Margaret Thatcher in Fiction

File:Face-of-evil.jpg

A comparatively mild portrayal.

Over the years I've got very used to being asked in interviews about Why Sandman Wasn't Political. Normally journalists would point out how very filled with politics all the other British writers of the school of eighty-something were, and that Sandman wasn't. And why is that? And I would hesitantly suggest that I thought that Sandman might have been a bit more political than they thought, and they would say no, it definitely wasn't; where was Margaret Thatcher, after all, and why hadn't I shown her eating babies with her vampire teeth? —Neil Gaiman

British Prime Minister (and the only woman to hold that position) for 11 years, Margaret Thatcher is the most divisive figure in recent British political history. Her administration featured controversial economic policies, high unemployment, the Miners' Strike, The Falklands War, a significant disembowelment of the Trade Union movement, the sidelining of Britain's heavy industry sector, and privatisation of public assets. As you can imagine, she's very divisive.

---

Fan Works

• The Axis Powers Hetalia doujinshii From the New Earth, with Love has a young and Moe-looking Margaret Thatcher as one of the caretakers of England, who survived his duel to death with America parallel to World War Two... only to fall in a coma due to his injuries. She chats with America over some soft ice cream, and he asks her to step forward into politics; some pages later, her older self is featured as already Prime Minister. As Thatcher becomes a full-fledged leader, England finally recovers from his coma.

Comic Book

• French comic Cupidon had Cupido unsuccessfully try to soften Margaret Thatcher for discussions, but all of his arrows just bounced off her. Ultimately, he shot her through one ear while a colleague of his held the other shut. The arrow stayed in this time and gave unexpected results: instead of ignoring her opponents, she flipped them off. By Cupido's own admission, "better than nothing."
• Yuppie demons celebrate her reelection in an early issue of Hellblazer written by Jamie Delano, which also featured Dave McKean's painting of a vampire-fanged Thatcher on the cover.
• The Planetary issue "To Be in England, in the Summertime", in which the team flies to London for the funeral of a John Constantine Expy, is a reflection on Thatcher's Britain and the fiction it produced. Jakita has...less than warm feelings towards Thatcher, which are obviously an echo of Warren Ellis; one of the points of the issue is the political climate that gave rise to a lot of the early Vertigo Comics.

Jakita: She wanted concentration camps for AIDS victims, wanted to eradicate homosexuality even as an abstract concept, made poor people choose between eating and keeping their vote, ran the most shameless vote-grabbing artificial war scam in fifty years...

• • The issue also features a flashback to the John Constantine Expy thwarting her attempt to murder the pregnant mother of a possible Second Coming of Christ by trapping her Invisible to Normals agent in an invisible box. Thatcher wasn't even doing it because she was in league with Satan or something; just because the Second Coming would be politically inconvenient for her.
• Alan Moore wrote V for Vendetta primarily as a rebuttal to Thatcher's more divisive policies.
  • And yet she appears in Miracleman in a much more sympathetic light, as another small human, arguing for the free market against a godlike superhuman.
• The Two Thousand AD strip Bec & Kawl once featured a story where Margaret Thatcher (unnamed in the strip, but the obvious caricature tells all) plotted to privatize Hell. Kawl refers to her as "The Arch-Manifestation of Evil".
• A caricatured Mrs. Thatcher appears as a fearsome Cirinist leader in Cerebus. Later on Cerebus gets the better of her, in an issue that appeared just around the time the real Margaret Thatcher was coming to the end of her term in office.
• Judge Dredd:
  • One story leads to the following exchange when the title character chases after Count Dracula, who takes refuge inside a Hall of Horrors tourist museum.

Dredd: You! Close the Hall! Get everyone out! Dracula's in there! Employee: 'Course he is! So's Frankenstein, the Wolfman, Margaret Thatcher...

• • There was also Chief Justice Hilda Margaret McGruder, who succeeded Chief Justice Griffin. After a very successful first term she made an error in judgment and went on the Long Walk, only to later have to take back her post after years of isolation and radiation exposure rapidly becoming clearly insane. Amongst many, many references she develops a Split Personality, and refers to her various selves as "we", parodying Thatcher's infamous "We are a grandmother" comment. Also of note were McGruder's more masculine physical features after her time spent in the Cursed Earth (including a beard), which would reflect Thatcher's masculine composure.

