Media Notes / Margaret Thatcher in Fiction

She had a bit of an image problem.

"Normally journalists would point out how very filled with politics all the other British writers of the school of eighty-something were, and that Sandman wasn't. And why is that? And I would hesitantly suggest that I thought that Sandman might have been a bit more political than they thought, and they would say no, it definitely wasn't; where was Margaret Thatcher, after all, and why hadn't I shown her eating babies with her vampire teeth?"

— Neil Gaiman

Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (and the first woman to hold that position) for 11 years, Margaret Thatcher remains the most divisive figure in British political history. Her administration featured controversial economic policies, high unemployment, the Miners' Strike, The Falklands War, a significant disembowelment of the Trade Union movement, the sidelining of Britain's heavy industry sector, and privatisation of public assets. As you can imagine, she's very divisive.

Punk music and the 1980s alternative comedy movement made her a frequent target, so in fiction she is caricatured with a punkish Refuge in Audacity. Many 1970s and early '80s depictions concentrated on her domination of her husband, Denis, who would appear as a nebbishy idiot drinking to deal with her. Over time, Denis was all but forgotten, and Maggie became more of a singular Evil Overlord figure, possessing Wicked Witch-like dark magic or occasionally be analogised to a Video Nasty psychopath. Even admiring portrayals of Thatcher tend to portray her as an unstoppable, terrifying force, an image the real Thatcher exploited.

---

Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Thatcher makes two minor cameos in The Legend of Koizumi as a wheelchair-bound Iron Lady. In her first appearance she (correctly) predicts the outcome of Koizumi vs. Putin and is later shown glaring the combined heads of state of Europe into submission. She is stated to be the strongest female Mahjong player on the planet but is unable to play actively due to health reasons.

Comic Books

• As Neil Gaiman suggests at the top of the page, the British comics industry (especially the guys who went on to make it big in the U.S.) practically ran on a burning hatred of Thatcher. Gaiman's own The Sandman (1989) never outright depicted her, but nevertheless slipped in a Take That! during "Men of Good Fortune" (which begins with peasants in The Dung Ages complaining about poll taxes, and ends with bar-goers in modern-day London complaining about the exact same thing).
• Hellblazer:
  • Yuppie demons celebrate her reelection in an early issue written by Jamie Delano, which also featured Dave McKean's painting of a vampire-fanged Thatcher on the cover.
  • England's political climate both during and post-Thatcher are heavy themes in Hellblazer. Many of the threats John Constantine has faced are, while not directly caused by Thatcher, certainly helped out by her politics. The rampant unemployment and economic depression during her tenure led to despair amongst the lower classes, prime breeding ground for evils that go bump in the night, for example.
• Planetary:
  • The issue "To Be in England, in the Summertime", in which the team flies to London for the funeral of a John Constantine Expy, is a reflection on Thatcher's Britain and the fiction it produced. Jakita has... less than warm feelings towards Thatcher, which are obviously an echo of Warren Ellis; one of the points of the issue is the political climate that gave rise to a lot of the early Vertigo Comics.
    Jakita: She wanted concentration camps for AIDS victims, wanted to eradicate homosexuality even as an abstract concept, made poor people choose between eating and keeping their vote, ran the most shameless vote-grabbing artificial war scam in fifty years...
  • The issue also features a flashback to the John Constantine Expy thwarting her attempt to murder the pregnant mother of a possible Second Coming of Christ by trapping her Invisible to Normals agent in an invisible box. Thatcher wasn't even doing it because she was in league with Satan or something; just because the Second Coming would be politically inconvenient for her.
• She appears — though unnamed, it is very obviously her — in one of the eighties issues of Excalibur (Marvel Comics) as one of Mesmero's therapy patients when he's trying to use his powers to go straight. She's depicted in a ridiculous but harmless light, dreaming of herself as Captain Britain and the Team Mum of the Excalibur team (the female members of whom are, for some reason, gender flipped), doing things like making sure they brushed their teeth and went to bed and reading them books like A Tale of Two Cities.
• Alan Moore wrote V for Vendetta primarily as a rebuttal to Thatcher's more divisive policies.
• And yet she appears in Miracleman in a much more sympathetic light, as another small human, arguing for the free market against a godlike superhuman.
• A caricatured Mrs. Thatcher appears as a fearsome Cirinist leader in Cerebus the Aardvark. Later on Cerebus gets the better of her, in an issue that appeared just around the time the real Margaret Thatcher was coming to the end of her term in office.
• Many 2000 AD comics from The '80s feature No Celebrities Were Harmed versions of her:
  • Judge Dredd:
    • One story leads to the following exchange when the title character chases after Count Dracula, who takes refuge inside a Hall of Horrors tourist museum.
      Dredd: You! Close the Hall! Get everyone out! Dracula's in there!
      Employee: 'Course he is! So's Frankenstein, the Wolfman, Margaret Thatcher...
    • There was also Chief Justice Hilda Margaret McGruder, who succeeded Chief Justice Griffin. After a very successful first term she made an error in judgement and went on the Long Walk, only to later have to take back her post after years of isolation and radiation exposure rapidly becoming clearly insane. Amongst many, many references she develops a Split Personality, and refers to her various selves as "we", parodying Thatcher's infamous "We are a grandmother" comment. Also of note were McGruder's more masculine physical features after her time spent in the Cursed Earth (including a beard), which would reflect Thatcher's masculine composure.
  • In Invasion!, where Britain is over-run by a foreign army which is suspiciously like the Russians, in an early episode a prime minister looking suspiciously like Margaret Thatcher is seen hanged by the invaders.
  • Bec & Kawl once featured a story where Margaret Thatcher (unnamed in the strip, but the obvious caricature tells all) plotted to privatize Hell. Kawl refers to her as "The Arch-Manifestation of Evil".
• Michael Moorcock's Multiverse portrays her as "Mrs. Ratchet", an old woman who is scared to death by the mysterious "silverskin" (in this particular usage, the name refers to Count Zodiac), despite earlier assurances that he has never harmed a woman.
• Garth Ennis:
  • In The Boys, Billy Butcher's formative years take place during her era; he fought in the Falklands War and afterwards was a working schlub while her economic policies were in effect — and after Butcher's wife dies from bearing a fetus begat by being raped by a rogue superhuman, her administration is all but stated to be an ally of the Big Bad MegaCorp, Vought-American.
  • In Preacher, she isn't named but is very likely to be the Prime Minister that Starr offers money (well, asks how much it would cost) to piss in her mouth.
  • The final arc of the Kev series has as its MacGuffin a videotape of her having sex with Saddam Hussein at a world summit.
• Nero: In De Man Van Europa ("The Man of Europe"), people's heads start falling off when they watch the sky. This strange phenomenon happens when several European Prime Ministers at the time (1990) visit Brussels. One of them is Thatcher, whose head indeed falls off. A general mutters: "Iron Lady, hollow head". Eventually all the heads are glued back on.
• Grant Morrison:
  • Dare, originally serialized in the pages of Revolver and then collected as a graphic novel, fused the idealistic 1990s depicted in the '50s sci-fi comic Dan Dare with the worst aspects of the actual 1990s bequeathed to England by the Thatcher government. Thatcher herself is caricatured as Prime Minister Gloria Monday, who sells out to Dare's alien archenemy, the Mekon.
  • St Swithin's Day is about a boy who seems to be planning her assassination, but then just points at her and says "Bang", concluding, even as her security detail pushes him to the ground, that "It was worth it just to see her scared."
• The French comic Cupidon had Cupido unsuccessfully try to soften Margaret Thatcher for discussions, but all of his arrows just bounce off her. Ultimately, he shoots her through one ear while a colleague of his holds the other shut. The arrow stays in this time and gives unexpected results: instead of ignoring her opponents, she flips them off. By Cupido's own admission, "better than nothing."
• The Italian horror comic Dylan Dog, being set in Britain, has several characters taking jabs at Thatcher in many stories. Even after her death there was a 2014 story that took place in a cargo ship named UK-Thatcher, which is haunted by Event Horizon-like space demons.

Comic Strips

• Margaret Thatcher is also made fun of in the Bloom County strips parodying the Falklands War and the marriage of Prince Charles and Diana and the birth of their first son, William.
• Sherman's Lagoon: The lagoon was once infested by a giant singing clone of Barry Manilow, to which the government responded by sending "the toughest agent they could find"; Margaret Thatcher on water skis with a machine gun.
• Private Eye had two main comic strip parodies of the Thatcher years, one where she was identified with Rommel in a Desert Rats-inspired scenario, the other where she was 'the Maggon' to Neil Kinnock's Dan Dare stand-in.
• The Daily Record's Angus Og had Thatcher as a frequent target due to her (in)famous anti-Scottish stance. In one example her picture was rejected as a Dartboard of Hate because it was felt her face might blunt the darts.
• Doonesbury's Zonker Harris, who owns a British lordship, was once called to the House of Lords to help repeal one of Thatcher's tax laws. He proceeded to lead the lords in singing "Ding, dong, the witch is dead!"^note This song was helped into the British pop charts in the week after Thatcher's death backed by a massive Internet campaign, much to the consternation of the BBC, who banned it from airplay. Thanks, Zonker!
• Steve Bell's satirical If went out of its way to savage her as a soul-less robot with no empathy or understanding.

Fan Works

• The Hetalia: Axis Powers doujinshii From the New Earth, with Love has a young and Moe-looking Thatcher as one of the caretakers of England, who survived his Duel to the Death with America parallel to World War II... only to fall in a coma due to his almost fatal injuries. She chats with America over some soft ice cream, and he asks her to step forward into politics; some pages later, her older self is featured as Prime Minister in The '80s. As she becomes a full-fledged leader, England finally recovers from his coma.

Films — Live-Action

• Meryl Streep plays her in the 2011 Biopic The Iron Lady, for which she won an Academy Award. The film is about an elderly Thatcher, addled by dementia, looking back on the fragments of her life.
• Margaret Thatcher appears (played by famous impersonator Janet Brown) in the James Bond film For Your Eyes Only. A worried (fictional) Secretary of State for Defence Sir Frederick Gray stats that "She'll have our guts for garters!" if the ATAC System isn't retrieved from enemy hands.
• Mentioned in less than glowing terms in Brassed Off, considering it was her fault that the colliery was being shut down. Phil mentions her in his Smite Me, O Mighty Smiter speech.
  Oh, aye. God. He can take my old man, he can take John Lennon, he can take those three lads down at the Ainsley pit, but Margaret Bloody Thatcher still lives?!
• Austin Powers thinks of her to avoid becoming aroused in International Man of Mystery.
  Austin: Margaret Thatcher naked on a cold day! Margaret Thatcher naked on a cold day!
• Her Iron Lady image is Played for Laughs in the comedy Water, where she is played by Maureen Lipman. Sir Malcolm Leveridge is having to explain to the PM how he let an American company get the sole rights to Cascara's mineral water. Thatcher is opening her mail at the time.
  Sir Malcolm: And we do regret the somewhat disappointing revenue.
  Thatcher: How much?
  Sir Malcolm: Err... one cent per every hundred barrels— (flung letter opener drills into the wall next to his head)
• Faith Brook played a female British Prime Minister in North Sea Hijack, which came out in 1980. It was obviously prompted by real life circumstances, though she doesn't look like Thatcher at all.
• The Ozploitation film Turkey Shoot unsubtly names its dystopian villain Charles Thatcher. The film's original title was even 'Blood Camp Thatcher'.
• Pride (2014) is set during the 1984 miner's strike and details the alliance between a town of striking miners and a group of far left lesbian and gay activists. Although Thatcher only appears in news footage, she is essentially the film's overarching villain and hatred of her policies helps forge a bond between the groups.

