How a chance meeting in the 1970s changed the world's political leaders for the worse - starting with Margaret Thatcher
Pic: Allan Warren via MikiCommons www.allanwarren.com
Laurence Olivier might well be the most respected actor of his era. Margaret Thatcher was a highly successful British Prime Minister who surfed a wave of social change and industrial reform to make her one of the most effective – if divisive – figures of post-war politics.
Put them together, what have you got? Apparently, a new play written by the highly respected journalist and writer Tim Walker, When Maggie Met Larry imagines the sequence of events when the great actor secretly transforms a bright but shrill and unengaging footsoldier of her political party into the future leader of the United Kingdom.
Or something like that.
It’s a good listen – here’s the link.
But there is a problem. And the problem is beyond Olivier, and Thatcher. Indeed, it envelops almost every political leader since the Iron Lady took office in 1979. As media became ever more mass, they suffered a horrible, daily, pointed, public examination by radio, television, newspapers. And of course more recently social media is an even more constant, short-form judgment that happens billions of times each day. That kind of attention tends to turn people into something they are not – while that odd KPI of public figures, authenticity, gets bandied around like it’s the most important thing ever invented.
Enter The Gipper
What Thatcher knew was that TV would change everything. Before her, it was different. Prime ministers, and presidents, were pretty much just who they were – for better or ill. So they were, by default, authentic – or at least, a bit amateur in trying to be something else. Nixon tried to do the media thing, and lost. Ford was himself, as was Carter. Then along came an actor, Ronald Reagan. From that point on, you can start to divide presidents that followed between stolid and unengaging (Bush squared, Biden), and those who shone under the lights (Clinton, Obama, and the new paradigm of performative governance, Trump).
And as with the US, the United Kingdom had a succession of those who played the media game and presented an adaptation of themselves (Blair, Cameron, perhaps Sunak), and those who did not (Major, Brown, May). Gauge their success as you will. The difference (and it goes back to Olivier) is that on the one hand you have people whose internal setting is ‘here’s me, being a leader’, versus ‘here’s me, and I think this is how leaders look’. Did any manage both, successfully? Very few – I’d suggest three of the names I listed in the two paragraphs above, but it’s a tough call.
The ‘authenticity’ thing is used as a tool on both sides of the approval/disapproval debate: supporters think their leader is for them, represents them, and is somehow like them. Therefore some people are convinced that Donald Trump represents them authentically, stands by their side in the great MAGA struggle; others say he’s a dangerous deceiver. His mandate is democratic, even if he may be fooling everyone with his presidential persona.
Tracking back to the end of the 1970s, that is precisely the trick that Thatcher discovered, maybe for the first time in politics. She became a version of someone that her party, and then the electorate, could get behind. In 1972 she hired Olivier, and voice coach Kate Fleming, and later another actor, Barrie Ingham. And her campaign manager was not a political strategist but a TV news producer, Gordon Reece. Those are the actions of someone who wants to transform how people perceive them – and in her case, it needed to be done. Gender and class bias in the 1970s, in a Conservative party stacked with patrician would-be leaders and rainmakers who very much enjoyed the status quo, was an operational setting more than a thing to be called out. Thatcher began her voice and presentation coaching under Olivier in 1972; she was leader of the party by 1975.
Very nearly real
But this is not about her success; it’s about the strange choice of Olivier, who was actually the choice of Reece, her former newsman campaign manager. It was he who happened to meet Olivier on a train, and recruit him to the great project.
So comes about the key issue: Olivier wanted her to act. And as the preeminent actor alive at the time, what else would he suggest? But the core problem with acting is that by definition it means you are not yourself. It means you are someone else. So you change your voice, and you change how you deliver, and you look engaged and interested when you visit factories, and you smile at babies, and you deliver lines like ‘the lady’s not for turning’ because it plays well with some of your voters. Referring to yourself in the third person.
Thatcher came across, and I remember although I was not a very political young teenager, like a production. Like she had almost, but not totally, mastered the act of playing prime minister. Because when she spoke, it was the way in which she had been coached to speak. Not a version of her, but someone else. And when she delivered those scripted lines, it was always like she had flipped a switch, imagined the spotlight, imagined the audience reaction, perhaps half wanting to have a call with Olivier where he might have said how well she performed.
If she were playing a part, all good. But she was presenting as a real person whom the public voted into office, twice. And the lack of that thing again – authenticity – began to start a spiral.
Problematic latex
Everyone could ‘do a Margaret Thatcher’. Two British actors, Janet Brown and Faith Brown, made livings in the 1980s impersonating her. It wasn’t hard. You talked very evenly and slowly, breathy and deep (for a woman), you over-articulated, and you finished sentences on a downturn.
But what really hit was Spitting Image, a satirical TV show using grotesque latex puppets to eviscerate the great and the good once a week. And for a long time, Maggie was the chief attraction.
They put her in a men’s suit, because she was more masculine than her cabinet (indeed, her puppet was voiced by a man, Steve Nallon). They referred to her as the queen, because of her regal demeanour. They imagined her a schoolteacher handing out punishments to child-like, petty ministers. And yet she was none of those things – they were just more roles that they imagined she might want to play, given how well she played being prime minister.
Voters, and her own party, grew tired of the act, and replaced her with a man that Spitting Image represented coloured a uniform shade of mid-grey.
So what we are left to do, as Trump grips the world like an angry two-year-old holding a Ming vase, Olaf Scholz fails his audition, Vladimir Putin plays the silent hard man, and Keir Starmer asks his own reflection what role he’s supposed to play next... but think about what politics might be today if Laurence Olivier had missed that train.
Matt Guarente is founder and principal of Guarente + Company Ltd. We work with senior leaders - but not politicians - to help them communicate more effectively with the people who matter most to them. Matt@GuarenteCo.com
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