Former Teignbridge Tory MP and minister Patrick Nicholls reviews The Iron Lady.

Former Teignbridge MP and minister Patrick Nicholls reviews The Iron Lady

Barely a year after entering Parliament, I rose to support the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, in what was to be the most bruising debate in which I ever took part. I told a journalist later that I'd been "mildly apprehensive"; in fact I was petrified. The screaming from the opposition benches was such that I couldn't hear my own voice.

That night, I received a handwritten letter from the PM. "May I write to say," she began, "how deeply grateful I am to you for the splendidly robust way in which you gave your support … from the backbenches? … Your contribution enormously sustained me in confronting the Opposition whose initial advantage was dissipated in hollow rhetoric and self-sabotage."

Here was "The Lady's" unique mixture of soaring courage and an unshakeable conviction that she was right. What many will not have realised until now is that she combined those qualities with a deep concern for the welfare of others, be they the relatives of those who died in The Falklands, or just a young Westcountry MP.

Phyllida Lloyd's The Iron Lady is a truly remarkable film. If you want to know what it was like to hear Margaret Thatcher at first hand, this is the film for you. Meryl Streep's performance transcends mere mimicry; rather, it seems grounded in an intuitive understanding of, and even admiration for, her subject, something which appears to have surprised both Streep and Ms Lloyd as well.

While the narrative was for the most part fair, there were lapses, one of the more serious of which was the impression given, perhaps unwittingly, that the events of the Winter of Discontent took place in reaction to Lady Thatcher's policies once in office, whereas they had taken place in the final days of the previous Labour administration and were largely responsible for her subsequent victory.

Like many who knew and worked with her, I would have preferred that Lady Thatcher's decline had not been recorded in such pitiless detail, even though what emerged was a dignified and, at times, heart-breaking depiction of someone desperately trying to recall an extraordinary life with declining mental faculties. I wish it hadn't been done, but I can see the case for it.

What I did find both tasteless and unnecessary were the imagined conversations between Lady Thatcher and her late husband. It was a wholly unnecessary invasion of the privacy of a woman still living. Indeed the device gave rise to the only truly false note in the film when Denis upbraids his wife for her ambition. In fact, Margaret's ambitions for her country were central to her relationship with her husband, a point made far more effectively in a strong performance by Harry Lloyd as the younger Denis Thatcher, than in Jim Broadbent's portrayal, which at times struck me as more Eric Morecambe than the late Sir Denis.

To have likened Britain to a banana republic when she came to office in 1979 would be an insult to bananas. By the time Mrs Thatcher was forced out of office 12 years later, the country was transformed. Indeed, the fact that she achieved this by treating with contempt all that the liberal establishment held most dear is why they loathe her to this very day and if at times, the narrative had something of the comic strip about it, the scale of her achievement was well made.

This isn't a Thatcher without fault. Indeed, some Thatcher loyalists may suspect that her demolition of Geoffrey Howe in Cabinet was simply too brutal to be credible, yet in tone and content, it echoed exactly one Cabinet meeting I attended, where a Secretary of State who had suggested to "The Lady" that "There are two sides to this issue" was impaled on the rejoinder, "Oh no, there are not! There's only one side and I'm right and you're wrong!"

"Feelings?" says Thatcher. "Thoughts and ideas are what matter the most." And in that simple phrase lies the essence of her tragedy. Because Margaret didn't "think" in the sense of "rationalise". Thatcher was a conviction politician; she just did what she thought was right and for as long as she was right, she could survive. The fact that on the Community Charge Thatcher was wrong, afforded Michael Heseltine and his cabal, who had always despised her, the means of her destruction, not because they saw her as a threat to Britain, but because in her implacable opposition to Britain joining the Single Currency, they perceived her, rightly, as a threat to the vaulting ambition of their beloved EU

The Poll Tax was Thatcher's only serious policy error, but it was enough to secure her downfall. As an IRA spokesman put it after she narrowly survived the Brighton bombing, "Today we were unlucky, but remember, we only have to be lucky once."

It remains a stain upon the conscience of the Conservative party that it was her colleagues in Cabinet, rather than terrorists, who brought about Lady Thatcher's downfall.

"What we think is what we become," concludes The Iron Lady, "and I think I'm fine."

History, I suspect, will agree.