THE SIGN OF THE HANDBAG

Matthew Parris on Lady Thatcher's elevation from an 'ism' to a religion

A REMARKABLE cover graced the sec- ond section of the Guardian some days ago. It was dominated by one huge photo- graph, at first glance a failed holiday snap taken with a badly aimed camera. It was of the bottom half of a woman. We could see a black leather handbag and matching shoes, the hem of a well-cut woollen jack- et, tweed skirt (midi-length) . . . and those calves. Those famous calves. She was walking: small steps, it appeared, across grass, beside water.

The woman was not named anywhere on the page. A traveller from a different world might suppose this to be the bottom half of any one of a million middle-aged ladies. His eye would not rest, transfixed like ours, upon that glove clenched around the handbag strap. That black leather fist. 'It has to be said,' ran the caption, 'that she comes alive when there is a whiff of gunfire in the air.' She. She. Nobody in Britain, no reader, anywhere, of the Guardian, could have had the least doubt who that 'she' was. And I thought: is this not an outrageous achievement, at the age of 67, to have six inches of your legs and your gloved fist appear in a blurred photograph captioned

One is apt to question God's motive, Vicar, when your tyres are slashed while you're attending church service.' with a reference to 'she', and for the whole world to know it was you? Another article about you.

That one, by Henry Porter, described her offices in Chesham Place. It evoked the atmosphere — part functional, part devo- tional — in which the team who serve her work. It was one among so many, recently. Ronald Millar's A View from the Wings, serialised in the Times, has been launched in a blaze of publicity. More quizzically, Sarah Sands, in London's Evening Stan- dard, watched her visit to Warsaw, where the faithful gathered around her hotel, bobbing and parting like small craft as the great liner sailed in. Historians, foreign counts, business tycoons and British peers jostled with lesser creatures for a glimpse, a smile, a word. 'A screen transmitted her image to several rooms and someone for- got to turn her microphone off after her speech, so her small talk . . . continued to echo into the night.'

We have still not named her. We have not needed to. 'She? Who's she?' The cat's mother is not a serious contender.

I have spent some time now talking to her friends, enemies and camp-followers, and am close to admitting that my first assessment of her future post-Downing Street was wrong. I once wrote that the tra- jectory this career would follow in retire- ment would be from a higher altitude and suffer a gentler descent than that traced by the reputations of most elder statesmen, but that it would be of the same shape: a few months looping the loop and writing out messages in the sky to a still-attentive world, and then a dignified glide down to earth, old age, and sad, little-heeded speeches in the House of Lords. This is not what is happening.

Instead, she is becoming the spiritual head of a political religion. She is emerging as a cult leader.

The shift is clear. Just as a messiah starts his life as a real man with a real plan who does things, measurable things, in the real world, and ends his life as the idealisation of a man, an abstraction almost, whose claimed works are unnumbered and ill- defined and whose function is to inspire, so does this woman now move from the part of her life when she did things to the part of her life where she just is: a visible bea- con.

Where does this beacon point? To which practical path onwards does it light our way? Ah, that is very, very unclear. And here lies the immense new strength she is acquiring as she changes from manager to messiah. She is not a route-map: she is an inspiration.

I asked some friends (one of whom has started a dining club called the Bring Her Back Club) what, for each, she most importantly represented. 'Standing up to foreigners,' said one. 'Rolling back the frontiers of socialism,' said another. 'Low taxes, minimum government,' said another. 'Well, minimum government in some things,' said the fourth, 'but also authority and the rule of law, protecting our values and way of life.'

I asked a backbench Tory who hates Maastricht whether as Prime Minister she would have signed this Treaty. 'Never,' he said, 'never in a million years. It would have been no, no, no.' Would she have called a referendum if she had been Prime Minister? 'Urn ... well, you set. she wouldn't have had to, because the question of signing such a thing would never have arisen in the first place.'

I asked another backbench admirer, who is not himself against the Maastricht Treaty, the same questions. 'Referendum? Probably not, but you see her role now is different: she's a gadfly. Were she PM I believe she would have taken us into a Maastricht accord, or something like it. But she'd have been so firm about what she would and wouldn't stand for that we'd have trusted her.'

I asked a young worshipper who consid- ers himself also a libertarian (she is acquir- ing diva — or Judy Garland — status in a certain semi-closeted gay set of young Tory graduates, as has Eva Peron) how he Squared her 'Christian values' stance with his own belief in sexual libertarianism? 'She's not really like that, you know. The Reaganites have got at her, surrounded her, made her seem what she isn't. She never, in her life .. — he corrected him- self — 'I mean so far in her life — acted in a personally homophobic way to any gay man.'

