The Elusive Maggie Thatcher

Why distorting Mrs. T. has been a popular literary pastime.  

- Leo Robson

Margaret Thatcher, though a prodigious consumer of economics textbooks and briefing documents, and a frequent spouter of Bible passages, has been widely considered deaf to literature. Even a besotted admirer like the novelist Anthony Powell found it hard to take her reading seriously. After Thatcher told him that Dostoyevsky’s novel The Possessed had helped her understand the pressing problems of the day, he wondered in his journal “when, how, she got round to this. Did she read the novel, see its contemporary relevance herself, or was that pointed out to her by someone? I fear probably the latter.” (His skepticism was well founded: The someone was apparently the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge.) In any case, reducing a classic novel to a kind of political how-to guide plays right into the prevailing image of Thatcher among the literary set: someone who, in the writer Jonathan Raban’s words, “doesn’t appreciate doubleness, contradictions, paradox, irony, ambiguity.” One famous anecdote has her pulling out a copy of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty at a meeting and pronouncing, “This is what we believe.”