Maggie Thatcher’s beleaguered ghost has been roused from its fecund grave an awful lot this month- not just during the feverish countdown to Boris’s ousting, but in the memeworthy pitches of prospective heirs. As the curtain falls on a Prime Minister whose rational coherence was overshadowed by his dramatic persona, it seems doubly apt to turn to Meryl Streep’s 2011 take on the Milk Snatcher. The Iron Lady drew criticism for its overambitious scope and flawed narrative- but even the harshest reviewers had to concede a rollocking central performance. 

Meryl Streep walked- or rather shuffled- so The Crown could run. With its provocative central conceit of Thatcher’s dementia, introducing her as a frail, delusional shell of her titular past, the film stirred some torrid blustering about the ethics of such presentation- when its subject was alive, if mentally enfeebled and two years from death. Yet the rather stately, chuntering tone of such protests illustrated their familiarity, their inherently ‘conservative’ nature. What more fitting setting to inaugurate the era of digital reality-politics than Westminster, which has been playing to the house seats for centuries?

Like the arch-neoliberal herself, The Iron Lady doesn’t have strong morals: unlike its subject, though, this is out of temerity rather than radicalism. Although perhaps a little financial enticement might have united them: the film raked in a cool $116 million and a pair of Oscars, having tweaked the source biography for the tastes of audiences across the pond. In politics as in film distribution, though, this makes Thatcher an ideal figurehead for the personality cults, and personal myths, that wrap up entertainment with political and financial regimes. Every character in British political theatre- including not just individuals but groups, settings, even architecture- exists in a weird twilight zone of fantasy and reality. The backdrops of Oxford and Whitehall are just as fantastical to a global audience as the enchanted Hogwarts inspired by them. Shakespearean parallels- the ghost, the betrayals, the Lear-like outbursts as Thatcher protests that she “will not go mad”- sit comfortably between naturalism and fact. Much as one of Johnson’s potential successors bills herself as ‘Thatcher on steroids’, everything is a copy of an age-old tradition.

Aside from Streep’s first Best Actress nod, the film’s second Oscar went to Makeup and Hairstyling: indicating the significance of the prosthetic nose which tied up the whole confection of past and present, fantasy and nostalgia. Everyone in the drama knows they have a role to play in a daunting, uncertain future, and they may struggle to seek it out: but the particularly British conservative context means they have a wealth of options to draw on. The young Maggie (Alexandra Roach), daughter of a grocer, knows she that must carve a new persona from the endlessly recycled source materials of the British establishment. The dear, departed Dennis (Jim Broadbent) plays an equally regimented role: the supportive husband, succeeding the inspiring father. As Thatcher’s metallic sheen starts to fade, the new cast of more recent seasons emerge just as inexorably: the conspirators at the heart of power (led by Richard E. Grant’s Michael Hesaltine), the dutiful, overshadowed daughter (Olivia Colman), the meddling makeover consultants (Rodger Allam’s Gordon Reece). The Iron Lady may have passed into the great Commons Tea Room in the sky, but her turn haunting the Tory incumbent is far from over.