Reporting Under Thatcher’s Gaze

LONDON - It was impossible to report on Margaret Thatcher up close without occasionally falling victim to the icy stare.

She routinely deployed it to skewer those who had the temerity or the witlessness to challenge her unswerving certainties.

“Margaret Thatcher was the most frightening woman I ever met,” recalled Nigel Nelson, longtime political editor of the left-leaning Mirror. “The Iron Lady would fix you with her steel blue eyes leaving men quivering jellies.”

It was an occupational hazard, not only for her colleagues who strayed from the path, but also for those of us in the permanent British press assigned to try to keep up with her bustling pace.

One occasion on which I got the treatment was on a prime ministerial flight back from the Middle East, when I tentatively suggested that her much-heralded visit had failed to make its intended contribution to the peace process in the region.

She fixed me with the laser beam stare and then imperiously changed the subject to the appalling state of Britain’s litter-strewn streets.

My old Thatcher-era colleagues all have their own anecdotes. “Intimidating” was one of the favorite adjectives applied to her in recollections following her death on Monday.

Mark Colvin, an Australian journalist, posted on Twitter:

I covered Britain and Europe in the 80s. Asking Thatcher a q at a press conf was intimidating. Her gaze swivelled on you like a tank-barrel.

“When you were in front of her, it was quite alarming,” John Sergeant, a television veteran of the Thatcher years, told the BBC.

The trick with the eyes was an integral part of Mrs. Thatcher’s well-cultivated abrasive image, a curious one for a woman who came to power in 1979 pledging, “Where there is discord, may we bring harmony.”

What we got was discord, according to her critics.

For every tribute this week for the leader who “saved Britain,” there has been a denunciation from those who believe she divided a nation that continues to suffer from her legacy.

Some of that divisive legacy has expressed itself in street parties in London, Glasgow and elsewhere to celebrate her passing.

As my colleague Alan Cowell writes:

The venom of the protests recalled policies encouraging private business and crushing labor union power that her admirers depicted on Tuesday as liberating the economy from years in the doldrums and that her foes characterized as ruinous for the poor.

It was a case of “love her or hate her,” as France’s Le Monde put it, but little in between.

Almost a decade and a half after she left office, neither the adulation nor the hatred appears to have mellowed.

As a journalist, I can’t say that reporting the Thatcher era wasn’t a rewarding experience. Conflict makes for good copy and, with Margaret Thatcher, it was never in short supply.

But there is always something disconcerting about ideological certainty â€" with or without the icy stare.