A false icon...

and a real one: How Alan Bennett showed his sneering, subversive attitude in yesterday's Radio 4 attack on the great colossus of our age, Lady Thatcher
By James Delingpole PUBLISHED: 00:05, 31 December 2013 | UPDATED: 07:51, 31 December 2013

To many he's a national treasure. But Alan Bennett's attack on Lady T is a part of a sneering, subversive attitude in much of his work
Alan Bennett to use that old cliche is a national treasure, of that there is little doubt. At least, that is the view held by the many who will have thought it a treat to hear, on yesterday's Radio 4 Today programme, the familiar cadences of arguably our greatest living Yorkshireman lent to another of our cherished institutions: the shipping forecast. '....German Bight. South west six to gale eight becoming cyclonic, storm ten to hurricane force 12 for a time. Rough or very rough...'

Alan Bennett is a national treasure but w as capable of m aking m istakes

The tone was vintage Bennett: wry, bittersweet, mournful but spiked with just a hint of twinkly, camp mischief. It could just as well have been an excerpt from children's classic The Wind In The Willows he was reading, rather than the daily bulletin that for years has been so vital to the lives of sailors around our island nation. This is probably why presenter James Naughtie had to warn: 'If you're on a ship, please don't worry.' (It wasn't the actual forecast, but one from two months ago.) For many, Bennett is the embodiment of so much that we love about our country. He is as English as plain-talking old ladies as played by Thora Hird, grammar schools, the Queen and Toad of Toad Hall. Bennett, the Leeds-born son of a Co-op butcher, made England and the English his special subject right from the start of his charmed career, first in the early Sixties, as an Oxbridge satirist with Beyond The Fringe, then as an acclaimed playwright with Forty Years On (set in a British boarding school). The Madness Of King George and The History Boys, about a group of sixth-formers preparing for Oxbridge entrance exams, were West End and Broadway hits and successful films. He charmed readers, too, with well-loved books such as The Uncommon Reader, which imagines the Queen joining a lending library. Whether as playwright, screenwriter, author or raconteur, his 50 years in the entertainment business have been remarkably short on flops.

For all his success, though, even the great man is capable of making mistakes. One of them, perhaps, was his decision to have excerpts from his 2013 diary published in the leftleaning magazine the London Review Of Books. While some of these diary entries will do his reputation as a lovable eccentric no harm at all putting his clothes on over his pyjamas to keep warm, musing on the Roman practice of crucifying tigers, nearly being conned by a burglar at his London home others leave a rather nastier taste in the mouth. Here, for example, is what he has to say on April 17, the day of Margaret Thatcher's funeral: 'Mrs Thatcher was a mirthless bully and should have been buried, as once upon a time monarchs used to be, in the depths of night.' Of course, Bennett is entitled to his own political opinions, especially when they are confided to his private diary. But when that diary is printed in the London Review Of Books, those private thoughts become public. And since, presumably, those extracts were published with the author's prior agreement, it seems not unreasonable to assume that Bennett is quite proud of them. Or, at least, not embarrassed by them. But the light such words cast on his insights and personality is very unflattering.

The playright seen reading AA Milne's book The House at Pooh Corner on Jackanory

His main reason for disliking Margaret Thatcher, it appears, is that she had no sense of humour. This clearly irks him almost beyond measure. He writes: 'In fact to have no sense of humour is to be a seriously flawed human being. It's not a minor shortcoming; it shuts you off from humanity.' Well maybe it does, to a degree. And you can certainly see why this flaw might be a problem for, say, for a comedy sketchwriter. But are we really to believe that Margaret Thatcher would have been better able to recapture the Falklands if she'd cracked a few more General Galtieri jokes in the Cabinet War Room? Do we think she would have defeated the striking miners more quickly, if only she could have done a better Arthur Scargill impression?