Film

• Margaret Thatcher appears (played by an impersonator) in the James Bond film For Your Eyes Only.
• Mentioned in less than glowing terms in Brassed Off, considering it was her fault that the colliery was being shut down.
• Austin Powers thinks of her to avoid becoming aroused in International Man of Mystery.

Austin: "Margaret Thatcher naked on a cold day! Margaret Thatcher naked on a cold day!"

• The Prime Minister in Love Actually, on the other hand ...
• Meryl Streep plays her in the 2011 Biopic The Iron Lady, for which she won an Academy Award.
• In the 1985 comedy film Water, the female Prime Minister is not named, but there's no prizes for guessing who she's based on.

Literature

• Caricatured in the picture book The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman by Raymond Briggs.
• The early Adrian Mole books were set during Thatcher's regime and thus featured many jabs at her policies. Adrian's diagram of personal relationships at the start of the second book lists her under "Enemies". This went Up to Eleven in True Confessions of Adrian Mole with a section called "The Secret Diary Of Margaret Hilda Roberts" (Roberts being Mrs. Thatcher's maiden name) which portrayed the titular teenager as an insufferable overachiever with a heavy disdain for the working class and delusions of royalty (going so far as writing letters to royals claiming to be the result of an hypothetical extramarital union, much of which was not dissimilar to the public perception of Thatcher at the time). (This was originally published in the newspaper Today.)
• In Stationery Voyagers, Marge Thicket isn't the Braldonian Prime Minister just yet. But she is one of the few arguing for why the judge who bans the Voyagers from visiting Braldon, simply for holding non-violent heteronormative views, has overstepped his bounds; especially when he allows Antian rioters/murderers/sex offenders/whatever to an all-expenses-paid trip there for threatening the Voyagers.
  • The IRA isn't the only group that makes an attempt on her life for defending the Voyagers. But the narrative's only competent threat to her, Ivan Witherpool, was busy stalking and murdering creation scientists a continent away.
• As the main Harry Potter page says, both Aunt Marge in Book 3 and Dolores Umbridge are thinly veiled takes on Margaret Thatcher, whom J. K. Rowling had a dislike for.
• Gets a particularly nasty treatment in The Satanic Verses, in which patrons of the Hot Wax Club melt giant wax effigies of unpopular politicians, including "Maggie the Bitch".
• Kim Newman's Diogenes Club story "You Don't Have To Be Mad..." features a Bedlam House being run as a training ground that turns people into high-functioning sociopaths, the Big Bad believing that madness will be a way of life in The Eighties, and his patients will be the leaders. The star graduate of the system is a woman known as "Mrs Empty", a play on her initials.
  • All of the "patients" are notorious figures of the 1980s, identifiable by plays on their initials. Captain Naughty, for instance, is Thatcher's subordinate Norman Tebbit.
• Kim Newman's Temps story "Pitbull Brittan" parodies the Thatcher government's handling of the Miners' Strike by depicting it as a battle against a sinister international conspiracy of the type seen in xenophobic pulp adventure stories like Bulldog Drummond. Margaret Thatcher makes several appearances in the story, and something unpleasant happens to her at the end.
• Several 1990s and 2000s Michael Moorcock works refer in backstory to an evil female Lord of Order named Miggea, who imposed oppressive uniformity on many parts of the Multiverse.

Live Action Television

• She appears regularly (and highly derisively) in the British puppet satire series Spitting Image. The classic example from here involves her ordering a raw steak at a dinner with her Cabinet:

Waiter: What about the vegetables? Thatcher: Oh, they'll have the same as me.

• Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher come in for some ribbing in Coupling.

Patrick: You know what? We need Maggie back!

