William Waldegrave

Courting the Iron Lady

Her favoured ‘Senecans’ divide neatly into pairs. Frank Johnson and Ronnie Millar were nature’s gentlemen; Woodrow Wyatt and David Hart, to put it mildly, were not

issue 15 October 2016

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.

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