Margaret
Thatcher: coverage in full
Margaret
Thatcher obituary
Margaret
Thatcher death: latest reaction
Last week an American friend was asking me about UK politics and the work I was doing. I then turned to his seven year-old daughter, who was listening attentively and asked her if she would like to enter politics and who knows, become President? “Oh no,” she said, “In America only men are Presidents.”
Her parents reacted as though she’d proposed re-introducing slavery. They fell over themselves to correct her. They were mortified. The poor girl was slightly overwhelmed by the efforts to put her right, and her confusion was not really allayed by their explanation that Bill Clinton’s wife might well be the next President of the US.
Examples matter. Much of the momentum that propelled Barack Obama to the White House was about having the first black man in as a President. Even then, there were those who whispered until the last moment, their certainty that when it came to the privacy of the ballot box, Americans just wouldn’t do it. But they did, and he proved, just as Margaret Thatcher did back in 1979, that an individual in politics can achieve the highest office despite the fact that they are different to what has come before.
Yesterday, President Obama’s tribute to Baroness Thatcher recognized that: “She stands as an example to our daughters that there is no glass ceiling that can’t be shattered.” That is powerful statement from a man, who knew his fair share about glass ceilings.
Becoming an MP is still tough for British women, but nothing like as difficult as it was for her. Lady Thatcher famously said that it was harder to become an MP than the PM. The excellent film The Road to Finchley shows the endless selection meetings she went to, the hostility from both men and women to her ambition to become an MP versus the easy way male candidates fulfilled the criterion of selection panels, with their military backgrounds, medals lazily left on blazers, and of course accompanied by dutiful wives.
This has now become fiction in politics. It is the stuff of fairy tales. The people who really adored Lady Thatcher were and still are the Association members in the Conservative held seats. They are the ones who make the selections of MPs. Their fears of the dangers of selecting women were quashed by the Iron Lady, and my female Conservative colleagues and I are the beneficiaries. There are still far too few women MPs (only 22 per cent of the House) but the easy assumption, based on precedent that they can’t really do what a man can, namely achieve the highest office, change a nation, was conclusively obliterated by Lady Thatcher.
Listening to the tributes to her yesterday, I was struck by the emphasis on her femininity. She didn’t rule as a man. She rose and she governed very much as a woman. The broadcaster John Snow described how unnerving it was interviewing a woman, even down to the fact that she was wearing a skirt, and crossing her legs. He had literally only ever interviewed men before. The charmless Alexei Sayle described the fact that she was a woman, “as one of the weird things about her”. Not to me, mate. She had a family, children and women like myself growing, up in the 70s and 80s took it for granted that politics was somewhere women could thrive, because that was the evidence in front of us.
She attracts criticism for not doing more to specifically help women in their working lives. That misses the core of Lady Thatcher’s self belief. She was clear about what needed to be done. She is praised for her conviction, her certainty and even her enemies begrudgingly admire her purpose. That didn’t leave room for examining the role of women. It just left room for her to do what she intended to, which was to “save the country”.
As a Conservative woman MP it is inevitable that voters try to draw comparisons. Not every male MP is compared to Churchill but as a Conservative woman you have to engage with the constant desire to compare you to the only really well known woman politician in the UK. But mostly that opening gambit: “Bit like Thatcher are you?” provides just an opportunity to talk about her. They want to wonder at her extraordinary climb, as an outsider on so many levels, to become PM and win three elections.
Westminster is a place where change is resisted. Institutions often cling to their formal codes and behaviour to protect the incumbent power group and the House of Commons is no different. Even in this Parliament we only narrowly won a vote to restrict the sitting hours on certain days to early evening, so men and women might get home to their families, rather than late at night.
But in 1979 for a woman to become PM was an extraordinary achievement. She stunned them all. Lady Thatcher didn’t smash the glass ceiling. She refused to acknowledge its existence. If she couldn’t see it, no one was going to point it out to her. She glided through it without a shard of glass landing anywhere near her perfectly done hair.
Amber Rudd is the Conservative MP for Hastings and Rye and Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne.