THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER2, 2019 59
Thatcher’s “force of personality,” one colleague said, was “almost too powerful for easy rational discussion.”
BOOKS
CAN YOU FORGIVE HER?
How Margaret Thatcher ruled.
BY JAMES WOOD
I
always found it hard to judge Mrs.
Thatcher dispassionately, because she
was so like my mother. They looked and
sounded similar—shortish urgent women
who moved with purpose. From large
hair, their faces narrowed downward;
they had receding chins that appeared
weak and strong at once. Force of will
made them courageously disagreeable.
They were born two years apart (Thatcher
in 1925, my mother in 1927), came from
modest, fiercely principled Nonconform-
ist religious backgrounds, and saw life
as a ladder that everyone must climb,
from evil to goodness, from error to cor-
rection, from the lower social classes to
the higher ones. Estranged from their
native accents, they spoke in their grander
borrowed ones a little carefully—as if,
having learned their elocution lessons,
they were now giving them. Both women
were complex feminists, of a kind, who
didn’t use the term, preferred men to
women, and coddled their sons over their
daughters. And both powerful women
married supportive men named Denis.
The degree of my hostility for Mrs.
ILLUSTRATION BY BEN KIRCHNER
THE CRITICS
