THE ELECTION

THE POWER OF ENGLAND'S EVITA

Women politicians can make the television

work for them in a dangerous way. Alexandra Artley

watches the cameras watching Mrs Thatcher

UNTIL that magical morning when bou- quets of roses and freesias poured into her Chelsea house and Mrs Thatcher became Prime Minster, the idea of personal power inBritish politics seemed rather a foreign thing associated with terrifying war-time excess. Male prime ministers saw to it that Power appeared to be thrust upon them. Perhaps it was. Power (`the essence of joy', said Nietzsche) was dis- creetly known as duty, the burden of govern- ment or the yoke of state.

Precisely because Mrs Thatcher is a woman whose 1979 triumph sparked genuine nation- al delight at a feminine first', I only gradually recognised her increas- ing exultation in power for what it is — not necessarily a means to good government but to intense personal satis- faction. She wants it, needs it, loves it. And occasionally, an election must be won.

When politicians men- tion the word, 'mil- lennium' they need to be watched. Consequently I spent several days in Mrs Thatcher's press entourage, beginning in a sunny field near Bury St Edmunds. It was marked with a huge red H where her helicopter would land. At the front of a small crowd, three little girls waited to present simple bou- quets with the tender gravity of childhood. Even here the new Conservative election tune ran through my head. `Dum-dee- dum. Diddle-dee-Dum-dee-dum' followed by a bit of Planets' Suite background festivity to suggest Jupiter the bringer of electronic jollity. When I first heard this music introducing Mrs Thatcher in person at her daily press conferences in Conserva- tive Central Office, I was deeply shocked.

`Don't you think using music to create mood rather than relying solely on rational argument is just a tiny bit Fascist?' I remarked when I got home.

`Don't be so silly. You don't even know what Fascism is.'

Out of the sky came a fierce chugging, the grass spread out and Mr Eldon Grif- fiths MP stooped across the field to receive the Prime Minister.

'WHAT ABOUT UNEMPLOYMENT MRS THATCHER?' A craggy passionate man with a huge voice (looks like Heath- cliffe') began to welcome her too. 'NICE TO SEE YOU MR GRIFFITHS. HA- VEN'T SEEN YOU SINCE THE LAST ELECTION.' Some people in the crowd were annoyed that Mrs Thatcher's visit had been 'spoiled'.

`She is a great woman who is against socialism,' said an old man with a strong mid-European accent. I thought how poli- tics in modern Britain had changed when a frail old man in a country town associated violent Marxism with the mild social demo-

cracy that had given him an old-age pen- sion. Sitting up high in her blue battle-bus (Moving Forward With Maggie) Mrs Thatcher put her head on one side. Perhaps having closely studied a recent photograph of Raine Spencer in the Daily Telegraph, she smiled with piercing Mayfair sweetness.

Next came a small orange factory called Herga Electrics which makes very modern fibre-optic sensor equip- ment. Outside a group of some 50 people had gathered. 'FOUR

MILLION UNEM- PLOYED. THATCH- ER DAREN'T MEET THE PEOPLE'.

`She dare do a walk- about in Moscow,' said one man, 'but with a 16,000 majority she da- ren't meet the people of Bury St Edumunds.'

I don't know how Mrs Thatcher got into the factory, but she appeared at a ground- floor window delicately holding a bone china cup and saucer.

`The management made 70 people take off Labour Party stickers, stand outside and hold blue balloons,' said another man. To clarify this matter, Mr Griffiths gathered three or four of the factory women into his arms. They wore white net caps and looked hesitantly and timidly from him to us. 'No. We were not told to take them off, we were asked to take them off.' Mr Griffiths looked mildly crestfallen.

'MAGGIE IN IPSWICH TODAY' said a fleeting newsboard as we whirled into the next town on Mrs Thatcher's route. Re- porting a Prime Minister's election cam- paign seems to involve a tremendous amount of running. The sight of rapidly moving television crews greatly excited the small crowd waiting outside a huge modern insurance building (Willis Faber & Dumas) designed in black reflecting-glass by Nor- man Foster.

An absolutely ecstatic middle-aged woman ran past me. 'I'm never going to wash my hand.' She was wearing a rather humbler version of the Chanel-style suits Mrs Thatcher has often favoured during this campaign. 'She's smaller, daintier than I thought — OOH, she's still there.' The woman ran back to try to touch her. 'I think she is the greatest British man or woman who has ever been in England.'

According to Rosalind Miles's uncritical- ly ebullient study, Women and Power (Macdonald 1985) this was a case of `gender jumble'. This means that when a woman is both feminine and powerful in her own field, she will be strangely con- fused with a man. Back on the bus (`there wasn't much there') a World In Action television team interviewed a woman poli- tical journalist about her job. As new and overtly ambitious politicians like Edwina Currie seem to use the media to distract people rather than constructively inform them, I thought more women political commentators might be a good idea.

