Mad, bad and quite possibly dangerous to know, given her propensity for murderous fantasy: that's the outraged verdict of the British establishment on novelist Hilary Mantel. Her crime? She has dared to imagine and, worse, write about, what it would be like to kill a prime minister. The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher is a short story in which an IRA sniper, unexpectedly assisted by a woman whose home he enters, prepares to murder the British leader.
It was inspired by a moment in Mantel’s own life, back in 1983, when she looked out the window of her house and saw Thatcher in the garden of the hospital next door. “Immediately your eye measures the distance,” Mantel recently recalled. “I thought, if I wasn’t me, if I was someone else, she’d be dead.” The short story was published in Saturday’s Guardian, and appeared alongside an interview in which the author – twice a winner of the Booker Prize — referred to her “boiling detestation” of Thatcher, who she described as damaging, anti-feminist and “a psychological transvestite”: a woman who felt compelled to act like a man.
The story itself — despite the melodrama of the opening line: “Picture first the street where she breathed her last” — is terse and under-stated. There’s nothing gory or gratuitous about it. Yet it has been met with extraordinary opprobrium: Mantel and her work have been widely condemned as vile, cowardly and dangerous, particularly – but certainly not exclusively – by right-wing British politicians and commentators. Conservative MP Conor Burns claimed that the story was a grave affront to IRA victims, adding that he “never cease[s] to be amazed by the disordered psyche of some on the left”; Stewart Jackson, another Tory MP, said that Mantel was “sick and deranged”, while Lord Timothy Bell, a former adviser to Thatcher – continuing the prevailing theme of lunacy – said that “Mantel needs to see a therapist.” Lord Bell even wanted to call in the authorities. “If somebody admits they want to assassinate somebody, surely the police should investigate,” he said.
If anyone has lost the run of themselves, it’s not Mantel, but this gang of hysterical grandees. Have they forgotten that Thatcher is dead, and thus beyond the reach of any power – fictional or otherwise – to do her harm? Even were the Iron Lady extant, has nobody pointed out to them that a pretend gun – you know, the kind that exists only in an author’s mind – hasn’t got the capacity to fire real bullets? And what exactly would the police be investigating if they did come knocking on Mantel’s door? Last time I checked, thinking wild, provocative or insurrectionary thoughts was not against the law. If they were, many of us would already be serving life sentences.
Far from acting improperly, Mantel is simply doing her job as a writer. Drawing on her own lived experience to create exciting, audacious stories. Refusing to be polite and deferential. Disinterring the unspoken and unspeakable desires that lurk beneath the surface and bringing them out into the light. Playing with ideas, testing out imaginary possibilities that proliferate tantalisingly beyond the boundaries of the narrative itself, asking — what if history had happened this way, and not that way? If Thatcher’s life had ended in 1983, how would today be different?
None of this is to endorse the mean-spirited wave of public celebrations that arose in the wake of Thatcher’s (actual) demise in 2013. However much she despised her, Mantel is too smart a thinker to indulge in witless antics of the “ding dong, the witch is dead” variety, and it’s wrong to interpret both the story and her remarks as a simplistic expression of leftist bile.
This isn’t a silly skirmish between left and right, Thatcher-loathers and Thatcher-lovers. It goes much wider and deeper than that. It’s about protecting the freedom to air challenging or controversial or disturbing topics and talk about them honestly, without some self-righteous fool wanting to call in the cops. The last time Mantel got excoriated for her opinions – she described the Duchess of Cambridge as “a plastic princess” born to breed – she complained that “public life and freedom of speech is compromised at the moment by a conformist and trivialising culture”.
She was right. Subversive thinking will no longer be tolerated; we energetically shout down and extract apologies from those who diverge from the approved beliefs of the mainstream.
And now it seems we can add crimes of the imagination to the list of indictable offences.