I chuckled to one of the arm-the-Bosni- ans set that, with recent Croatian misbe- haviour, their heroine had surely suffered a reverse, for was she not one of the first to back Croatia? For a moment he looked blank. Then, 'Oh, the Croats let her down.'

The whole of Europe is also said to have let her down. Challenge one of her parlia- mentary claque with the assertion that the EEC rot started with the Single European Act, which she signed and whipped through the Commons with no more squeamishness than her predecessor now shows, and they will echo what she herself has hinted: 'It wasn't the Act, it is the way some of our partners have interpreted it.'

The others have cheated.

In other words, she was betrayed. The language of betrayal has become as impor- tant to her disciples as it is to the disciples of other divinities. It both explains appar- ent failures and nourishes an image of nobility through suffering. Far from bring- ing your divinity down, a celebrated betrayal can become a key legend in cult mythology. The Last Supper: who kissed her? Was it Chris Patten? Kenneth Clarke? In invoking that infamous tableau, Fluck and his Spitting Image puppeteers fed the imagery they meant to mock. Transfigured by her own murderers! That strange alloying of supremacy with martyr- dom has immense resonance for Chris- tians and Jews. The victim as worship-object! Poor Nietzsche would turn in his grave. Were he writing today, it would be The Anti-Thatch.

If Thatch is with us, who can be against us? As a cult gathers strength and intensi- ty, discovering itself as a cult, three trans- formations can occur. First, the quality of its own internal reasoning degenerates. It becomes relentlessly self-justifying, wor- shipping the person of its holy figure and attaching itself blindly rather than intelli- gently to his or her dicta. Reverence replaces reason and a sort of mysticism fills the temple. Some of the better minds associated with the cult's earlier incarna- tion grow uneasy, distancing themselves from the uncritical excesses of the new dis- ciples.

Second, the cult begins to proselytise, typically choosing foreigners, barbarians, simple people or those with damaged or emotionally incomplete personalities to convert and carry on its work. Third, the cult grows studiedly vague about precisely how its teachings are to be translated into concrete or detailed analysis and prescrip- tion for the real world. It seizes large themes and applies them, sometimes eccentrically, to the news, finding a vindi- cation of its teachings in everything which does happen but, when asked for detailed predictions of what will happen, refusing to be drawn.

Where are the early Thatcherites, the intellects? Do we see much of John Biffen or Keith Joseph among the throng now jostling around her? Shrewd young men, once part of the cult but with ambitions now to pursue beyond it — Portillo, Lilley — kiss the altar-stone occasionally — a well leaked luncheon, perhaps — but oth- erwise avoid public entanglements. Who are the new Thatcherites? 'They do not fol- low her policies too closely,' writes Sarah Sands of the Poles, 'but love her willingness to respond with force.' Poles, Hungarians, Italian counts, American enthusiasts from the Midwest, sidelined intellectuals and a pack of younger glamour-seekers, some of them quite rich — to all of whom that title 'baroness' has been an important accou- trement, acquired with more forethought than Westminster lobby correspondents understand — these are her disciples now.

Like any new religion, this one needs Apostles. John O'Sullivan, the Baptist, spread the word before her Church was founded. St Charles Moore suffers for her. The Apostle, Paul Johnson, displays the disturbing zeal of the convert, while Lords Forte and McAlpine, modern Josephs of Arimathea, paid for the embalming. There is still no Peter to lead her Church into the next millennium; not before the Ascension. But soon the memoirs: testaments to her many miracles. Already we anticipate the scholarly dispute as to authenticity: which of the words, which parts of the speeches, were really hers? Already it is becoming possible to find that those parts of her teaching and example which we dislike were wrongly attributed. Entry into the ERM? She was bullied by John Major and Douglas Hurd. The poll tax? Surely that was Kenneth Baker! Zimbabwe? Blame Peter Carrington. And what does her cult teach? Its claimed teachings are various these days and not internally consistent. What links them is that upon each different issue the argument concludes that we should do something; and always something bold. This is a doctrine likely to draw applause across a wide range of human concerns. Soon you will see it applied to public spending in Britain. We should do some- thing. Others will be left to say what we should do, but the cult will claim credit for the insight that something should be done, and its leader occasionally (and sparingly) wheeled out to hint that the insight is her own. And why did she do none of these things herself? Ah, she was betrayed.

I do not see how she can fail. Remember Peron. Increasingly, like every religious cult, hers will draw its strength from the human failure all around it, feeding on insecurity, anxiety and despair. Thatcherism is dead. Hail the dawn of Thatchianity.