Thatcher: Puccini or Sylvie Krin?

It’s always fascinating but unsettling to see living people walking around on the big screen — Stephen Frears’ masterful portrait of The Queen springs to mind.

It’s disturbing to think that the person concerned, along with their nearest and dearest, must be watching this.

I gather the Thatcher clan sat this one out, wisely I think, but they may have sneaked a few peeks through the cracks between their fingers.

This is non-political non-historical Thatcher; indeed all that is missing is music by Signor Puccini to accompany the verismo libretto of “Signora Thatcher e Denis”. The curtain rises to discover our heroine in a Pooter-Chic apartment full of pictures of herself, the sort ordinary people would have to had to Photoshop, mulling over her glory years. Age has wearied her, and the years condemn. June, a maid, hovers cheerfully in the background, whilst her slightly dog-eared daughter Carol performs the functions of a faintly exasperated maid. Meanwhile, 6,000 miles away, the adored Boy Mark drifts on, heedless.

The other principal in the tale, is the shade of Denis, who is not entirely buffo. He flits in and out between arias with kindly but piquant saloon-bar comment.

There goes the Falklands war, and in a furioso aria, La Thatcher tongue-lashes an Argentine dictator, a US Secretary of State, and her own lily-livered crew.

As the aria fades, Denis slides gently onto the sofa behind MT and says something like “well, that saved your bacon, didn’t it old girl.”

You get the idea.

At heart la Thatcher is an ordinary human being with a penchant for occasional Churchillian verbal spasms. Early on she stages an epic breakout, and gets as far as the paper shop where she discovers, horrore! milk is now 49p a pint. This treatment is kindly to the point of patronising, a kindness for those of us still traumatised by her Spitting Image. It’s free with the facts but that could be its greatest strength.

What about Thatcherism, though?

Well what about it? Nothing to it, really. That could be why, in real life, her foundation went bust a few years ago.

Mrs Thatcher’s lifetime achievement turns out to have been holding on tight to the memory of a much-admired father, and living up to his instincts and slogans courageously through an escalating variety of challenges — a thoroughly decent thing to do, but hardly the basis for a new kind of world government.

In 1964 Geoffrey Barraclough observed

contemporary history can only justify its claim to be a serious intellectual discipline and more than a desultory and superficial review of the contemporary scene, if it sets out to clarify the basic structural changes which have shaped the modern world. These changes are fundamental because they fix the skeleton or framework within which political action takes place.

This film is no work of contemporary history. It does not clarify the structural changes that have shaped the modern world. As  various chickens come home to roost, sending the wheels flying off the whole neo-liberal free market panjandrum Mrs Thatcher and her friends honestly believed in and represented, perhaps the same can be said of “Thatcherism” itself. But that’s a judgement for historians a few years hence. For now, just enjoy the show.

Meryl Streep's performance is as amazing as everybody says, and if your taste runs to opera verismo in a Barret Home, Signora Thatcher e Denis could well be the production of a lifetime.

St Paul’s: Writing on the subway wall?

What can leaders in the Church of England, like me, learn about our operation from last year’s experience outside St Pauls? I wanted to capture three bits of feedback about the Church of England from sympathetic voices. Their words are not comfortable, but we have to pinch ourselves and remember the Facts are our Friends. They can be changed, but doing so will require change in us.

Voice 1:
The chair of our local council, a member of the Conservative party, wrote to the Archbishop to

jolt the leadership of the Church of England to become more vocal and effective in offering moral guidance based on the Gospel to a society where the vast majority are fumbling to find their way to a place where the world’s resources are more evenly shared and where the poor and weak are both supported and respected.  ....It is absolutely appropriate for you to comment on the ethics of particular financial structures, taxation and economic policy. However, in arguing for three specific financial solutions in your first public response to the concerns highlighted by the protesters you sounded like yet another economist or politician rather than an Archbishop. Even if each of the suggestions proved to be a brilliant idea would they solve the fundamental problem? No! 

You state that the demands of the protesters have been vague. 

That, I suggest, is a symptom of their inability to collectively articulate their desire for a fairer world. 

Had your response been to answer simply and directly the question on the banner most frequently featured in the media coverage outside St Paul’s “What would Jesus do?”  you  may have been able to help them. 

Present concerns about the future of life, work and money transcend political stereotypes. Mammon is the god that failed, but remains enticing. Right now he has us by the short and curlies. People are desperate to go beyond the assumptions and processes that got us into this mess. They want spiritual guides to engage with the real big issue not tinker with silver bullets and quick fixes. What would Jesus do? Over to us...

