Me and Mrs T

Stateswoman. Sex goddess. Clown? As a new exhibition of Thatcher iconography opens, our Political Editor Andy McSmith reflects on the magnetism of the Iron Lady

Was Margaret Thatcher sexy? She was iconic, of course, like no other prime minister since 1955. Would anyone recognise a statue of John Major, let alone feel provoked to whack its head off? Or is it imaginable that 12 years after Tony Blair leaves Downing Street, they will mount an exhibition featuring Tony as a clown, Tony as patchwork, Tony as a statue on an oil drum? That's what is happening to Mrs T this week in London.

She certainly had celebrity status. I was waiting in a doorway in Tokyo, years ago, at the back of a classroom full of 14-year-old Japanese girls who were hoping for a glimpse of the British prime minister. I did not see Mrs Thatcher enter the room, but I knew she had arrived from the screaming adulation that greeted her, as if she were a rock star or sporting hero.

And there was Guimri, then Leninakan, the Armenian town hit by an earthquake in 1988. Its population doubled the day Mrs Thatcher arrived to reopen a school, 18 months later. Wellwishers poured in from the surrounding farms to wave from the rooftops or mob her in the streets. The crush was so bad that, comically, the men from Downing Street linked arms with the KGB officers to create a protective chain around her. The Armenians, for some reason, supposed she was on their side in a territorial dispute with Azerbaijan.

Not only was Mrs Thatcher a political superstar, there were men who actually lusted after her. They came in two categories. The more obvious were the limp young Tories for whom she was a feared surrogate mother. On the day after her fall, I was talking to a youngish minister – small, quiet, intelligent and fiercely right-wing – whose flow of conversation came to a sudden halt as he started weeping, silently, tears dropping on to the stone floor of the Commons lobby. The man was truly distressed. He had lost his mummy.

There were also strong-willed, clever, independent men who claimed to find her sexy, including men of high culture such as Anthony Powell and Sir Kingsley Amis. Alan Clark, the diarist, admired her ankles and her blue eyes. The best known comment of all on her sexuality – "eyes of Caligula, mouth of Marilyn Monroe" – was made by François Mitterand.

Personally, I saw the Caligula in Margaret Thatcher long before I detected any Marilyn Monroe. In the first years of her turbulent reign, I was on Tyneside, where you could see her impact in the accelerated factory closures, growing dole queues, and the general gathering harshness and bugger-you-mate attitude she encouraged. The favourite marching slogan of the day was "Maggie, Maggie, Maggie – out, out, out." There were others, too obscene or sexist to repeat. She was an immense but very distant hate figure.

She became less distant, for me, in a few startling seconds one afternoon in the mid-Eighties, when I was working for the Labour Party and emerged from Neil Kinnock's suite of offices into a narrow corridor, which is also the route to the Prime Minister's Commons office.

Suddenly, my way was blocked by a small woman with a familiar face, and a purposeful manner, who raised a finger and pointed first to one side, then the other, as if imitating the movement of a windscreen wiper. What the gesture meant was that I could step to the left, or to the right – whichever, I was to step out of her way. I, of course, flattened myself against a wall and let her stride wordlessly by.

What surprised me, given how I had loathed this woman from afar, was her pleasant smile, as if she found it mildly funny that I was startled to recognise her.

Mrs Thatcher's absence of what passes as a sense of humour is legendary. There was something Victorian about her, and like the Snark, I am sure she was gravely offended by a pun. She did not see the joke when she said of her deputy, Willie Whitelaw, that everybody needs a Willie. She certainly was not trying to be funny when, on an anniversary visit to the Falklands, sitting on a gun aboard a naval destroyer, she inquired: "Can this thing jerk you off?" Yet, on close observation, I thought I detected a kind of humour buried in there somewhere. It took the form of self-parody. At moments of relaxation, she would play to her reputation for domineering fussiness by hamming it up.

The first time I saw her properly, close up, was in an aircraft, when I was one of half a dozen journalists taken forward to meet her. It was like talking to a lively but severe aunt. As she spoke, she tugged at her necklace, drawing attention to her neck, which, curiously, was a decade older than her face. Below the chin, she had a grandmother's wrinkles; the smoothness above was a tribute to the science of cosmetics.

