Janet Keefer

One thing about being the age of dirt is that one vaguely remembers recent history that might not yet have made it into high school history books—history that is still too recent for today’s historians to have dispassionately evaluated. The election today (July 23, 2019) of Boris Johnson, a major Brexit foe and Tory—a genuine heir to Margaret Thatcher’s suspicions about the EU—makes watching the movie now on Netflix a timely and valuable exercise. Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party in 1975 and Prime Minister in 1979. She favored Britain's entry into the EU in 1975, but when she was Prime Minister, she grew wary of the increasing power of Brussels over British trade, defense, and economic well-being. In 1980, she called for an adjustment in the amount of money the UK contributed to the EU, and that put her at odds with other members of the EU. She fell out with members of her own party when she opposed Michael Heseltine’s efforts in support of EU attempts to sell the Westland helicopter company to a European consortium. She favored selling the company to the US company, Sikorsky. (She was, after all, great pals with Ronald Reagan.) She won, and he quit. (The movie shows her copy-editing a timetable Heseltine had prepared and belittling his general intelligence in front of the rest of her cabinet.) That rift disturbed members of her own party. Then came her speech in Bruges in 1988, where she expressed her outrage at what she called the EU a “European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.” That speech delighted Britain’s right but not its more moderate pro-Europe politicians. Two years later, she was out of her job and Mark Heseltine had moved into 10 Downing Street. She grew increasingly distrustful of the the EU, and almost literally until she breathed her last criticized it and Britain’s leaders who continued to support it. Britain’s first female PM opposed Britain’s powerful unions and enacted policies to end the welfare state in Britain, creating fierce opposition and genuine economic pain and dislocation. I had forgotten just much pain; the movie reminded me of it and also of the ERA’s violent actions before and during the Thatcher years. In one scene, Meryl Streep as MT used the words, “It’s time to put the “Great” back in “Britain,” and at her state funeral in 2013 (which Boris Johnson helped “produce”), the BBC quoted a Canadian woman who came to London for the ceremony as saying, “She was a strong woman. She made Britain great again.” The mourner was referring to Thatcher’s victorious, 10-week, undeclared war against Argentina in 1982. She established a blockade around the islands in the south Atlantic and sent troops into reclaim the islands after Argentina tried to reclaim them from Britain, who had claimed them in1833. The Iron Lady is not a history lesson, but it successfully invokes Margaret Thatcher’s life and times. In a masterful performance, Meryl Streep plays Thatcher as she was at the end of her life: widowed, betrayed, delusional, confused, and lonely. Streep’s Thatcher was like Thatcher in real life: a person larger than life who was loved or hated and toward whom nobody felt neutral.