As the world tilted towards the new millennium 26 years ago, I conducted a poll for the magazine I then edited, the Erotic Review. We asked readers to cast votes for the most erotic people of the past 1,000 years. To no one’s huge surprise, Marilyn Monroe took pole position. But it was the woman in fourth place who won us news coverage across the globe, from Portugal to this headline in South Africa: “Margaret Thatcher is considered one of the most erotic personalities of the millennium, a British magazine says.” I am quoted as saying the former prime minister’s high ranking was due to “the British man’s nanny obsession”.
I still feel there’s a grain of truth in that vision of Thatcher as a nursery dominatrix, thrashing grown-up little boys who confuse punishment with love. But now I’m 57, I realise the reason Thatcher made our podium is more obvious. A powerful, intelligent woman who knows her mind and is unafraid to use her sexuality as part of her arsenal can act as catnip on certain men.
A new, pleasingly unconventional biography of Thatcher, The Incidental Feminist: Friend, foe, femme fatale? by Tina Gaudoin, places much of its focus on what sociologist Catherine Hakim terms “erotic capital” — the way personal assets, such as glamour and sex appeal, can be used to gain social and economic advantage. Instead of looking at the leader’s political legacy, Gaudoin tracks down Thatcher the woman: daughter, sister, wife, mother, fashion lover, flirt, manipulator of men. The book examines how the Finchley coquette’s utilisation of feminine qualities propelled her to the top job, with chapters titled “Autistic Glamour Puss”, “Warrior Queen, Gender Blender?” and “All the Prime Minister’s Men”.
For all the “Attila the Hen” labels and Spitting Image’s puppet of a beaked PM standing at a urinal in a man’s suit, what stands out now is the constant sexual appraisal of a woman who was 53 when she entered Downing Street and 65 when she left. In 1989, Vanity Fair ran a major interview with Thatcher by Gail Sheehy, which contained the following frothy passage: “President Mitterrand says Britain’s prime minister ‘has eyes like Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe’. She also has the nerves of a five-star general and, increasingly, the sexual charisma of a woman in her prime. She manipulates her court of bedazzled male advisers with the skill of Elizabeth I.”
If you think Sheehy’s wildly overstating the case, here’s a tableau I witnessed at the Spectator summer party in July 1992. I arrived just as a car drew up amid a cascade of paparazzi flashes; the former prime minister, dressed to the nines, stepped out and was greeted by a phalanx of adoring young fogeys with Simon Heffer at the fore. I recall thinking I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had laid down his immaculate linen jacket for her to tread on. For one surreal moment, in the crammed entrance corridor, I found myself bosom-to-bosom with Thatcher, looking into her blue eyes (which didn’t alight on me) and imbibing the heady cocktail of fame, glamour and mythology still in the making.
That, however, wasn’t the first time I registered Thatcher’s erotic allure. This happened earlier, in 1988, when a friend from university invited me to join her family for a country walk. Her charming father was Peter Snow, renowned for Newsnight’s election night “swingometer”. At some point in the conversation he made reference to the PM’s sex appeal, which his daughter and I — with all the callowness of youth — found impossible to countenance. How could the 60-something villainess of the Poll Tax, with her roller-set hair and pussy-bow blouses, possibly be seductive?
Nearly four decades later, I realise Snow was just one in a sizeable cohort of media men who — if not all ardent admirers — couldn’t help but relish the way Thatcher deployed her femininity (rather as many media men and politicos now battle inconvenient attraction to Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni). Peter’s cousin, Jon Snow, said of encounters with the Tory PM, “she enjoyed being a woman and I enjoyed being a man”. John Sergeant, the BBC’s former chief political correspondent, admitted on Michael Parkinson’s chat show in 2005 that Thatcher “could be… sexy, almost”. He explained that it was “unusual” in the Eighties “for a prime minister, or powerful woman of any sort, to put her hand on your arm and she could do that to devastating effect. And I would tend to weaken, I must admit.”
“For one surreal moment, in the crammed entrance corridor, I found myself bosom-to-bosom with Thatcher, looking into her blue eyes”
Thatcher’s allure was carefully cultivated, as Gaudoin’s book reveals. Childhood letters to her older sister Muriel reveal a passion for cinema, but also for clothes and quality lingerie. I hadn’t anticipated quite so much bra shopping. There’s even a moment on a trip via London when teenage Margaret fibs to her parents about the day’s trajectory and absconds to Bond Street.
