New model
Peter York
Earlier this month Margaret Thatcher had her hair re-styled. Her familiar waves and the upswept 'wings' on either side disappeared to be replaced by an altogether smoother job, one which apparently caused cartoonists to complain that there was not much left to latch on to.
It was, for anyone who believes in the portents of small behaviours, a significant poli tical act. Why did she do it ? What does it mean? The old hairstyle expressed—and was widely seen as expressing—the quintessential nature of Tory womanhood. It was hard and set and classy and old-fashioned and ceremonial. In its rigid 'femininity' it was a sort of hat substitute. In fact this is precisely what it was, because until recently Margaret Thatcher was a hat woman: in this once again she conformed to the popular conception of a Tory lady. But the hair, like the hats, like the voice of Margaret Thatcher, was one of a series of mistaken signals.While to most people in this country Margaret Thatcher and Raine Dartmouth are practically sisters, Mrs Thatcher is really not a Tory lady at all. She is a highly educated, highly intelligent upper working class/lower middle class woman of considerable application and resolve, a science graduate, a trained lawyer. It is an interesting question therefore why she took on the protective colouring of a type of Tory womanhood that was fading even when she entered politics, and interesting to speculate whether she did it consciously or unconsciously.
Did Margaret Thatcher think that the suppression of a very considerable self was a way to get on as a woman in the Tory Party ? If so, perhaps she was right.
But winning the Tories and winning the country present entirely different problems. To win the country you have to project, in the words of the professional market men, a more inclusive image. The very image qualities which served so well at the party grass roots are a positive burden at the top. With what distress must Mrs Thatcher's advisers and chartists have watched the centrist appeals of Shirley Williams; the image of a somehow classless, modern woman who is female without being in any ritualised sense
feminine. How they must have noticed her hair, falling untidily forward, moving as she moved. Mrs Williams is a woman who seeins utterly without contrivance. How unfair' how much the usual paradox then that Mrs Williams comes from a comfortable upPer middle class background, while Mrs That cher comes from the hinterland which Pro" duced Heath and Walker. So Mrs Thatcher changed her hairstyle. Her new one is an upswept affair without waves or curls, and swept back too; it sug' gests that she is a fairly determined figure looking into a gale. It is clearly more modern' more classless, but above all a more active' looking sort of hairstyle. Rather like early streamlining, however, it suggests movement,. rather than actually moves. It is not, .(31, course, in the least like Mrs Williams's Lab flop, for that would be going too far' (But then, consider the fact that Mrs Wil" hams seems recently to have gone in fo1. a
dier rather neater, shorter coif, somehow ti
and less inclined to fall around her faee;) What Mrs Thatcher has taken up is a hairstyle of the early 1960s, instead of one better suited to a star of Gainsborough films. Tills hairstyle is one favoured by smart middle' aged ladies of a powerful kind, like KatherMe Graham or Marjorie Hurst ; it has power and authority without the deadly Tory over" tones. It expresses the real Mrs Thatcher very much better than the original.
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