Byline: Albert Morris
LADY Bracknell, in Oscar Wilde's play. The Importance of being Earnest, had a near-sighted view of that item still carried by women. "A handbag!" she exclaimed, like a blast from the old Queen Mary's siren to Mr John Worthing, who confessed that, as a baby, he had been found abandoned inside one. "To be born, at any rate bred, in a handbag," she continued, "seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds me of the worst excesses of the French Revolution."
That said, a handbag is not only an item for carting around anything from cosmetics to car keys and spare tights but, in the case of Margaret Hilda Thatcher, can also be a potent symbol of authority and verbal punch. The Germanic name Hilda is said to mean "terrible fighting woman". Julian Critchley, one of Lady Thatcher's severest Tory back-bench critics, coined the word "handbagging" through pursed lips. "She has been beastly to the Bank of England," he stormed, "has demanded that the BBC 'set its house in order' and tends to believe the worst of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. She cannot see an institution without hitting it with her handbag."
What a woman. She sorted out the Argentines, sank the Belgrano, biffed led light accessories the bloated bureaucrats of Brussels, took the starch out of the trade union barons and stiffened America's resolve to deal with Saddam Hussein. While she has been described as a bargain-basement Boadicea and doing for monetarism what the Boston Strangler did for door-to-door salesmen, the lady with the lethal handbag was described, probably rightly, by President Reagan in one of his more lucid moments, "as the best man in England".
Lady Thatcher's black Ferragamo handbag is now up for sale in an internet auction to raise money for Breast Cancer Care. It joins a long line of symbolic objects in British political life. One of the most famous was Winston Churchill's cigar that resembled, in a broad manner of loose speaking, the glowing war-time torch of defiance with which Fashion Clothing Britain was metaphorically attempting to blow smoke-rings round her foes. If that ever went out permanently, the rumour said, the result would be the same as the apes leaving Gibraltar or the ravens deserting the Tower of London - doom, followed by destruction.
A largely forgotten symbol was connected with a largely forgotten politician - the Anthony Eden hat, a black, high-quality creation, resembling part of the superstructure of a Dreadnought battleship and almost as formal as the topper but with a slight hint of a cut-down trilby. The impeccably-suited Eden brought it to popularity particularly among the head people of Britain. Under it, as prime minister, he was regarded as a first-class advertisement for the Fifty Shilling Tailors. He believed that Britain was still a bespoke first-class power and was the first to confront a crisis (Suez) that proved she was unravelling at the imperial seams. When Eden resigned as prime minister in 1957, the Anthony Eden headgear went into the hatbox of history.
One of the great symbols of hope for peace in 1938-39 was the black, respectable umbrella of prime minister Neville Chamberlain, a man who believed he knew how to handle dictators and whose gaunt face with bushy eyebrows and old-fashioned moustache drew the behind-scenes derision of Hitler. Chamberlain's umbrella seemed to represent Britain's far-sighted preparedness to shelter the country from a reign of fascist terror. Many people thought he would use it to poke Hitler and Mussolini in the ribs and bring them to reason. Unfortunately, it was blown inside out by the Blitzkrieg wind in 1940.
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