• During Sylvester McCoy's tenure on Doctor Who, the writers loathed Thatcher and this showed in their scripts. Most blatant was Helen A. in "The Happiness Patrol", an unsubtle Thatcher satire.
• She wrote a sketch herself for Yes Minister, which she appeared in with the cast.
• In a world in Sliders, an Alternate History Thatcher became The Quisling after Kromags (basically evolved Neandarthals) invaded. After they were successfully repelled, the word "Thatcher" remained synonymous with "selling out your kind"/"collaborating with the enemy". Sliders does have the habit of hitting the British at every chance it makes/gets.
• Season 3's third episode of Ashes to Ashes depicts the 1983 election, complete with clips of Thatcher and bomb threats against her — after which Alex assures everyone the IRA isn't behind this bombing, since their only attempt failed. The characters also discuss Tory vs. Labour, The Falklands War, and Gene dubs Thatcher "the great handbag". This is rather ironic considering that, in Life On Mars, Gene famously commented "there will never be a woman Prime Minister as long as I have a hole in my arse."
• Maid Marian and Her Merry Men had a house repairer character called 'Margaret The Thatcher'.
• In the opening montage of Blackadder special Blackadder Back and Forth, an incarnation of Edmund Blackadder is shown giving Margaret Thatcher the finger from behind her back.
• On Parks and Recreation, Leslie has this to say about her mother Marlene: "She's a big mucky-muck in the county school system. She's my hero. How do I explain her? She's as respected as Mother Teresa, she's as powerful as Stalin and she's as beautiful as Margaret Thatcher." In a later episode, we learn that Marlene is nicknamed "The Iron <long bleep> of Pawnee".
• A sketch on The Lenny Henry Show parodying Doctor Who had Lenny Henry as the Doctor confronting the big-haired alien dictator Thatchos (and her ineffectual underling Denos).
• The main character in BBC mini-series The Line of Beauty, set in the early to mid-1980s, takes a turn with her.
• Thatcher still manages to make political satire shows. As summed up with this quote from Mock the Week's Frankie Boyle upon being told the projected cost of Thatcher's funeral is £3 million.

Frankie: For £3 million we could give everyone in Scotland a shovel, and we would dig a hole so deep we could hand her over to Satan personally.

• Insulted, mocked and reviled in every single episode of The Young Ones.
• The first two series of The New Statesman coincided with her final term as PM, so she was at least mentioned in almost every episode. She also was The Ghost in three episodes, with the plots generally revolving around the main character, a Villain Protagonist who was a Straw Character of Tory MPs taken Up to Eleven, trying to regain her favor after doing something particularly stupid.
• The Goodies: During their time as Scouts, Bill and Graeme are awarded their "Initiative Badge" for...

Tim: "Stealing a pair of Margaret Thatcher's bloomers?!"

Magazines

• Private Eye's prime ministerial parody was The Dear Bill Letters, in which Thatcher's husband Denis (presented, not entirely inaccurately, as something of a drinker) wrote letters on topical subjects to ancient Telegraph correspondent Bill Deedes.
  • This led to a stage play and (separately) to a ZX Spectrum text adventure game, Denis Through the Drinking Glass.
  • They also had at least two comic strips in which she featured: Battle for Britain, where "Herr Thachler" was a Rommel caricature commanding the Tories as stand-ins for the Nazi Afrika Corps in the North African Front of World War II (while Labour were the British Desert Rats), and Dan Dire: Pilot of the Future?, a Dan Dare parody with Neil Kinnock as the title character and Thatcher as 'the Maggon', standing in for Dare's enemy the Mekon.

Music

• Frequently criticized by the Two Tone Ska revival. Jerry Dammers of The Specials wrote the band's last hit Ghost Town as an attack on her economic policies and Dave Wakeling of The Beat (who was from a working class background and believed that the PM was denying her similar upbringing and pretending to be something she wasn't) covered the Prince Buster song Whine and Grine with the addition of a refrain of "Stand down Margaret/Stand down please,/Stand down Margaret".
• Pink Floyd's Roger Waters is a vocal critic of Thatcher, and he would take shots at her in the 1977 song, "Pigs (Three Different Ones)", and throughout the 1983 album The Final Cut, which was released after The Falklands War started.
• And then there is Morrissey's "Margaret On The Guillotine"...
• French singer Renaud wrote a song ("Miss Maggie") where he expressed how men were violent, vulgar and stupidly proud, and finishing each verse by stating how no woman would lower herself to such a behavior, "à part bien sûr Mme Thatcher" (except of course Mrs Thatcher). He finished by saying that after his death, rather than going to a Hell full of stupid men, he would rather stay on Earth as a dog, provided he could use Margaret Thatcher as a street lamp to pee on.
• Elvis Costello wrote a song on his 1989 album Spike, titled "Tramp The Dirt Down", which explains how he would like to do as much to "Maggie" when she dies.
• Frank Turner, being the punk he is, wrote the bluntly-titled "Thatcher Fucked The Kids".

