Despite their differing political allegiances, Brian Walden and Margaret Thatcher had a mutual respect that developed into a surprising friendship, until October 1989 that is. Are you sitting comfortably?
Recently premiered on the UK’s Channel 4, Brian And Maggie is a two-part drama — confusingly billed as a ‘docuseries’ by its creators — that traces an unlikely friendship and its explosive parting of the ways. That’ll be the one between former Labour MP turned broadcaster Brian Walden (Steve Coogan) and Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher (Harriet Walter), until it all ended suddenly over Walden’s atypically scorching interview of a PM on the ropes, just 13 months before she was forced out of office.
The PR guff makes a bold clam that this was The Interview Wot Done It — ie her in, but that’s just achingly inevitable hype. What is certainly true is that, although her appearance had been planned months in advance, the political journalist quizzed Mrs T for an autumn edition of The Walden Interview, then in its second year as the successor to ITV’s current affairs behemoth Weekend World.
Despite coming from the (slight) left of the political divide, Walden was rather enamoured of Thatcher, a fellow lower middle class Midlandser who also bagged a place at Oxford thanks to scholarship. The Brummie even once likened the contentious empress to his mother (because of her “wonderful dogmatism”) , and after crossing numerous red lines by penning a speech for her in 1983 went on to proclaim her five years later as “a unique politician…the master spirit of our age”. He was, in turn, said to be her favourite interviewer, mainly because by her own admission she loved to argue, but what she was less candid about was her insistence that she must be up against a person of the contradictory gender.
As a matter of courtesy, on the day Walden told Woodrow Wyatt, one of the PM‘s closest confidantes (and cousin of Robert Wyatt of anti-Thatcher Shipbuilding song fame), to ask Thatcher what questions he should pose to her. Yet the way he chose journalism over friendship and verbally assaulted the daggy one live on air was a right royal shocker and helped reinforce the growing realisation that the Iron Lady was becoming out of touch and a little rusty.
The Thatcher episode coincided with two other things: the PM’s appearance went out just three days after her chancellor Nigel Lawson’s shock resignation, and b) aged 20, it helped crystallise my burgeoning interest in politics.
And it all came together on a Sunday lunchtime two days before Hallowe’en, 29 October 1989. As was the case a week later when the Berlin Wall fell, in October I was working at the former Codebreaker site at Bletchley Park. The once classified wartime centre in Buckinghamshire was half an hour from the PM’s weekend country retreat at Chequers, from where she had been driven to get to the ITV studios on London’s South Bank.
The following day and we were all bitching about Thatcher, as you do. This was an unequivocal leader whose steely resolve was so carefully coiffured that she rarely flinched in the face of scrutiny, in public at least. Yet here we were a decade into her premiership and collectively we seemed to be bemused/shocked/alarmed at how nervous she appeared, with one of my more empathetic female colleagues remarking “she looked rattled, didn’t she?” You know the sort, the sort of person I discovered were literally everywhere in true blue Bucks, that if I asked them who they were voting for at the next election would say in hushed tones, “Conservative.” With just as many intending Tory because of Thatcher as despite her.
I watched the broadcast live as it happened — in fact, it may well have been my first ever taste of the titular Walden experience. Moreover, that Monday lunchtime I offered something along the lines of “she’s not going to win the next election.” To which a rotund receding customer with John Lennon style glasses making his way across the serving hatch overheard and piped up “Yes, she will. She’ll invade another country like Libya to boost her popularity like she did with the Falklands.”
At least I think he said Libya. In terms of chronology it would make sense as this was ten months after the Lockerbie bombing — still the deadliest terrorist attack in British history — and almost a year before Iraq invaded Kuwait. I’d have to check the diary, which is packed away under a mountain of possessions in a nearby garage. The point is, his reaction summed up most people’s slightly cynical opinion of Thatcher in a Tory stronghold like Milton Keynes; that she wasn’t personally popular but sections of that opaque entity called ‘society’ had a grudging admiration for her cunning, her convictions, and her hard-as-nails leadership qualities.
So what of the telly retooling of the event that precipitated Maggie’s downfall? Based on James Burley’s 2023 book Why Is This Lying Bastard Lying To Me?, Brian And Maggie stars Steve Coogan as Walden and one of the great dames of acting, Harriet Walter as Thatcher. It shows not just a word-for-word recreation of the infamous interview but also the build-up to the interview and Walden’s decisions behind the questions that kick-started a domino effect that would eventually force the longest-serving prime minister of the 20th century to resign a year later.
Maybe it was the anticipation but I found the first episode “riveting” and the second sagging somewhat. Though I find undefinable centrist outsider types like him politically fascinating there was something rather oleaginous about Walden. Coogan plays it well, trading a fine line between impersonation and impression, though he struggles at times with his slight speech impediment. Walden’s not Coogan’s.
Yet there are scenes that don’t ring true. The scene where Walden is forced out of bed to write a speech for Thatcher’s 1983 general election campaign — where he coined the term “Victorian values”, a phrase she famously adopted — made the trench-coated cad come over as a cross between Midge Ure in the Vienna video and Columbo with a hangover.
Both Coogan and Walters are certainly great actors yet in a way I struggle more with the latter’s take on Thatch, strange prosthetic teeth and all. Walters was brilliantly convincing as Prime Minister Jo Patterson in Doctor Who’s 2021 story Revolution Of The Daleks but here it‘s tempting to dismiss her as just far too nice. Though much of that is down to the script and general direction, admittedly.
Commenting on her portrayal, Walter noted, “I decided I don’t look anything like Thatcher, I‘m the first brown-eyed dark-haired person who‘s taken on the role, so I won‘t go into it attempting to do a direct impression but to just try and get behind the thinking of this person.“
On that sub-surface level I concede the Dame‘s recipe turned out a treat. Catherine Walters, a recent contributor to this site (and no relation to Harriet or Alan, the man who sparked Lawson‘s resignation, to my knowledge), remarked that “I thought Thatcher came across really sympathetically in this. Then afterwards 4OD played the actual interview and she wasn’t at all. I’m not sure why they played t that way?”
Rather than push any political agenda, I deduced that because it wasn’t just a straight retelling of the interview without behind the scenes, the point was to show there was a different Thatcher behind the cold and unyielding public persona, and there was — there were many Thatchers, a fact which doesn’t always fit the narrative her arch admirers and detractors want you to believe,
Indeed, Brian And Maggie is arguably the latest episode in the media’s agenda-pushing tickbox marked Humanising Thatcher which started with Streep and was pushed to almost comical degree with Gillian Anderson’s cliched but convincing turn in The Crown.
For my money, out of all the many actresses to portray Thatcher, Anderson was the only one who gave Meryl a run for her Oscar. Yet both prior projects showed more of the she-devil and her titanic ego, which, perhaps due to its shorter running time, is somewhat glossed over here. Still, it’s an enjoyable look at a tempestuous turning point in British politics, when there were conviction politicians unafraid of speaking their mind and being unpopular.
The beginning of the end of the longest and most talked about premiership in peacetime history then.
It was a very very long time.
Steve Pafford
