This article was originally published in the March 2025 print edition of Byline Times
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There’s a simple, striking moment towards the end of a 1989 interview with her friend, former Labour MP-turned-journalist, Brian Walden, when Margaret Thatcher says: “I don’t know.”
The response came after repeated attempts by Walden to discover whether Thatcher thought she could have kept her Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, from resigning if she had sacked her economics advisor.
“I don’t know,” Thatcher replied, before saying, “I did everything possible to stop him.”
The LWT interview was widely credited as contributing to the downfall of the ‘Iron Lady’, who resigned a year later.
Just two years old at the time, I didn’t see and hadn’t heard of it until I attended a screening of its recent Channel 4 dramatisation, Brian and Maggie, based on former BBC editor Rob Burley’s book, Why Is This Lying Bastard Lying to Me?
What struck me was the series’ depiction – across party-political lines – of the friendship and mutual respect Thatcher and Walden shared. As well as her admission of doubt; a recognition that she did not have the answer to his question. Even her convictions were not boundless. Even she could relinquish her dogmatic control.
If this didn’t necessarily humanise the person behind the divisive politician, her uncertainty revealed something human nonetheless.
I found hearing her words in the drama so interesting, not primarily because they were coming from Thatcher, but because it is hard to imagine any prominent politician saying them, genuinely, today.
Dominated as it is by definitive soundbites, empty messaging, and a lack of humanity that runs through our collective public life, modern political culture sees politicians either running scared of a rigorous delve into their actual beliefs or anything that cuts too close to their true character; or otherwise a reductive but appealing emotionally-driven ‘I have all the answers’ populist approach – which may offer people what they think they want to hear but without the clarity as to how it will actually improve their lives.
For Brian and Maggie’s writer, James Graham, turning the interview into a drama was an “unlikely” way to explore the “anxiety about conversation, how we talk to each other, particularly in the political sphere” that surrounds us – characterised by an inability to accommodate complexity in how we are even willing to make sense of the world today.
“Thinking about what’s been happening in the past few weeks in America, with the election, and Elon Musk and Twitter, and just how conversation in the political space is changing… this felt like an unlikely way into a conversation about that,” he told an audience at the British Film Institute in London in January.
Graham said he had “some sympathy” with modern politicians who don’t want to engage in interviews – in stark contrast to Thatcher who faced Walden just three days after her Chancellor resigned.
“Whether you agree with her or vehemently disagree with her… She really did turn up, she really did listen… the fact that she actually turned up to that interview when everyone else would have gone ‘oh, do you know what, I can’t make it, something’s come up’ – she really, at the worst moment in her career, did turn up and it illuminated something for the audience,” Graham said.
For politicians today, “it must be terrifying to know ‘if I just say that one wrong thing that can obviously then be clipped, manipulated, and shared in a way that is out of context’,” he observed.
“So they actually don’t even have a conversation. You can ask them anything and they just say ‘look, what I think people up and down this country really want to hear about’. It’s performative, it’s a simulation of a conversation. But I do understand why it’s so terrifying.”
Not everything is complex – and some modern politicians are just straightforwardly terrified of legitimate scrutiny at every turn. Boris Johnson’s refusal to sit down for a BBC election interview with Andrew Neil, or his Cabinet members declining to appear on the morning media rounds during the pandemic, are a few obvious examples that come to mind.
But “I think an interesting question we should ask is of our complicity in that – is it journalists’ fault in being too aggressive or is politicians’ fault for being too performative?” Graham asked. “As citizens, we have a responsibility to allow more leeway and space for them to make mistakes and to not always know the answer.”
This lack of space for complexity – and a compelling narrative to make it engaging enough for people to understand why it matters – is what gives populist lies currency, according to Graham.
“If we don’t allow our politicians to converse in a way that isn’t reduced to these simplicities, that leaves a vacuum of complexity which is often then filled by the populists, who sound like they are talking with substance… if someone like Boris Johnson or Nigel Farage comes along into that vacuum of managed, moderate politicians, it sounds like what they are saying is the truth – because it sounds so to the point and direct – but I don’t think it’s any more or less the truth, Donald Trump being the perfect example of that,” Graham added.
“This vacuum needs to be filled with complexity, otherwise it will be filled with populism – and that’s another form of lying with more damage.”