This article first appeared in the Evening Standard on 15th November 2011
It's not every day that Meryl Streep bakes you a cake. But on Saturday night, she did just that: an American apple cake, made from a recipe by Julia Childs, the groundbreaking cookery writer played by Streep in the 2009 film Julie & Julia.
You could say the cake was a sweetener because I - and a dozen other opinionated women - had been summoned to discuss a far less palatable subject: Margaret Thatcher.
Earlier that evening, before our informal "kitchen supper", we had crowded into a private screening of the long-awaited biopic of the former prime minister, The Iron Lady. Now, I find myself sitting in Islington in the Georgian home of the film's director, Phyllida Lloyd, eating homemade chicken curry alongside Streep, who plays Thatcher, and screenwriter Abi Morgan (Sex Traffic, The Hour, Shame). Grande dame columnists Polly Toynbee, Suzanne Moore, Janet Street-Porter and India Knight are to my right.
Across the table are actress Tracey Ullman, broadcasters Jenni Murray, Fi Glover, Edith Bowman and Lauren Laverne. A group of strong women, none of us obvious Thatcherites, debating the Iron Lady's legacy.
Arguably what united us was our antipathy towards Thatcher. Growing up as a Lefty feminist in the West Midlands, I felt oppressed by a Tory government which specialised in union-bashing and BBC-baiting, told the unemployed to get on their bikes and introduced the homophobic Section 28 legislation. Laverne is the granddaughter of a miner; Toynbee a well-known Thatcher-baiter; Murray confronted Maggie about her childcare policies on Woman's Hour.
All weekend Twitter hummed with grown women debating what to wear to the dinner party of the year (dungarees, in tribute to Mamma Mia!? Or a French Lieutenant's Woman ballgown?).
In fact Streep, 62, dressed in print shirt and dark trousers, does all she can to keep things normal. She passes around canapés, helps wash up. She has even brought her daughter along to join in the discussion. Streep has a reputation for turning film sets into a family unit. She and Lloyd worked together on Mamma Mia!. She met Ullman on the set of David Hare's Plenty and they have been friends ever since.
But there's another reason she has organised this evening. Streep knows a political biopic of an "old lady" will be a hard sell at the box office where franchises are aimed at teenage boys. The film, she tells us, "is about how this divisive pioneer, who was monstrous in some ways, broke through in a way I couldn't have imagined when I was that age".
After the success of Mamma Mia! she and Lloyd could have chosen a frothy rom-com but Streep wanted to do a film about "the end of a life" which "circles questions of mortality". When she read Morgan's script about Margaret Thatcher, she knew she had found her project.
What drew Streep to the script was her own dislike of Thatcher. "I wasn't a fan. In America she was this woman who hung out with Reagan and we didn't like her policies and it was easy to dismiss her because our iconic political women were figures like Jacqueline Kennedy. In contrast she seemed dowdy - and we judge female politicians in a different way than we do men," she apologises. "I was guilty of that." Making the film gave her a chance to challenge her own prejudices.
But could the film alter my own less-than-rosy views of Maggie Thatcher, milk-snatcher? In many ways The Iron Lady is a feminist re-evaluation of Thatcher's life - and the price she paid for power. It is hard to remain unmoved at the sheer scale of the challenges she overcame to reach the highest office in the land.
The camera films mostly from her perspective - so you are with her from her 10-year bid to win her first parliamentary seat to the physical assault course of first entering the macho House of Commons. It is undeniably a lonely road. Apart from her own daughter, Carol, and Thatcher's beloved dresser, Crawfie, there are very few women in the film, and certainly no other female MPs. This, argues Morgan, reflects Thatcher's own belief that she was the only woman in the room.
Streep's performance is disturbing. Just like Helen Mirren in The Queen, she makes Maggie a radiant figure. I found myself rooting for the brainy grocer's daughter as she battled through the snooty Tory ranks.
But other elements of the film are cartoonish and unsettling: where is the rational, indignant opposition to Thatcher's policies? Union leaders and protesters are a wild rabble banging on her car windows. Devastating political events - the miners' strike, the Brighton bombings - are dealt with in an almost operatic way. There is a chilling moment when she declares "Sink it!" to order a British submarine to torpedo the Argentine ship the General Belgrano. You could easily lose patience with the frantic plotting.
But arguably The Iron Lady is most daring in its treatment of the older Thatcher. The film opens with a fragile old lady trying to buy milk at the news-agent's. With a shock we realise this is Maggie at 80, having given her minders the slip. Denis is long dead. Deluded with grief (or dementia) Maggie spends her days conversing with a ghost.
Both Streep and Morgan read Carol Thatcher's memoir, A Swim-on Part in the Goldfish Bowl - where she revealed that her mother had to be reminded of her husband's death over and over again. "Carol Thatcher came under a lot of flak for writing about her mother's dementia," says Streep. "So did Patti Davis for talking about her father, Ronald Reagan."
Morgan, who has known several female relatives with dementia, is convinced Thatcher was ill at the end of her time in office, believing her drinking habits (lots of whisky) and lack of sleep may also have contributed to her gradual loss of autonomy.
Maggie fans have already protested loudly that the film invades the great lady's privacy. But the family are dealt with generously, from Jim Broadbent's Denis, the clever buffoon who marries a woman who has no intention of being a traditional wife, to Olivia Colman's wonderfully nuanced Carol (all kaftans and brave smiles each time her mother slights her). Tellingly Mark, the favourite twin, is absent from the film.
There is much to admire about this ordinary woman who knows the price of milk, unlike her public-school educated Cabinet ministers; who believes passionately in the idea of public service. There is a moment when Thatcher explains her reasoning behind the poll tax (one of the most hated acts of her premiership). Anyone who believes in Britain must be prepared to make a contribution, rich or poor, she argues. It is brutal, impeccable logic from a woman who can't imagine what it is like to fail.
I found myself secretly applauding when Maggie bemoans an X Factor world where people are more interested in "being" than "doing". Where they elevate feelings above "thoughts and ideas". Morgan wonders how long Thatcher would have survived in the media-sophisticated Twitter age. The real danger for Lefties is that Streep's performance is so touching. While she is on screen, hostility is suspended. Rather than the political monster of my teenage years, Streep portrays an everywoman battling loss. In one scene, which actually made me cry, she is terrified by the reappearance of Denis's ghost and switches on every electrical appliance in the house sobbing: "I will not go mad."
And this breaks the greatest taboo of all, the one the party faithful can't bear to accept about their heroine. We all get ill, uncertain, grow old. For all that the keepers of Thatcher's flame love to wheel her out for public occasions (remember those pictures of her at Liam Fox's birthday), they can't forgive her for being human. This film does.
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