Complexity Is Reality – But There’s No Possibility For It In Today’s Political Culture

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.”  

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United in ‘Otherness’

One of the complexities explored in Brian and Maggie is what brought the two different personalities together, as well as the boundaries of access and scrutiny between the press and the powerful in Britain – an entrenched issue urgently in need of a spotlight in the present.

Walden – who wrote a speech for Thatcher’s 1983 election campaign – is played by Steve Coogan. He told the BFI that the former Labour politician was “more enamoured with her than she was with him” but that their experiences of class created an affinity.

“She was certainly curious about him, about his background,” he said. “I think there was a genuine connection about the fact that neither of them were ultimately part of the traditional establishment – they were the product of the state school system, and they felt that that connected them in some way. That they had an ‘otherness’. That to me represents a really interesting part of the story, beyond the politics of it – the idea of them being connected as outsiders.”

Part of what the drama hints at is how people can become so fundamentally shaped by the very forces they are trying to break free from. The human need to transcend the things we see as limitations can come at the cost of our humanness. 

“The lower-middle-class in this country is, in a sense, the backbone of this country, it is what makes it function,” Coogan observed. “That they both rose to the top of their professions from that background, to me, is curious in terms of what you have to do to get there. Margaret Thatcher broke through the glass ceiling but did it by adopting some of the more aggressive tropes of men. Remember Spitting Image, when they dressed her up in a suit and then she smoked a cigar. 

“But, certainly, I found it fascinating – that idea of being a product of some sort of imperfect meritocratic system… especially the people who were a product of that old grammar school system, which unfair as it was at its heart, allowed these strange schisms that allowed people to navigate their way through.”

Reflecting on how she went about depicting a figure she personally disliked, Harriet Walter noted the inherent purpose of art is to grapple with the uncomfortable and the unresolved – unlike politics.

“I do believe that people are totally complex and that is why I could never be a politician because I haven’t got the single-mindedness to judge something to be right or wrong,” she observed. “I find that, as an actor, I’m always going to try and find the complexity in a character… it doesn’t change my opinions about what she did to the country.”

In praising Thatcher’s convictions compared to politicians today, Coogan demonstrated this ability to hold multiple views of her legacy at once.

While the “Thatcherite experiment benefited a few people very well, it failed a lot of people”, he said. “Having said that, she wasn’t duplicitous and what I respect is that she had a clear point of view, in stark contrast to politicians these days who just say whatever it is that they think will get them into the next day. They are so risk-averse about saying anything.”

Because “she wasn’t worried about being unpopular”, and had a clear ideology, she wasn’t “bumbling along with ineffectual pragmatism, which is what we’ve got now”, Coogan believes.

Striking the right balance in portraying Thatcher with complexity also involved being careful that the drama didn’t become “some sort of rehabilitation” of the politician, the actor said. While his character toasts Thatcher after she resigns as Prime Minister in the final scene of Brian and Maggie, Coogan revealed he asked for Walden’s line, “she’s worth a hundred of them”, to be cut.

The decision wasn’t a “woke kind of thing”, he added, aware of the times we live in. The toast was enough.

Thatcher “felt she could trust Walden to be, not toeing her line, but on her side, in a way that could free her up to be honest with him”, Walter added. Whereas, now, interviewees “are instantly on the defensive”.

That defensiveness is fuelled by an all too often shallow and sensationalist political culture, led by social media platforms shaped by algorithms monetising our more base emotions. Rage, moral righteousness, a desperate (and often justified) desire for recognition, a lust for revenge, justice are all in the mix. 

How politicians either channel such psychologically-driven needs to ‘empower the people’ (and themselves) or run scared of scrutiny in such a relentless, unforgiving, reductionist climate both help explain why it is hard to picture any dominant figure in public life today uttering the words ‘I don’t know’.

And in that lies an insight that is easy to overlook: that one of the biggest victories of the modern political right in both Britain and the United States has been to close the space in which nuance and ambiguity can even sit.

Being alive to what is happening around us means paying attention to the ideas we think with, not just the ideas we think about. The idea that a political leader couldn’t today tell us ‘I don’t know’ is one too many people don’t even have in their heads. 

‘Brian and Maggie’ is available to watch at channel4.com