Gordon Greig, political editor of the Daily Mail, whom she knew well, teased her about her disastrous relations with Sir Geoffrey Howe, whereupon she poked him with her finger and told him: "You must rearrange your ideas, Gordon." On another occasion, we had stopped off at a town in Siberia called Bratsk, previously known only as the place of exile for a former Soviet boss, Georgi Malenkov. Protocol required Mrs Thatcher to sit in a wooden building that passed as Bratsk's town hall, being bored by the local mayor, while we journalists hung around in an adjoining room. The novelty of the day was that satellite television had just arrived in the Soviet Union, and we watched the video of Elton John performing "It's War, Baby" on Sky TV. When the prime minister rejoined us, there was no point in asking about her meeting with the mayor, so to make conversation I inquired whether she, too, had had the Elton John to keep her entertained.

No, she had not, Mrs Thatcher replied, but what she had seen was Sky's coverage of the British Green Party's annual conference, during which one of the speakers (she named him) had suggested that the country had a problem with litter. This set her off on an indignant monologue about people who make detrimental comments about Britain which will be heard abroad, and how she was going to speak out in defence of Britain's exemplary refuse collection system the minute she was back. I could be wrong, but I think somewhere deep down she detected that this conversation was a little absurd.

Generally, Mrs Thatcher liked to be surrounded by men who were tough enough not to be overawed, but respectful enough to flatter and flirt. She could not stand Sir Geoffrey Howe because he was no fun, whereas the left-wing Labour MP Dennis Skinner was one of her favourite parliamentarians, because of the humorous insolence with which he barracked her.

You need only think of the number of dog-ugly male politicians whose proximity to power has acted as an aphrodisiac to see that it is not altogether surprising that a woman wielding the power that Thatcher had should enter the dreams and fantasies of some males.

At the first Prime Minister's Questions after her fall, she sat several rows back, dressed in purple, with the controlled stillness of a big beast, while acolytes fussed around her. Then, suddenly, the government benches erupted in a cheer when a funny little man who looked like a town clerk scurried in clutching an armful of folders. It was her epigone, John Major. That moment gave an insight into how Mark Anthony must have felt.

Yet, though she was awesome, I have to say that Mrs Thatcher's reputed sex appeal quite escaped me. That may have been a generational thing. I was in the White House a few weeks ago, standing a few feet away from Condoleezza Rice, and she gave me a look. Perhaps because I was part of Tony Blair's party she thought I had views I don't hold – even so, it was definitely a look to remember. Smart, single, driven, brain as big as a planet, close to a man of considerably less intelligence but with the power to flatten Baghdad – Dr Rice is what I call sexy.

'Thatcher' is at the Blue Gallery, 15 Great Sutton St, London EC1 (020-7490 3833). It opens on Wednesday

Mrs T and the art critic

When Paul Kelleher took a cricket bat to a statue of Margaret Thatcher last July, he was following in a tradition that began with Emperor Leo III in 726AD. Iconoclasts believe that image-worship should be discouraged, usually by destroying the images concerned. The bigger question is why those images came to be made: why some people make it as icons, and others don't.

As Kelleher showed, disagreement is the first rule of artistic iconhood. Worthy saints – the tirelessly moral Saint Charles Borromeo, say – have seldom cut the mustard as icons. It's those such as Saint Sebastian – cute, homoerotic and probably mythical – who've been taken up by artists from Perugino to Julian Schnabel. The more vexing the subject, the more likely they are to become iconic; and in our post-Freudian times, vexatiousness has usually to do with sex.

Consider the first truly modern art icon, the Mona Lisa – not Leonardo's but Marcel Duchamp's, appropriated as a readymade in 1919 with the addition of a small moustache. Duchamp was picking up on his subject's vexed sexuality: the directness of her gaze, her apparent amusement at some part of Leonardo's anatomy that we cannot see. She's manly? Then make her a man. Contrariwise, the gay Andy Warhol liked his female icons to be both powerful and powerless: Jackie Kennedy, with her headless husband and steely New England class; Marilyn Monroe, with her double-D cup and taste for men who did her wrong.

But Margaret Thatcher? Considering the length and depth of her rule, she has inspired little iconography. The trouble is that she was neither masculine nor feminine, but grotesque; and grotesquerie has never been a good recipe for iconhood. Warhol painted Marilyn and Jackie because he wanted to; the artists in this show have made works about Mrs Thatcher because they were invited to do so. To my taste, Kelleher's cricket-bat iconoclasm was a brisker response to the ex-prime minister than the iconolatry of Keith Tyson and Martin Creed; but then my views on icons are probably quite strict.

Charles Darwent