Over a decade on from Margaret Thatcher’s death, her spectre still haunts both left and right. The fortieth anniversary of the Miners’ Strike brought the usual panoply of BBC whingeing. Labour frontbenchers fall over each other to pledge fealty to her memory. Rachel Reeves is only the latest to evoke the spirit of 79. For Tories, the less said about Liz Truss’s tribute act, the better.
It’s to none of these particular homages that I turn today. Instead, I wish to draw readers’ attention to reports of Laughing Matters, a display at the Victoria and Albert Museum on British humour through the age. Thatcher is mentioned in a caption next to a set of Victorian Punch and Judy puppets and features in her Spitting Image puppet form. Insert the usual reference to vegetables here.
The latter seems hardly unusual. My parents’ generation regard Spitting Image as having been quite amusing. The only sketch that’s ever gotten me to chortle was their penetrating musical analysis of white South Africans. Nonetheless, her puppet is not out of place in a display charting the evolution of our national funnybone. It is the caption that I find rather more eyebrow-raising.
A description of Punch and Judy through the ages, it is mostly the same progressive handwringing depressively familiar from museums and galleries up and down the country. It laments that the traditional seaside show, “although aimed at a family audience”, “featured domestic violence, hangings, and racist caricatures – a jarring and unacceptable combination for modern audiences”.
All par for the course. The spit-out-your-tea moment follows: “Over the years, the evil character in this seaside puppet show has shifted from the Devil to unpopular public figures including Adolf Hitler, Margaret Thatcher, and Osama bin Laden to offer contemporary villains.” Grantham’s favourite daughter sandwiched betwixt der Fuehrer and the world’s most infamous terrorist.
Few would doubt that, at her pomp, many on the Left considered Thatcher villainous. But even Arthur Scargill might pause before lumping her in with the perpetrator of the Holocaust and the author of 9/11. Seeing her plonked between the embodiments of evil so offhandedly, in an exhibition in one of Britain’s leading museums, feels absurd, grotesque, and rather rude.
The Iron Lady’s disciples have taken umbrage. “Whoever write that caption should be called out publicly for being a moron,” Conor Burns told MailOnline. “It is sadly symptomatic of the woke, luvviedom nonsense that persists in our public institutions.” He advocates that the culprit is “sent to read a Ladybird book of modern world history” and “given a serious rap across the knuckles”.
I wholeheartedly agree with his recommendations. But as well as dressing down whoever was responsible, I want to know how it came about. When Burns says this is “sadly symptomatic of the woke, luvvideom nonsense that persists in our public institutions”, any reader who has recently visited a museum will know exactly what he means. Our cultural institutions are no longer neutral.
As Tom Jones has explained, progressive ideology has achieved “almost total institutional capture”. Even if many were “formerly political neutral” they have now “been weaponised to advance a particular ‘liberal’ agenda – a “viewpoint…largely entrenched inside the power institutions that dominate arts and culture”. The Fitzwilliam Museum’s rehang is only the latest depressing example.
Lara Brown is doing God’s work at Policy Exchange documenting “much-loved national institutions…led astray by a minority of campaigners” as curators place contemporary moralising over the sanctity of their collections. Conquest’s Law is being proved in real time from the Pitt Rivers to the Tate Britain via the Wellcome Collection and the National Maritime Museum.
Elite overproduction has produced a glut of underemployed humanities graduates with heads stuffed with progressive ideas about decolonisation, queer theory, et al. Finding their way into our cultural institutions, they become curators who hate their collections, who see their jobs not to preserve the inheritance of the past, but to condemn, disown, and, where possible, remove it.
This is the “woke, luvviedom nonsense” to which Burns refers. Plenty on the right have ideas for tackling it. Ed West has suggested restaffing public institutions and nationalising private ones taken over by our political opponents. The Left stuffs the art world with its cronies. The Tories, scared of their own shadow, don’t do so. Fight fire with fire. Bye-bye Tristram Hunt, hello Andrew Roberts.
Alternatively, Jones has suggested the Government should go after the funding of the “astroturfed agglomeration of charities, institutions, and NGOs” using public money for political posturing. The Arts Council is the biggest source of arts funding in the UK and has been captured by ideologues. More than 80 per cent of the £445 million it is currently investing comes from the taxpayer.
Let the market decide (Thatcher – and Kingsley Amis – would be proud). Is the V&A ripe for such an approach? In 2022-23, the museum received £67 million from the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport – more than half its income. Would it become a little friendlier to Conservative Prime Ministers past and present if it thought it had to do more to impress them for taxpayer cash?
I’m not so sure. For as much as the capture of our institutions by progressives is a genuine problem, I don’t think that is entirely what was going on in this particular insistence. I sense that it was cock-up rather than conspiracy. When a curator sat down to write the label, I do not think it occurred to them that comparing Thatcher to Hitler and Bin Laden seemed offensively wrong.
The Left is often unpleasantly surprised by enduring Thatcher’s popularity. A 2019 poll saw her voted Britain’s greatest post-war leader. 44 per cent of Brits thought she was a good or great PM and 29 per cent thought not. Even if her popularity remains higher with Tories and in the South, a 2021 survey showed Northern respondents thought by 40-34 per cent that she did a good job.
Yet those figures are skewed by those who can remember Britain before Thatcher’s premiership, or who personally benefited from her policies. They remember the Winter of Discontent, the Falklands War, and buying their council house. Subsequent generations must rely on historians – an overwhelming left-wing profession – and popular culture. Neither has been kind to the Iron Lady.
“The further we get away from her,” Alwyn Turner has noted, “the more public attitudes are shaped by hostile depictions of her and her policies”. Billy Elliot, Pride, The Crown – Ben Elton has triumphed over Charles Moore. The Historical Writers’ Association voted Thatcher the worst Prime Minister of the last 100 years in 2016. That label’s author likely came of age in an anti-Thatcher milieu.
Couple that with the self-loathing required of modern museum curators and the present tendency to compare anything distasteful to the Nazis, and placing Thatcher between Hitler and Bin Laden in a “contemporary villains’ rogue” becomes an understandable product of habit. This cultural progressivism cannot be reversed except through an aggressive programme of counterindoctrination.
Is that likely? When asked about the display, Luzy Frazer would only bring herself to say that she didn’t think that it was “appropriate”. If a Conservative Culture Secretary won’t stand up for the Prime Minister who put Scargill and Galtieri to the sword, hauled our economy off its knees, gave her party three election wins, and Britain her pride back, the battle is already lost.
Or is it? The example of our first female Prime Minister remains before all of us who spend too much of our free time re-reading Stepping Stones. “Defeat? I do not recognise the meaning of the word.”