Over the years, Thatcher’s love of fashion and finery was honed for strategic effect. When she won the Tory nomination for Finchley in 1959, an Evening Standard headline blazed: “Tories Choose Beauty.” She would go on to appear in Vogue four times. One fascinating example of Thatcher maximising personal effect is the private deportment classes she took from Laurence Olivier, arranged by her speech writer Ronald Millar. She was advised by the thespian to take long confident strides, and to use her eyes to seduce and flirt.
Thatcher’s use of fashion as a seductive power ploy became even more effective when she took on Margaret King as a personal stylist. The Aquascutum director sharpened Thatcher’s look for a state visit to Russia in 1987, as a guest of Mikhail Gorbachev. Gaudoin describes King’s vision for Thatcher as “a kind of Julie Christie in Doctor Zhivago meets Sigourney Weaver as the boss in Working Girl”. The PM even wore a Lara-style fur hat. So successful was the Moscow visit that the Mirror ran a photo hoax on the next April Fool’s Day, using Thatcher and Gorbachev lookalikes cuddling up to one another in Gorky Park. Many readers fell for it.
Prime-ministerial tendresses appear to have cropped up all over. The Australian CEO and diplomat Sandy Holloway recalled attending a private Downing Street dinner for Australian leader Bob Hawke, and sitting next to Neil Kinnock who said, “You just watch how Margaret flirts with Bob.” Although, of course, that was a mere flicker compared to the flame that developed between Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Charles Moore once said that, “She had a sort of, it sounds a bit explicit to say, a sexual attraction” to the US president. It’s just as well Nancy and Denis got on too, so no one was left feeling too much of a wallflower. But the Reagan pash lends weight to Kinnock’s observation: “All of Margaret Thatcher’s favourite men and those she promoted, sometimes way beyond their abilities, looked as though they’d walked out of a 1950s B-movie.”
Gaudoin takes Kinnock to task in the book for oversimplifying Thatcher’s predilections. She agrees the PM appreciated good-looking men. But argues that “she also liked men who flattered, and those with brains, tenacity and, to put it bluntly, balls”. The chevaliers and stalwarts are there, like Airey Neave, Robin Butler and Willie Whitelaw, who inspired her immortal line “every prime minister needs a Willie”. But there’s a more fun list of bounders: Cecil Parkinson, Jeffrey Archer, Alan Clarke, Jonathan Aitken and PR advisor Tim Bell (who boasted about putting his hand on the PM’s knee). It’s worth noting that the supposedly devout Methodist PM readily overlooked her favourites’ peccadilloes; perhaps because, in some part of her brain formed by wartime movies, she was swooning in their arms too.
Conservative women MPs didn’t enjoy the same leeway as the chaps with Thatcher. Those who succeeded — Virginia Bottomley, Edwina Currie and Gillian Shephard — did so for many of the same reasons she had: talent, graft, good hair, and persuading constituencies that they were good political housekeepers. Thatcher was never a “sister” and wasn’t even all that sisterly to Muriel, who she once alluded to in the past tense while still alive. Gaudoin makes it clear that it was the leader’s forward-propulsion and sense she was any man’s equal that rendered her an “incidental” feminist. In his 1990 TV interview with Thatcher, Terry Wogan says of male media interrogators: “They don’t seem to make any concession to the fact you’re a woman.” Thatcher flashes back at Wogan — another favourite — “Why should they? I don’t make any concession to the fact that they’re men.”
Notably, the one man who didn’t seem to attract Thatcher much at first was Denis Thatcher. Both Charles Moore and Gaudoin deduced from the Muriel letters that 20-something Margaret’s preferred suitor was a medical superintendent twice her age, Robert Henderson, inventor of the iron lung. There’s a tantalising mention of an overnight stay with Roberts at a hotel in Eastbourne, but no indication of similar intimacy with poor, patient Denis who she was running alongside the medic. Then Henderson suddenly disappears from the correspondence and Margaret Roberts marries the man whose loyal support — and money — would allow her to fulfil her political ambitions.
It strikes me now that this long, stable, unsexy but mutually supportive marriage may, in itself, have contributed to Thatcher’s erotic glamour. For certain individuals, there are few things quite as tantalising as an attractive woman (or man) who is unavailable, but happy to deploy their sexual energy within safe boundaries. Denis gave her that freedom and perhaps took a little for himself. I was intrigued to learn via the book of his late-blossoming friendship with Marilyn Foreman, better known as Mandy Rice-Davies of the Profumo Affair.
In the end, Woodrow Wyatt speaks for all of Thatcher’s admirers, the overgrown schoolboys who doted on matron: “I was in love with her, yes, but I suppose in the best platonic manner because — well, she was a marvellous girl… her skin was glowing and she had very fine legs.” You can’t help suspecting that for all Thatcher’s political achievements, that gushing appreciation of her sexual charisma might be her preferred epitaph.
