formidable. I went on to become one of her biographers. Perhaps I recognised something in her story that reflected my own life and career; to be praised and pilloried in almost the same breath? Thatcher, of course, is all of that turned up to maximum volume.
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Behind the lacquered hair and the famous handbag was someone far more complex, surprising, and vulnerable than the cardboard cut-out so often rolled out to represent her history suggests. That’s what I found when researching my latest book, The Incidental Feminist, which asks what we miss when we strip away her humanity, and what her life can teach us about female power today. During the process, I was granted access to Thatcher’s correspondence with her sister, Muriel, seen only by me and her official biographer, Charles Moore. Their letters proved revelatory. Whereas they’d been mined for politics in the past, I looked at them through a female lens. And what I saw startled me.
My research revealed someone insecure around men, somewhat vain, passionate about clothes, but even in the early days, unquestionably single-minded. Thatcher’s letters to her sister were full of lists – of clothes, of fabrics, of accessories and movies she’d seen; of excruciatingly dull details of her exploits (while they were at school, where she was a “know-it-all”, while she studied at Oxford and beyond). They were written with obsessive precision, much like that of someone cataloguing train numbers or the like, much like I’d seen the autistic children of my friends do in the past. It got me interested. I did more research, talked to more experts and reflected on some of her own admissions – that she didn’t understand jokes, and punchlines had to be explained to her. Her famous lack of empathy and inability to sleep were arguably more telltale traits. I began to wonder: was Margaret Thatcher mildly autistic?
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Many have described Thatcher as ‘literal-minded’, but it was also yet another example of her ‘different’ take on the world(Getty)
I don’t make this sort of statement lightly; it is impossible to retrospectively diagnose anyone and – importantly – I frame it as speculative, though experts I spoke to while writing told me I’m far from the first to make such a suggestion. Charles Moore, in his official biography, described Thatcher as “literal-minded”, and that might have been so, but it was also yet another example of her “different” take on the world. She was, by all accounts, incapable of telling anything but the truth, and she saw the world in black and white, without nuance. Her direct approach would make others feel uncomfortable, but leave her unfazed. “She was utterly incapable of feeling embarrassment,” Charles Powell, her private secretary and foreign policy advisor from 1983 to 1991, remarked. “I’ve seen her say and do things that no other person would.”
Experts agreed that if she was neurodiverse, Margaret Thatcher was at the mild end of the spectrum. I would add that, having written this book on her, I and many others regard this level of autism or neurodiversity as a sort of superpower. Many who have been leaders in their fields acknowledge their neurodiversity. Einstein, Gates, Thunberg, Jefferson, Jobs… History is full of single-minded, somewhat neurodiverse overachievers, whose focus propelled them beyond the ordinary. Thatcher’s steeliness and her immunity to distraction were traits that carried her through the barricades.
She cared deeply about her appearance and regarded her immaculate presentation as a marker of respect to her voters. She also had a pretty messy love life before Denis, who I don’t believe was her first love, which was, as it turns out, something she worked hard to conceal. And like every woman, she navigated the perimenopause and menopause, though in her case with the scientific pragmatism of a chemist. Her solution was quite unheard of, in fact: she quietly stayed on the pill into her sixties before switching to HRT patches. To me, this shows an extraordinary level of bodily awareness at a time when barely anyone spoke about such things. Thatcher would have felt it was nobody’s business but her own – a private thing to be managed quietly and efficiently, just like everything else in her life.
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Thatcher was widely dismissed as a ‘housewife’ on her initial rise to power as Tory leader(Getty)
But here’s the rub. Thatcher did not call herself a feminist and, in fact, I think she found it difficult to relate to and communicate with most other women. It’s been pointed out many times (and it’s mostly true) that she did not promote women. She did not see herself as part of some sort of sisterhood and, to her, feminism had done its job already: women had the vote, didn’t they? Anything past that, she thought, meant ability alone should be sufficient to achieve. If she could do it, then others could follow. Second and third wave feminism completely passed her by. Clearly, it’s a great flaw in the eyes of women: that she opened the door and promptly closed it behind her again. And yet Margaret Thatcher normalised female power. After Thatcher, it was no longer impossible to imagine a woman leading a G7 country.
And what of women in the Labour Party of opposition? As I write, there’s a battle going on between two women to be PM Keir Starmer’s 2IC. But let’s not forget that we’re a quarter-way through the 21st century and a female has yet to be voted head of the Labour Party – the party traditionally believed to be “on the side” of women and reflective of their values. Until Labour frees itself from the strictures of Trade Union patriarchy, I don’t believe we shall see a female Labour politician in No 10. And I think that MT believed that too.
And, of course, MT made mistakes (that theme seems to be a current one too): Section 28, the lack of replacement infrastructure to re-employ those made redundant from industry, the failure to build more council houses after “the right to buy” and more. But Thatcherism has become lazy shorthand for the furious, the disenfranchised and the hopeless. The criticisms that “she closed all the mines” (she didn’t; Labour closed more), “Thatcher dismantled everything”, or “nothing has ever recovered since Thatcher" were frequently levelled at me during my research interviews (and also at plenty of social occasions after people heard what I was working on). None of these accusations are entirely true. They also imply that the nine British leaders since Thatcher have lacked agency, ability or policies, and I’m sure they’d all disagree with that.
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Lady Thatcher wipes away tears after the memorial service for Sir Denis Thatcher in 2003(AFP/Getty)
As a woman, the binary response that Thatcher invoked troubled me. Not because I am an ardent Thatcherite – I never voted for her. But my parents did. And I remember being baffled by the fuss engendered by an invitation she sent to my mixed-race businessman father to a drinks party at No 10. (And yes, my mother wore a blue two-piece skirt suit, complete with pussy bow blouse). And then, as my kids grew up, I realised that there was a whole generation of women who knew almost nothing of the woman who smashed through the proverbial political glass and class ceilings, and at a time when they were all but impermeable.
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When it comes to Margaret Thatcher, we do not have to gush. We don’t have to like her, even. We do not have to approve of her policies. But we do, as women, owe her a great debt – every single one of us. Her single-minded politics may have divided a nation, but her sheer presence redefined what was possible for women. She led by example – showing us that not only could we throw open the doors to the highest corridors of power, but we could dominate them too.
Tina Gaudoin’s book ‘The Incidental Feminist: Friend, Foe, Femme Fatale? The Truth About Thatcher’ is out now