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Thursday 9 February 2012

The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore's reflections on the week

Like millions of people, I enjoyed the film Slumdog Millionaire. It cleverly locks in the viewer’s sympathies and fulfils Wilkie Collins’s rule: ‘Make ’em laugh. Make ’em cry. Make ’em wait.’ Afterwards, though, I felt a little used. The film has the Four Weddings and a Funeral trick of being secretly more clichéd and consumerist than its surface wit suggests — how tacky and improbable, for instance, to have the two brothers becoming guides at the Taj Mahal, hundreds of miles from their native Bombay. And just as Four Weddings slips in a propagandist pro-gay message, so Slumdog Millionaire is a semi-concealed liberation movie for Indian Muslims, who are presented as being persecuted. The hero is hit by police for refusing to recognise the picture of the Hindu Gandhi on banknotes. There have certainly been attacks on Muslims in Bombay over the years, but it is irritating to reflect that no commercial director would dare do the same thing the other way round, and make a film about Hindus who are being picked on by Muslims. Finally, what is the moral? In Four Weddings, it is quite obvious that Hugh Grant should have gone through with it and married Duckface (Anna Chancellor), who is anyway far more beautiful than the heroine he skives off with. In Slumdog Millionaire, there is a comparable final flaw: is it really a good thing that he wins the money? Why are we expected to believe that it will bring him happiness?

This week, I went to Girton College, Cambridge, to speak in memory of a several times great-aunt of mine, Barbara Bodichon, who was co-founder of the college. Barbara was a painter, writer, feminist (a prime mover in the Married Woman’s Property Act), anti-slaver, and friend of George Eliot. Since my sister, Charlotte, is writing a book about Barbara and other members of my mostly radical family, and she was speaking first, I preferred to talk on the more provocative theme of Margaret Thatcher, feminist. I don’t suppose Mrs Thatcher and Barbara Bodichon would have got on, but it is very interesting that, as early as the 1930s, the Grantham grocer’s daughter could have believed so absolutely that she could and should get in to Oxford. This was highly unusual. Like Barbara two generations earlier, Margaret was brought up by her father to assume that women should learn as much as men, so she never doubted. She also subscribed absolutely to Barbara’s dictum that ‘Women want work for the health of their minds and bodies’ — work as an inner need more than a right. I find it touching that, even on the Left, there are now small signs of recognition that Mrs Thatcher’s progress as a woman was astonishing. There is a forthcoming BBC drama about her fall, called Margaret. The left-wing actress Lindsay Duncan, who plays Mrs T, seems in interviews to be wrestling with the — to her — new realisation that she has feelings. ‘She was a woman,’ she concludes. Others noticed that earlier, but it is good to see the glimmerings of understanding at last.

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