Newspaper Comics

• Margaret Thatcher is also made fun of in the Bloom County strips parodying the Falklands War and the marriage of Prince Charles and Diana and the birth of their first son, William.
• Sherman's Lagoon was once infested by a giant singing clone of Barry Manilow, to which the government responded by sending "the toughest agent they could find"; Margaret Thatcher on water skis with a machine gun.
• Private Eye had two main comic strip parodies of the Thatcher years, one where she was identified with Rommel in a Desert Rats-inspired scenario, the other where she was 'the Maggon' to Neil Kinnock's Dan Dare stand-in.
• The Daily Record's Angus Og had Thatcher as a frequent target due to her (in)famous anti-Scottish stance. In one example her picture was rejected as a Dartboard of Hate because it was felt her face might blunt the darts.
• Doonesbury 's Zonker Harris, who owns a British lordship, was once called to the House of Lords to help repeal one of Thatcher's tax laws. He proceeded to lead the lords in singing "Ding, dong, the witch is dead!"

Tabletop Games

• You Are Maggie Thatcher was a roleplaying game where you had to win the election in bizarre and hilarious manners.
• Diana: Warrior Princess is a roleplaying game about a future holo-vision show full of Future Imperfect. As a result, it has Princess Diana and Toni the Vampire Slayer going up against the sorceress Thatcher and the war god Landmines.

Theatre

• There is an ironic parody of the miner's strike at http://www.milksnatcher.com, and the lady's not for burning at http://www.maggiethatcher.com/games.html.
• The opening of the second act of Billy Elliot is a song called 'Merry Christmas Maggie Thatcher', an upbeat tune with lyrics celebrating that Christmas is "one day closer to [her] death." Not to mention that poor government policy is the whole reason the town's miners are on strike.
• Even the Dead Parrot Sketch wasn't immune to Thatcher.
• Thatcher appears as a character in the Doctor Who stage play (yes) "The Ultimate Adventure".

Video Games

• Grand Theft Auto:
  • She's referenced during a cutscene in Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. While CJ is talking to Mike Toreno, in the background we see that Kent Paul has locked Maccer in a recording studio, refusing to let him out until he gets over his addiction to masturbation. As a suggestion, Kent tells him to think of Thatcher. Doesn't work.
  • During an radio interview in Grand Theft Auto Vice City, the Straw Feminist character mistakenly names Thatcher alongside Reagan and Gorbachev while ranting about how everything was being run by men.
• The ZX Spectrum game Monty on the Run was based on the infamous Miners' Strike against Thatcher's policies that lead to the destruction of several British industries. In the game, Monty is imprisoned by Thatcher's police for his involvement in the strike and must escape to the docks to flee to Spain.
• In the computer version of Nuclear War, she is "P.M. Satcher".

Webcomics

• Erfworld has a Captain Ersatz of Mrs Thatcher as one of its more important side characters — she's affectionately known as "Maggie" and is actually one of the more likable people in the cast.
• Subnormality casts Thatcher as a literal monster who loves two things; nuclear weapons and Ronald Reagan.

Web Original

• Tends to show up in a lot of Alternate History stories set in the 1970s and the 1980s.
  • In the famously dystopian What if Gordon Banks Had Played? timeline, Thatcher is Home Secretary in the cabinet of PM Enoch Powell and is put on trial for human rights abuses in the prison camps in Northern Ireland after Powell's government falls.
  • She also appears in Fear, Loathing and Gumbo on the Campaign Trail '72, this time as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. Once more, she is shown implementing authoritarian anti-terror measures against the PIRA. However, Edward Heath gave her this job because he hopes it will break her.
  • Thaxted imagines what might have happened if a young Margaret Hilda Roberts had become a Marxist instead of a Conservative.
  • A Greater Britain is more concerned with the first half of the 20th century, but Margaret Thatcher appears in an epilogue — as a member of the Labour Party.

Western Animation

• Gains mention during an episode of Family Guy. Discussing what woman they'd most want if they weren't married, Cleveland answers with Thatcher. Peter, Joe, and Quagmire are instantly revolted, leading to this quote from Cleveland.

Cleveland: So no one thinks power is sexy? Not one of you finds power sexy?