Some matters are too serious for silly jokes. Could it perhaps be that the criteria by which Bennett is judging our greatest 20th-century peacetime prime minister are completely misguided? Not just misguided, but indicative of a personality at least as flawed as the one Bennett accuses Margaret Thatcher of having: one marked by crabbiness, childish petulance and an unpleasant and insidious sneering at so many of the qualities that have made our country rather a good place to live. Bennett's wit has always had an undercurrent of sly subversiveness. It is noticeable that with age (he is 79) his work has grown cattier and more peevish. But the evidence was there from the start in his work with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller in the early Sixties revue Beyond The Fringe, the defining characteristic of which was its irreverence contempt, even for our traditional institutions. In the decades since, we have been encouraged by Left-leaning cultural historians to look back on that era with enormous fondness: the moment when the bright young things finally punctured the pomposity of the stuffy old Establishment by daring to mock the prime minister Harold Macmillan, the creaking class system and (Bennett's particular speciality) the clergy, thus ushering in a glorious new age of fun, free love and gay rights. But there was a price to be paid for these new freedoms. This is perhaps best embodied in the Beyond The Fringe sketch set at a wartime RAF base, in which the squadron leader addresses Flying Officer Perkins. 'I want you to lay down your life, Perkins.' 'Right, sir!' 'We need a futile gesture at this stage. It will raise the whole tone of the war.' The sketch was funny because it was more or less true: the exigencies of war did sometimes require men to fly suicide missions. Yet it rode roughshod over the honour, decency and self-sacrifice of those brave men who less than 20 years earlier had embarked on those missions. Men who, unlike Bennett and Co, never got to graduate from Oxbridge, be feted on Broadway or enjoy hugely lucrative careers in the Sixties satire boom, because they never got to live much past the age of 20. This viciously subversive streak has run through much of Bennett's work ever since. In his adaptation of The Wind In The Willows, he made much of the theme of class war as the stoats and weasels took over Toad Hall. In An Englishman Abroad, a drama about the Cambridge spy ring, he sought to find much that was likable in the vile traitor Guy Burgess. In The History Boys, he proposed the idea that it is perfectly OK for gay teachers to molest schoolboys, if they are inspirational with it. Bennett's tendency to thumb his nose at the Establishment has given him the kind of fashionably dangerous, Left-leaning edge that guarantees recommissions by the BBC and publicly subsidised theatres. But it makes you wonder if he is quite so cosy a treasure as we like to imagine.

In our Icons of the Year series, Melissa Kite, herself a shopkeeper's daughter, pays a very personal tribute to a colossus of our age
You will always remember this moment,' my mother told me, as I watched the lady dressed in blue walking through Downing Street's shiny black door. Thirty-five years later, it is still the childhood memory that is most indelibly seared into my brain: my

mother calling me to the television set to see Margaret Thatcher reciting the St Francis prayer and then entering No 10. My mother was a shop-owner raised in a council house in Coventry; she was as convinced of Maggie's greatness on the first day of her momentous time in office as millions were when she left it. And when the former Prime Minister died this year, it was the strivers like my mother the people who came from nothing, who worked hard and pulled themselves up by their bootstraps who most mourned her passing. To those people, Baroness Thatcher personified all that is best about our nation, and about our politics.

Baroness Thatcher's funeral at St Paul's Cathedral in London, in April 2013

Her legacy stands today as a shining example, not only to citizens who aspire through their own endeavours to lead more prosperous and productive lives, but also to politicians who aspire to represent those people. Lady Thatcher, who died in April aged 87, was the last great conviction politician this country has known. She was also the last to imbue hard-working Britons with a sense that the Government was on their side. She unleashed a spirit of enterprise that turned Britain from a laughing stock into a global force that tackled and helped to defeat Soviet communism. She led from the front and from a deep sense of her own instinctive belief in the right of the individual to determine their own destiny. She loathed above all things the U-turn, a manoeuvre that seems to have been perfected in recent years by David Cameron and his PR-savvy Notting Hill chums. Her leadership was the polar opposite of government by focus group, a tendency begun by Tony Blair. Instead of bowing to political weather, she changed it. She understood that there was no honour in formulating policies simply because they were popular. She would never have dreamed of moving her own position to fit the consensus.

Margaret Thatcher w aving at 10 Dow ning Street w ith her husband Denis Thatcher

That is why the one thing you hear said about Margaret Thatcher by admirers and opponents alike is: 'You might not have agreed with her, but you knew where you stood.' How different to the leadership that came after her. It speaks volumes that anyone who has ever tried to outline David Cameron's philosophy has become mired in a terrible muddle. By contrast, what Thatcher believed is as easy for a brickie or a bookie to explain as it is for a professor of politics. She stood for individual freedom and free enterprise. And yes, she clobbered those who got in the way of that. She knew that no state-owned industry, government regulation or union demand for wage increases was a substitute for the virtuous cycle that begins when one individual starts a business of their own and begins employing people. Her rigorous sense of fairness was sometimes brutal. Charging local tax according to the number of people in a house, and the amount of services used, was correct in theory but, in practice, triggered such powerful emotions that it led to the political disaster of the poll tax riots. But you only need to look at the individual stories of those who flourished during the Thatcher era to see how 'Thatcherism' worked. On the day we watched her walk through the door of No 10, my mother had been full of hope not just because the new Prime Minister was the first woman ever to hold the post, but because Margaret Thatcher was a shopkeeper's daughter who spoke the language of common sense. And Britain was in desperate need of common sense. My mother was fond of telling me then, as she does now, horror stories about the winter of discontent in 1978/9, before Margaret Thatcher came to power: how clients with wet hair sat under the driers of her hairdressing shop in darkness for hours, waiting for the power to come back on. Many of the young today who happily join in on Facebook and Twitter with the Left's relentless haranguing of Thatcher have no idea of what it was like to experience rubbish piled up in the streets, or bodies left unburied, or power cuts and under Edward Heath's earlier lacklustre leadership the

three-day week.