Voice 2:
I was lucky enough to have a conversation in the week of all the resignations with a French Monastic friend I much admire. 


With the bodies piling up on the bed like the final act of a Jacobean tragedy, he told me:

 

There was no need to resign
— only to repent!

Our faith is one of repentance, renewal and hope. This isn’t always well understood in England, natural home of Pelagianism — the religion of dyb-dyb-dyb/dob-dob-dob and pulling your socks up. The world we are entering is an ever more risky place. To make fools of ourselves may be embarrassing, but if it’s only our pride on the line, that shouldn’t be the end of the world. A faith in grace breeds courage, including the courage to risk failure. Every day, we can start again. We become what we could be by the grace of God, not corporate planning.

Voice 3: 
Last word goes a US banker working in London. I wish I knew his name. He came up to me on the street outside the Cathedral that first weekend. With the press asking me what bishops think of bankers, I found it especially valuable to hear what bankers think of bishops. He saw my collar and asked if St Paul's was “my Church.” “Yes, and no,” I said. But I am a Church of England bishop. And he said...

Ah! Church of England! — a lot of what you do in your churches is beautiful. Your downside is your top people. Their heads are stuck so far up their own asses they can't see the light any more!

Excuse my friend’s American. They talk like that, especially the bankers. I hate to think our good and decent College of Bishops comes over like this. But it does.

The facts are our friends. And the fact is there is a world out there rocking on its bearings, looking to Jesus Christ, among others, for wisdom and hope.

An institution that’s absorbed in anxiety about itself, and gets hung up on, for example, arcana like “the gay issue” as currently framed, or discriminatory behaviour towards women, doesn’t inspire wisdom or hope in anyone outside itself.

This is painful to admit, but it’s the truth on the street. Most local parishes are far more recognisable as the Body of Christ than the anxious fading institution wringing its hands at the centre.

The time has come, not to resign but to re-engage — and to repent on the way. Change is possible, but we need to want to get real. That’s what metanoia is. How can we expect the bankers to do something we find so damned difficult ourselves? By grace, through faith. Same as everyone else. Who knows? our struggles to get real may resource them on their parallel journey.

But only if we do it.

How about the particular role of leaders in institutions? Can they do more than whistle for the wind, telling everybody how magnificent the Emperor’s new clothes are, pour encourager les autres? Let me throw in a final soundbite. I’m currently reading a wonderful book by Euan Semple about the realities of communication. I hope to review it when I’ve finished reading it. Reflecting on his hands-on experience of many corporate entities including the BBC, he says

We are used to thinking of the world in terms of mass. Big things like nation states, religions, society, the media. We are used to expecting those big things to look after us and protect us. But the internet splits those up and breaks them apart. It is made up of networks of individuals, each with their own voice. If we are going to survive the changes we need to see in our institutions we need to help them find that voice. We need to help them grow up.

Dark Crusading in rural Sweden

On our first date nite of 2012 we try out David Fincher’s Hollywood remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It’s a pacy stylish two and half hours, with one or two slightly sicko undertones, but time flies when you’re having fun.

Daniel Craig plays a disgraced journalist, if you can imagine such a thing, who takes refuge from the slings and arrows of a libel conviction by sorting out the dirty linen of Sweden’s most dysfunctional family.
They live on their own private island that they’ve turned into a Fraggle Rock of murder, mystery and intrigue. Everyone nurses their own dark Nazi, misogynistic or Oedipal secrets, sometimes all three simultaneously, as mist curls off the lake towards deserted boathouses past the mangled corpses of beheaded cats.
Pretty standard stuff, but is the killer still be at large? That would be telling.

There’s a dark arthouse feel about this take on the tale, and Rooney Mara’s Lisbeth heads the charge. In the good old days a trainee secret agent used to swing provocatively across English TV screens with a box of Milk Tray for the lady. Now the Lady is doing the swinging, tattoed like a sailor, abetted by several pounds of chunky metalware installed in unusual ways around her person.

She’s a dark, lean, mean street machine, who melds with her machinery as she locks on motorbike or laptop. She zaps through action like a steely robotic whippet but is she emotionally engaging enough? Probably not for some, but it is a considerable achievement to have evolved an action heroine who makes Angelina’s Lara Croft look like Mary Poppins.

Finally, brethren, the wackiest wacko on this Fraggle Rock murders women according to prescriptions derived literally from the Book of Leviticus.

So, what price literalism?

It’s easy to bang on about “biblical” attitudes and practices in a way that bears no relationship at all to what’s actually written in the Bible.

Let the reader beware...