Niall MacCormick (2008)

The Long Walk to Finchley is described on Wikipedia as a drama and on IMDB as ‘Biography, Drama’.  The latter does acknowledge that it’s a ‘light-hearted retelling of the true story’ of Margaret Thatcher’s decade-long campaign to become a Member of Parliament – a campaign that eventually succeeded when she was elected the MP for Finchley at the 1959 General Election.   In fact, Tony Saint’s TV screenplay is nothing if not a comedy, and a broad one at that.  This is clear from the sarcastic title that ridicules the idea of comparison of this political leader with Nelson Mandela, and relies, as so many British writers before Tony Saint have relied, on the belittling effect of English place names.  IMDB’s ‘true story’ is questionable too, as Saint’s smug subtitle (‘How Maggie Might Have Done It’) makes clear.  Srdjan Kurpjek and Mario Takoushis’s jaunty music underlines the facetious spirit of the piece.   Margaret Thatcher first stood as a parliamentary candidate in the General Election of February 1950, in the safe Labour seat of Dartford.   This film doesn’t bother to explain how she was selected as a candidate there; in view of the difficulties she encounters in finding another constituency that will have her, this might seem a surprising omission – but that’s how shallow The Long Walk to Finchley is.   Although there’s reference to her studying for the bar, Mrs Thatcher’s qualifying as a barrister is glossed over when she briefly decides to give up any hope of a political career.  If she’s not going to the House of Commons, she’s destined to be a housewife.

The comedy in The Long Walk to Finchley comes often in the form of jokes that rely on the viewer’s prior knowledge of Margaret Thatcher’s future incarnation as a cabinet minister and then prime minister.   Once we hear the aspiring politician stress a commitment to free milk for all British children, we can practically guess the geddit lines to follow.  On honeymoon with Denis, his new wife kicks up a noisy fuss because they’ve been overcharged by a French waiter.  ‘When will you ever go the jungle?’ Margaret’s infant son Mark asks his twin sister Carol, circa half a century before her triumph in I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!  In case you don’t pick this up, Mark then asks his mother if he can go to Africa one day and promises he won’t get lost there.  These jokes aren’t confined to the Thatchers – they extend to Edward Heath, although in a different and more personally unkind register.  Immediately suspicious of what he sees as Margaret Roberts’s uncompromising political ambition, the young Heath, to stress the importance of being a team-player in politics, uses the analogy of an orchestra but he’s seen by others, even in his early thirties, as a hopelessly confirmed bachelor and described, to his face, as preferring ‘to be alone with your organ’.  Once he becomes an MP in 1950, Margaret is encouraged to cultivate Ted as a political mentor.  He mistakes her clumsy flattery (‘With men like you thrusting forward …’) for a sexual approach and is terrified.

It’s not surprising that most screen depictions of Margaret Thatcher to date have made fun of her.  Her influence on British life was large and largely destructive – if you didn’t laugh, you’d cry.   As the reception of The Iron Lady three years on from this BBC film made clear, anything other than outright mockery of Thatcher is liable to be seen, in this country anyway, as contemptibly sympathetic towards her.  Although the jocose tone of The Long Walk to Finchley is very different from that of the confused Iron Lady, Tony Saint and the director Niall MacCormick hit the same problem that any account of Margaret Thatcher’s early political life is liable to hit:  the class and misogynist prejudices that she’s up against in the Tory establishment of the day, even when the grandee-chauvinists are as crudely caricatured as they mostly are here, are enraging enough for you to start rooting for her.  The film-makers try to get round this by having Margaret sometimes use her ‘feminine’ side to break through – she pretends to be tearful and strategically adjusts her skirt length and so on (see too the image on the DVD sleeve for The Long Walk to Finchley[1]).  I guess that Saint and MacCormick thought this would be effective because it makes fun of their protagonist as well as her antagonists but it still leaves you on the side of someone you feel you should be finding as loathsome as the real thing was.  It’s interesting too that suggesting, even for satirical effect, that Margaret Thatcher knew how to look good is enough to get an angry reaction in some parts of the British press.  In a Guardian article of June 2008 (‘Margaret Thatcher a style icon? Do me a favour’), Zoe Williams described the casting of Andrea Riseborough as Thatcher as ‘ludicrously flattering’ to the woman she was impersonating.

Andrea Riseborough’s portrait is essentially a lampoon but she’s very witty.  In view of how much she has to say, it was probably a wise decision on Riseborough and Niall MacCormick’s part, because a relief for the audience, to give us a Margaret Thatcher more voice-trained than she may have been in the 1950s.  At first, the script is anxious to nail her lack of a sense of humour.  It always seemed to me that Mrs Thatcher was something worse:  she thought, mistakenly, that she did have a sense of humour, and Andrea Riseborough captures that well.  The way she tilts her head and looks pained at what an interlocutor is saying looks silly until you remember that Thatcher really was like this, at least by the time she was running the country.   Riseborough gets well-judged support from Rory Kinnear, who plays Denis rather sympathetically.  Samuel West has the decency to make Edward Heath, gnawed by political anxiety and emotional fearfulness, a substantially uncomfortable fellow.   Within the well-populated old boy networks of the Conservative Party, Oliver Ford Davis is amusing as the chairman of candidates and Geoffrey Palmer outstanding as John Crowder, the long-standing MP for Finchley whom Margaret Thatcher succeeded, virtually over Crowder’s dead body.  Palmer expresses Crowder’s reactionary misogyny as something seriously felt and meant – which gives impetus to Andrea Riseborough’s coruscating dressing-down of him, as the Finchley constituency party prepares to select its parliamentary candidate for the General Election of 1959.

1 July 2015

[1]  http://tinyurl.com/o7uv7q4