The Iron Lady passed away last week, and there has been almost no mention of the fact that Thatcher had dementia during this last week – the stigma remains. A friend alerted me to this article about the movie, published in The London Telegraph in 2012. I’m going to begin this blog today with the last paragraph of the review;

“Sociologists talk of “social death” and “biological death”. Ideally, the two coincide, but in dementia, there is discordance. As people with dementia decline, they are no longer deemed worthy of attention or thought. As far as society is concerned, they are already history. This film gets away with treating Lady Thatcher as though she were already dead, because that’s precisely how society behaves towards the old and infirm. This is lamentable, vile and shameful – and it should anger every one of us.”

This is the full article.

“In one vignette, she is hosting a dinner party at her Belgravia home, clearly confused as to who is present, muddled in her thinking and humiliated as she struggles with names and battles to keep up with the conversation. There is a flash of the old Mrs Thatcher and her mastery of argument – then it is gone. In another poignant scene, she scuttles around her flat, turning on electrical appliances in an attempt to drown out the sound of the “voice” of her long-dead husband Denis, which torments her constantly. She peers furtively around doors to overhear people discussing her deterioration.

In my work in caring for the elderly, I have treated many older people with dementia. The way Streep captures this is outstandingly accurate. Anyone who has cared for someone with Alzheimer’s, for example, will recognise the waxing and waning confusion; the way in which sufferers appear to slip into another world, their loss of a sense of time, the way they look at you utterly perplexed in stark contrast to rare moments of startling clarity and insight – all the things that make this disease so cruel and tragic. The film is faultless in its depiction of dementia.

But to show someone in the throes of an illness while they are actually experiencing it and in terminal decline is chillingly insensitive. Can you imagine an unauthorised film being made about the life of a public figure who was dying of cancer, for example – Christopher Hitchens, say – before his death? Can you imagine watching scenes that his family opposed – showing him writhing in agony, weak and vulnerable? Of course not. There would be a furious outcry. It would rightly be considered a terrible violation of that person’s privacy, and in appalling poor taste.

So how are the scenes that show Lady Thatcher battling with dementia any different? Whether the portrayal of her as an old lady is sympathetic and kindly or not is irrelevant. It dramatises highly personal and deeply tragic aspects of someone’s life while they are still experiencing it.

I never imagined I would ever leap to the defence of Margaret Thatcher. I am a child of the Thatcher era but no Thatcherite. In the Eighties, my father lost his job as a milkman and joined the ranks of the unemployed. Times were hard and I remember vividly the loathing my parents felt towards her and her government. They actively supported the miners’ strikes and I have fond memories of visiting Barnsley and sitting on a miner’s knee while my parents were taken on an informal tour of the pits.

I remember the graffiti daubed on walls near our home after the poll tax riots. I remember going on marches and protests with my mother and chanting the old soubriquet “Thatcher, Thatcher milk-snatcher”. I also remember the day in 1990 when Lady Thatcher left office and a music teacher burst into our classroom, unable to conceal her delight.

Margaret Thatcher was a pantomime-ish villain of my childhood. Since then, I have developed a more circumspect view of her time in power, and a grudging respect.

I still loathe the insidious selfishness that crept into the collective consciousness under her premiership and that is so pervasive now. But I also think it’s all too easy to vilify a powerful, determined, forthright and ambitious woman as an ogre, blaming her for society’s ills in a way that would never happen to a man in public office. She was dedicated to public service, with a strong sense of social responsibility and duty. While I might not agree with her solutions to the serious problems this country faced in the early Eighties, at least she believed passionately that what she was doing was for the greater good. Surely her astonishing political journey from grocer’s daughter to Downing Street is worthy enough of the Hollywood treatment, without focusing on her descent into dementia?

Whatever one’s feelings about Lady Thatcher’s legacy, The Iron Lady is a disgraceful film. You do not have to support her politics to defend her right to privacy in old age. She deserves to be treated with as much dignity as anyone else. This is precisely what the film, in depicting her in the grip of dementia while she is still alive, fails to do.

I do not know how impaired Lady Thatcher is, if she really hallucinates and sees her dead husband or has ever slipped past her minders to wander aimlessly to the shops, confused and alone. But I do hope she never sees this film or reads the reviews. No wonder her children, Mark and Carol, refused to attend private screenings.

Watch this film without knowledge of the background and you’d assume Margaret Thatcher had already died. This is what angered me most about The Iron Lady. It is representative of how society largely views elderly people, particularly those with dementia. They are ignored. They are considered to be dead long before they actually are. Those with dementia experience a loss, not just of their memory and cognition, but of respect and dignity.

Sociologists talk of “social death” and “biological death”. Ideally, the two coincide, but in dementia, there is discordance. As people with dementia decline, they are no longer deemed worthy of attention or thought. As far as society is concerned, they are already history. This film gets away with treating Lady Thatcher as though she were already dead, because that’s precisely how society behaves towards the old and infirm. This is lamentable, vile and shameful – and it should anger every one of us.”

May Lady Thatcher rest in peace, and her family face their lives without her, drawing strength from her best qualities.

Ps. You might like to read todays poem Stolen dreams posted for National Poetry Writing Month, and I am still adding a recipe each week In the kitchen.