Courting the Iron Lady

This is a strange book. Peter Stothard, the editor of the TLS, is packing up his office. It is a year after Margaret Thatcher’s death, and Murdoch’s Wapping site is being destroyed to make way for new, expensive flats. As the national memory of Thatcher fades, and transmutes into myth and caricature, so the physical scene of one of the seminal battles of her time, where the old print unions and their rackets were destroyed, crumbles into dust.

Into his room comes Miss R, a young and mysterious historian, to interview him for her thesis about Thatcher’s courtiers. The effect is dreamlike: partly a sort of Cherry Orchard, with Stothard playing Firs the butler and the buildings which had housed the old Murdoch papers standing in for the trees; partly a mystery (‘Who is the girl?’); and partly a meditation on the nature of courtiers at a court with a dominant ruler. It turns out that the courtiers whom the mysterious Miss R is researching were all pupils of Stothard — a serious classicist as well as a fine editor — whom he gathered once a week in a Wapping pub to study the life and works of Seneca the Younger, the tutor of, principal adviser to and finally victim of the Emperor Nero.

If this all seems unlikely, it is as nothing to the oddity of the four who gathered for these tutorials: David Hart, the Old Etonian inheritor of two fortunes (one of which he lost) from the Ansbacher merchant bank; Woodrow Wyatt, once the scourge of ballot-rigging communists in the Electrical Trades Union, latterly courtier to many of the rich and powerful (Arnold Weinstock paid off his debts at least once) but above all to Thatcher and Murdoch; Sir Ronnie Millar, speechwriter and joke-smith to Heath and Thatcher (‘The lady’s not for turning’); and, finally, Frank Johnson, pre-eminent parliamentary sketchwriter and fine journalist who perhaps more faithfully than anyone carried Thatcher’s torch even — especially — into the dying days of her regime.