A wooden sign depicting a big red strawberry meant we had arrived in Tip- tree, home of jam. Here in a Fifties shopping arcade containing a chemist, Co-op, café (Tudor Snacks) and a baker's called The Crusty Loaf, stood a small wooden box partly covered with a strip of blue cloth. Mrs Thatcher mounted it con- fidently. 'Someone got me a soapbox for a good old-fashioned election speech.' Standing a few inches behind her, I felt the unmistakable clunk of a heavyweight politician. Her navy-blue skirt was creased at the back and there were bumps on her heels. Firmly planting her feet on the boards like a singer, she let them have it.

`THE DEFENCE OF THIS COUN- TRY . .

`I'm only here in case there's an assas- sination,' confided the reporter beside me.

The Co-op lured Mrs Thatcher next. Shortly after the speech a nest of gerbils (pole-top outdoor microphones covered in fur to stop wind-whistle) listened to her being a Tiptree housewife. 'I'm going on too long. I'm sorry. Women do some- times.'

`Even during the fight for the Tory leadership Gordon Reece taught her that washing-up might be a good notion,' said another journalist long versed in politics. `She couldn't come across as a virago who didn't know one end of a dish-mop from the other. Poor old Willie Whitelaw also decided to be photographed washing up, but a landed gent with a J-cloth in his hand didn't have quite the same media nuance.'

An election campaign seems to be plan- ned like a wedding-dress — something old, something new, something rural, some- thing blue. Later that day in a farm near Witham, I sat on top of a hay-cart watching this woman who had so successfully dis- guised (from me anyway) her real interest in power. She was standing in the middle of a blackcurrant field insisting that she be photographed holding binoculars to her eyes (now one of the most potent images of this election). Mrs Thatcher the far-sighted Churchillian Green. I wondered if she might be scanning the horizon for her sister Muriel (`she has never broken cover yet') a real Essex farmer's wife, the sort of woman now scornfully dismissed by successful career women as a 'power virgin'.

Political power in women and how they wield it, is a subject which needs to be carefully looked at. The greatly increased television coverage of politics has coin- cided with the entry of more women into national political life. When women politi- cians become mendacious here lie the seeds of creeping totalitarianism. Male journalists and politicians are naive about the skills of ambitious women in using manner and image to mask power.

Mrs Thatcher and Mrs Currie know what glossy magazine publishers know — that a colour picture of an attractive woman `God only knows how the advertising agency managed to project your image.'

holds the interest of both men and women. All women instantly identify with it ('she is older, younger, prettier, plainer, more successful, richer, poorer, happier, nastier than me'). All men are attracted to it (or later repelled). Politically that is virtually a 100 per cent impact and unfortunately for the present opposition parties, pictures of men do not work like this in reverse.

Earlier this week I continued to follow Mrs Thatcher in her election campaign to try to discover how the television picture of what she did matched up to what I saw.

Bleak, grey north Kent is a shock to people accustomed to south-east prosper- ity. After bussing through a landscape of rusting corrugated iron, mean little houses and scrubby wasteland, we piled out into a small modern factory (Jubilee Clips Ltd) on an industrial estate called Gillingham Business Park. Amidst the pneumatic his- sing of hand-operated machines, the camera and gerbil men followed Mrs Thatcher as she watched worm-drive hose clips (invented by Commander Lumley- Roberts in 1921) being spat out into vats. These clips are a successful export to the West German car industry. Being a writer, I work like all old- fashioned 'steam' reporters, men and women with a notebook and biro who later stand and conscientiously pool their find- ings to establish veracity of political quota- tion. It is part of the squalor of modern politics that the truth of the printed word is made to seem dowdy beside the deceitful attraction of the visual image. As Mrs Thatcher watched the machines and the cameras watched her, I spoke to Jim Thomas, General Manager of Production. 'This is the Year 2000 factory where all the automation is coming in.'

'Doesn't that mean job loss?' 'I'm not looking forward to telling the people. We employ 200 people now but it will be 100 in two years' time.' But the television pictures mean Mrs Thatcher, promoter of new industry and jobs, Forward With Maggie In the Medway Towns.

Earlier that afternoon a party of 100 press people travelled with Mrs Thatcher on the Kingswear Castle paddle-steamer up the grey melancholy quiet of the Med- way. It began to drizzle. To be photo- graphed she stood on the bridge and put on a Hermes headscarf. Sideways she looked small, pale, vulnerable and remarkably like the Queen. The Housewife of Wind- sor. From a small moored merchant vessel with a name in Arabic a man yelled, 'THIS TIME YOU'RE OUT, MAGGIE. YOU'RE OUT.' He yelled with such force that he fell backwards as if from the recoil of a gun. Sitting with my feet on the rails of the boat I reflected that Mrs Thatcher engenders inappropriate emotions for a democratic leader — fear, hatred and ecstasy.