“Deeply loathed” even by Harriet Walter, the actress who played her, was clearly a controversial figure – and often a victim of misogyny too.
Like many Brian and Maggie viewers, I wasn’t yet born when Thatcher first came into power – but I couldn’t help wondering whether Brian Walden’s explosive final interview with her, before she resigned three weeks later, truly reflected journalistic integrity, or merely sexist prejudice of those unwilling to accept a “strong” woman at the helm.
After all, a disagreement with her chancellor led to Thatcher being belittled on national television after he resigned, and forced to address whether she was to “blame”. Viewers will witness a televised version of this “betrayal”, after Brian vowed never to label her “off her trolley” but then did exactly that in a brutal true-to-life finale fit to rival any soap opera.
The first episode, based on the real-life events that led to Thatcher’s resignation, portrays MP turned journalist Brian Walden (Steve Coogan) bonding with her over shared political passions. Both “products of state schools”, they connected over their mutual vision of a society propelled to economic growth by the values of meritocracy and hard work rather than handouts and high taxes.
It’s easy to draw parallels between Thatcher’s warnings before coming to power about a “socialist” government crashing the economy, and the current criticism of and his modern day chancellor – and equally easy to imagine how Thatcher might have swept in, were she still here today, to save Britain from financial ruin.
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Margaret Thatcher’s betrayal is explored in a new show (Image: Getty)
And while Thatcher clashed with her chancellor Nigel Lawson over how they envisioned Britain’s financial relationship with Europe, Reeves, like Lawson, is now causing concern for the same reasons.
Meanwhile, the drama shows how Brian is summoned from his bed at midnight to write an election speech for her, after she sacks another writer at the eleventh hour for not being keen on a political “fight”. The resulting speech urges that anyone can be who they want to be “regardless of creed or class” – and in a late night rehearsal, the pair can be seen triumphantly chanting the words in unison.
In spite of that, neither the two starring actors nor writer James Graham nor director Stephen Frears have much “sympathy” for Thatcher – and Steve Coogan, who played Brian, has been forced to defend “woke airbrushing” after cutting a scene he said had seemed “too kind” to her.
Steve Coogan stars in the new Channel 4 show (Image: Channel 4)
On-screen, Brian’s colleagues are portrayed as equally suspicious of her.
They discuss her mission for an equal opportunities society as a calculated fairytale constructed to pull voters in and lament that in her world, community spirit would be replaced by flash cars and greed-fuelled materialism.
At first, Brian resists his colleagues’ views as the perhaps unlikely friendship struck up between the former Labour MP and the Conservative PM starts to deepen.
He shakes off the constant criticism that he shouldn’t be so “enamoured” with her and should challenge her more uncompromisingly on the tough questions.
Yet he then suddenly gives her the grilling no-one expected him capable of – and more – in an explosive scene of public humiliation and betrayal.
The cause? The resignation of her chancellor, Nigel Lawson, in a feud over exchange rate policy, with him feeling “undermined” by her refusal to sack an economic adviser, Alan Walters.
On previous occasions, when he was urged to bring up claims that she was “off her trolley” on live TV, Brian insisted: “I’m not going to level that at the Prime Minister” – but that was exactly what he ended up doing in their final debate, after which they never spoke again.
“That’s a terrible admission that you don’t know if you could have kept your chancellor if you had sacked your part-time adviser,” he accused, before calling her “domineering” and insultingly suggesting the public might prefer a PM who was more “yielding”.
Brian humiliated Margaret in a TV interview (Image: Getty)
Then he delivered the killer blow, telling her: “One of your back benchers described you as being off your trolley.”
Of course, there’s much more to this story than the TV drama, or indeed this article, has scope for, and even those who remember Thatcher’s PM days first-hand could not know everything that took place behind the scenes.
However, was her tenure really the feminist victory it’s often portrayed as being, if a disagreement with a male cabinet member caused such a backlash that she felt forced to resign?
Thatcher was appointed to lead the country with strength and authority – but then she was ousted by her own party for doing just that.