Margaret Thatcher outside 10 Dow ning Street follow ing her election as Prim e Minister

Whenever Labour talk about putting up income tax, the misty-eyed idealists who vote for them, and who denounce Lady Thatcher as cruel, conveniently forget that millionaires routinely used to move abroad to avoid paying tax altogether in this country. And when socialist bigots sought to tarnish Lady Thatcher's memory by hurling vile insults at her when she died, they only served to highlight what she was up against, and fought so hard to overcome, when she was in power. 'Ding dong the witch is dead', a moronic police sergeant from Milton Keynes wrote on Twitter. Well, yes, in a way, Mrs Thatcher was a sort of witch. She was certainly a miracle worker for dragging Britain back from the brink of irrelevance. And there was something almost supernatural about her ability to tackle vested interests, seemingly without fear. Tony Blair, in contrast, watered down his education and health reforms to appease the teaching and health sector unions defending their cosy pay deals. But Lady Thatcher would not be intimidated or worn down. She saw her mission through to prise British industry from the vice-like grip of the unions. She cut taxes, enabled people to own their own homes for the first time, and sparked a revolution, social and economic, which attracted an influx of talent and money into this country. She gave Britain a purpose again. Very few people shape a nation's history. Very few leaders are exactly what a nation needs at precisely the time it needs it. I don't think it is overstating things to compare Thatcher to Elizabeth I, who saw off the invading Spanish Armada and transformed Britain into a world power.

Margaret Thatcher at 10 Dow ning Street during the 1983 general election

Thatcher was an icon every bit as potent on her stage as the virgin queen and with that halo of hair she almost took on the look of Elizabeth. Just as Elizabeth I was said to be married to England, Lady Thatcher put the duty she believed she owed her country before the responsibility she felt to her family. She may not have been the greatest mother, but to women (such as me) who like their female role models to be gritty, tough and uncompromising, Thatcher was a heroine. She had that rarest of qualities, not caring about what people thought of her. She was an exciting figure, a disrupter, an agitator. She never played safe, unlike so many of our political elite nowadays. One could fantasise endlessly about what Mrs Thatcher would have done about our problems today. Faced with extremist Islamists threatening her own people, what would she tell the European Court of Human Rights when they ruled she could not deport them? She would slam her handbag down and, with fire in her eyes, declare: 'No, no, no!' And they would struggle to argue with her. She was, after all, a force of nature. Her stoicism and relentless determination to propel her government forwards at all times led detractors to portray her as heartless or even inhuman. But this misses the point. She had a heart, and she had feelings. She just wasn't afraid to push them into the background so she could get on with the job. If she had a blind spot, it was to disregard the fact that other people were not made of the same stuff she was. There is a poignant scene in the film The Iron Lady where she snatches a paper from her senior Cabinet colleague Geoffrey Howe and starts correcting his spelling. Her insensitivity and lack of tolerance sowed the seeds of her eventual destruction. But whatever her faults, they pale into insignificance compared to the self-seeking sleaze of the political class that came after her. Unlike so many of today's politicians, she was frugal and uninterested in the frippery of power. She would not have dreamed of overseeing a high-spec make-over of the kitchen in the Downing Street apartment, as the Camerons did.

Not that she was uninterested in domestic matters. Hers was a unique brand of feminism. She would grab a vacuum cleaner during photocalls when it suited her, to become a housewife again. She connected with people by explaining the economy in terms of their household finances. My favourite phrase of hers was: 'If you want something said, ask a man; if you want something done, ask a woman.' As Charles Moore observes in his biography: 'Thatcherism was never a philosophy, but a disposition of mind and character embodied in a highly unusual woman.' There was one particular occasion I remember meeting her. It was during then Tory leader William Hague's doomed 2001 general election campaign when she joined in for a day and set the campaign briefly alight. She opened a speech that evening by noting that a cinema nearby was advertising the film called The Mummy Returns. With a withering stare, she said: 'You were expecting me after all!' She knew there were many people, even those who didn't like her, who deep down wanted her back, in the way a child left to run wild longs for a strong parent. Cast your eyes around for a political a leader of her stature today and you will find, sadly, no one even comes close.

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