The woman as the issue
George Gale In declining to take part with the Prime Minister in a couple of televised faceto-face confrontations for London Weekend Television, Mrs Thatcher let it be known that she did not view the election as a Presidential-style contest between herself and Mr Callaghan. 'Issues and policies decide elections, not personalities,' she said. 'We should stick to that approach.' Well. maybe we should; but we won't. Politicians are forever saying that people Should choose between them on the basis of their principles, not their personalities; but the people as constantly refuse to be deceived. They make up their minds in all manner of ways, insofar as their minds have not already been made up for them by the traditions in which they have grown up and the expectations of the company they keep. Certainly, the swaying voter will look to issues and policies; he will also consider Which party is likely to produce measures Which suit his interests; but he will also look to the personalities in the campaign, and the Chief of these cannot fail to be the leaders of the two principal parties. Since parliamentary parties pick their leaders, the Personality of a leader tells the public much about the kind of leader a majority of MPs of each party thought, at the time of the leadership contest, to be desirable. When the leader is also the Prime Minister, his personality informs the entire administration. In considering whether to vote Labour, none will be so foolish as to neglect considering how Mr Callaghan as Prime Minister has governed. His government is inseparable from his personality. Likewise, in considering whether to vote Conservative, no one will not take into account the manner of how Mrs Thatcher may be expected to govern, given her record as a Minister and her performance as Leader of the Opposition. Few, if any, voters will decide how to vote by considering and comparing the party manifestos and deciding which suits them best, and only a fool would thus decide. It is not Only issues and policies which decide elections; personalities also count for a great deal.
So, whether she likes it or not, the country will not only be making its mind up between the rival policies offered by herself and the Prime Minister, and will not only be Judging upon the issues which divide them: it will also be assessing their respective Personalities. And in the fact that Mrs Thatcher is a woman is contained the chief unargued and undisputed issue of the election.
Mrs Thatcher may want the public to treat on their merits the various policies she proposes and principles she stands for and to conclude that she is right in wanting the forces of law and order and so on. But the public, in supporting or opposing her in these regards, will at no time be able, or wish, to disentangle Mrs Thatcher the woman from Mrs Thatcher the Tory politician.
She may wish that this were not so. But so it is. She is a woman and as such her woman-ness is an issue. I might here add that she is very much a female female. She is in no manner an imitation man who in her imitating proclaims the inferiority of her sex. She says that her sex has nothing much to do with her politics and insofar as she means that she does not feel herself to be an inferior, or superior, political animal because of her sex then she is right; and insofar as she believes that her sex is irrelevant to the issues and policies she puts forward she could be right. But she gets irritated when her being a woman is discussed, as if it had nothing to do with the matter at all, and here she is wrong. I think her being a woman has far more to do with her politics than she cares, or chooses, to admit, and that she is less the reasoning and intellectual animal and more the passionate one than she affects.
Her temper is sharp and quick. She ruffles easily, and is fierce and effective when ruffled. She enjoys the company of intellectuals and seeks them out, but her intelligence always seeks out the practical and the concrete. If discussion gets too theoretical she will swiftly bring it down to earth and she will never allow an argument to be followed to its logical conclusion if along the way the dictates of common-sense are affronted. She is pragmatic in the application of her principles, and the principles themselves are derived, not from reasoning, but from her upbringing. She believes in such things as thrift and private enterprise because her father, alderman, Methodist lay preacher, grocer, instilled them into her. Her instincts are female and maternal. Her face mirrors her emotions, except when she is seeing to it that it doesn't. In short, she is a woman first and politician second.
Politics is a game that men play. I think that Mrs Thatcher does not see it as a game at all. She is serious about her political beliefs in a way that Mr Callaghan is not, or that Sir Harold Wilson, Sir Alec DouglasHome, Mr Harold Macmillan were not. They played the game, for pleasure or as a chore. Of Mr Heath! am not so sure: I think he thought he had abjured the game and believed himself to be serious about his political beliefs: but what were they? What happened to them? Mrs Thatcher will be — has been — much less fickle a Tory than Heath. Here I am very aware that I may be proved wrong, and that she may yet perform such acrobatics and become another mere player of politics, but as long as she remains a woman first and a politician second she will, I think, be constant to her beliefs; if she puts politics first, then she will have become a mere and fickle player.
None of this will be put to the proper test unless she wins the election: which brings me back to the question of her woman-ness as an issue itself. Last week a woman from Bolton said on television that she had always voted Labour but that this time she would vote Conservative because she had heard Mrs Thatcher speak and 'everything she said I agreed with entirely, as well as her being a woman.' On the other hand, a doctor's widow I know is very concerned about her father, a life-long 'and very crusty' Tory, who has been going around Northamptonshire declaring that he could not possibly bring himself to vote for that damned woman.' There will also be women who cannot bring themselves to vote for one of their kind, and there may be a few men who will vote for Thatcher because of, rather than despite, her being a woman. Whether these groups will cancel themselves out, or not, I do not know;! think that her being a woman will, on the whole, cost her votes: but of this! am not as sure as I am that her being a woman will gain her many female votes she would not otherwise obtain.
She, in herself, quite apart from what she says, represents change. Never before has this country chosen a woman to lead it. No western democracy has done so. Only once has this country been governed by a woman; and she was Elizabeth, least royal of our monarchs, least female of Queens. We have no historical precedent to call upon, and the examples of MrsGandhi, Mrs Bandaranaike and Golda Meir have little relevance. The country is asked to take a risk not only on Mrs Thatcher's policies (which themselves mark a decisive change from the orthodoxy of failed Butskellism) but also on Mrs Thatcher as a woman. It is astonishing that it should be the Conservative Party which confronts the country with this risky and radical choice. It was an unlikely choice; and Mrs Thatcher has never been under any illusions that she would get the chance of fighting more than one election. If she loses, which seems unlikely, she will be discarded. And if she loses, then the most probable reason will be that she is a woman.
Her sex is thus an issue. So, too, is the kind of woman she is: Keith Waterhouse is right enough to say in the Daily Mirror: 'Very many voters have the greatest reservations about Mrs Thatcher becoming Prime Minister not because she's a woman, but because of the kind of woman she is'. but at the same time very many voters have great reservations about any kind of woman at all becoming Prime Minister, as Waterhouse should have acknowledged. The kind of woman she is is very far removed from the Waterhouse caricature, which dwells, with astonishing ignorance, on 'her overwhelming niceness'. Nice is not what Mrs Thatcher is: no nice lady would have beaten Heath in the roughest contest for the leadership the Tory party has experienced; no nice lady would cause Callaghan to run scared. If she were nice and were inviting all of us along to the vicarage tea-party she would not arouse the apprehensions of political friends as well as of foes.
It is to no vicarage tea-party that Mrs Thatcher invites the country. She is a worker who does her homework and a woman who knows her mind. Perhaps her being a woman should not be an issue, but how can it be otherwise when we have not had a woman Prime Minister before? Perhaps the kind of woman she is should not be an issue, but how can it be otherwise given the responses she evokes?
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