Resumen de Thatcher and Blunt: Class and Resentment in Twentieth Century British History
Satirists have long characterised the Margaret Thatcher who arrived in Downing Street to become UK Prime Minister in 1979 as someone with a strong strain of resentment against the political establishment and polite society as a whole. According to the novelist Sue Townsend, who ten years later compiled the fictional diaries of Margaret's thirteen year-old self for her True Confessions of Adrian Albert Mole, Margaret Hilda Roberts and Susan Lilian Townsend (1989), "She walked alone and friendless to school and back [...] "She took these early experiences with her to Downing Street and had her revenge". Yet, at the same time, conventional descriptions of the so-called "Iron Lady" (many of which, such as the autobiographical passages in Thatcher's Statecraft:
Strategies for a Changing World (2002), originate in her own heroic self-image), characterise her as a figure of emotional equilibrium, a Machiavellian paragon of politics and international relations. Such accounts tend to see Thatcher in hindsight through the prism of "Thatcherism" and its political certainties, whether in a positive light or, as in texts such as Peter Jenkins' Mrs Thatcher's Revolution: The Ending of the Socialist Era (1987), in terms of a master-plan to crush the "working class" of industrial labour and elevate the marketplace world of her own youth as a small-town grocer's daughter. Looking closely at the upwardly-mobile class politics of her life has already helped to generate a more complex portrait of her emotional biography, however; one in which her emotional control feeds off and at the same time aggravates her feelings of resentment. In John Campbell's magisterial two volume Margret Thatcher (2003), her compulsive appetite for enemies means she figuratively "eats up" those she resents and their cultures and institutions, moving decisively (or maybe desperately) from feast to feast; from civil service to universities, from council housing to the BBC and independent television.
Naming the respected art historian and Keeper of the Queen's Pictures Sir Anthony Blunt (1907-1983) as a Soviet spy in November 1979, a handful of months into her first term of office, perhaps represents an early example of this desire to confront the power of, from her perspective, an alien world. Blunt represented a certain class background; that is to say, the complacent, privileged upper class of the public schools and Oxbridge, who controlled many of the public institutions which Thatcher sought to reform. It should be pointed out that Thatcher, who remarked to reporters on becoming Prime Minister that "it is passionately interesting for me that the things I learned in a small town, in a very modest home, are just the things that I believe have won the election", to some extent inhabited the mental universe of Jane Austen novel whose marginalised middle classes meet, and struggle with feelings of inferiority to, the lordly manors (and manners) of the local aristocracy. From the aristocratic point of view, classically, the humbleness of Thatcher's own background in provincial Grantham might be looked down upon as a sign of her ill-breeding and insignificance; and such a social consciousness certainly had some residual significance within the post-war Conservative Party. Her political career within the Party had made her acutely aware of her beginnings, her rivalry with Edward Heath revolving around her unease with his cultural accomplishments, and her political credibility growing with the voice training she undertook before becoming Prime Minister, to eradicate her dull Midlands vowels and acquire the sharper, more cut-glass accent of the respectable lady. These issues of social identity and social performance, which coalesced in the Blunt episode, tell us a great deal about the social politics of resentful emotion at a crucial juncture in twentieth century British and European history.