Literature

• Caricatured in the picture book The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman by Raymond Briggs. (The General is President Galtieri of Argentinia, the book being a satire on the Falklands War.)
• The early Adrian Mole books were set during Thatcher's regime and thus featured many jabs at her policies. Adrian's diagram of personal relationships at the start of the second book lists her under "Enemies". This went up to eleven in True Confessions of Adrian Mole with a section called "The Secret Diary Of Margaret Hilda Roberts" (Roberts being Mrs. Thatcher's maiden name) which portrayed the titular teenager as an insufferable overachiever with a heavy disdain for the working class and delusions of royalty (going so far as writing letters to royals claiming to be the result of an hypothetical extramarital union, much of which was not dissimilar to the public perception of Thatcher at the time). (This was originally published in the newspaper Today.)
• Harry Potter:
  • As the main page says, both Aunt Marge in Book 3 and Dolores Umbridge are thinly veiled takes on Margaret Thatcher, whom J. K. Rowling had a dislike for. Although given her censorious attitude, Dolores Umbridge is likely also partly based on Mary Whitehouse.
• Ms. Wiz's eighth book 'Power Crazy Ms Wiz' has the eponymous Paranormal Operative taking on Downing Street first to stop Podge being moved schools, and of course going crazy with power. This is coded by her saying the famous Thatcher quote "this lady's not for turning".
• Gets a particularly nasty treatment in The Satanic Verses, in which patrons of the Hot Wax Club melt giant wax effigies of unpopular politicians, including "Maggie the Bitch".
  • And even one character who's a strong supporter of hers affectionately refers to her as "Mrs. Torture".
  • Although it was also noted that Rushdie gives that character a short speech actually defending Thatcher, saying that "What she's trying to do is create a whole new fucking class" of entrepreneurially-minded Britons.
• Kim Newman:
  • The Temps story "Pitbull Brittan" parodies the Thatcher government's handling of the Miners' Strike by depicting it as a battle against a sinister international conspiracy of the type seen in xenophobic pulp adventure stories like Bulldog Drummond. Margaret Thatcher makes several appearances in the story, and something very unpleasant happens to her at the end.
  • The story "The Ibby the Fish Factor", set in the Warhammer universe, refers to the Empire having had an egomaniacal past Empress called Magritta, the Bronze Lady, who was followed by Johann the Grey, who nobody remembers.
  • The Diogenes Club story "You Don't Have To Be Mad..." features a Bedlam House being run as a training ground that turns people into high-functioning sociopaths, the Big Bad believing that madness will be a way of life in The '80s, and his patients will be the leaders. All of the "patients" are notorious figures of the 1980s, identifiable by plays on their initials. "Captain Naughty", for instance, is Thatcher's subordinate Norman Tebbit. The star graduate of the system is a woman known as "Mrs Empty". "Swellhead" implies that the knowledge of Mrs Thatcher's backstory is part of the reason the Diogenes was shut down.
  • "Slow News Day" is set in an Alternate-History Nazi Victory. John Major is Britain's puppet Prime Minister and makes mention of his predecessor the Iron Duchess.
• Several 1990s and 2000s Michael Moorcock works refer in backstory to an evil female Lord of Order named Miggea, who appears in the novel The Dreamthief's Daughter. In the 1990s Jerry Cornelius stories, the elderly, senile and ennobled Miss Brunner became a blatant caricature of Thatcher after her retirement.
• The Big Bad of the Doctor Who Expanded Universe novel Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma is the evil dictator Rehctaht.

Live-Action TV

• Monty Python got in on the act long before she was even PM, with a spectacular Take That! in the sketch "How to Identify Different Parts of the Body"
  (Image shows a shin)
  Cleese: Number Twenty-three: the shin.
  (image shows Reginald Maudling, with an arrow pointing to his shin)
  Cleese: Number Twenty-four: Reginald Maudling's shin.
  (image shows a brain)
  Cleese: Number Twenty-five: the brain.
  (image shows Margaret Thatcher)
  Cleese: Number Twenty-six: Margaret Thatcher's brain.
  (an arrow points 'to her shin; cue tremendous audience applause)
• Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher come in for some ribbing in Coupling.
  Patrick: You know what? We need Maggie back!
• Doctor Who:
  • The concept of a female Leader of the Opposition who could get the premiership was on the writers' minds in the mid-70s. In "The Ark In Space", Harry discovers the leader of Earth in the future is a woman and attempts to score points with Sarah Jane by complimenting her on having a woman 'on top of the totem pole'. Sarah shuts him up with the same kind of frustrated, strained reaction that was common to see amongst left-leaning feminists of the time (who wanted more women in power... but not like that). The Prime Minister in "Terror of the Zygons" (made in 1976, when Thatcher was the leader of the opposition) is clearly supposed to be Thatcher, with the Brigadier referring to her as 'Ma'am' and commenting on his fear of the woman. (Although for some reason, the Expanded Universe decided this was actually then-Labour politician Shirley Williams.)
  • During Sylvester McCoy's tenure, the writers loathed Thatcher and this showed in their scripts. Most blatant was Helen A. in "The Happiness Patrol", an unsubtle Thatcher satire.
• She wrote a sketch herself for Yes, Minister, which she appeared in with the cast.
• In a world in Sliders, an Alternate History Thatcher became The Quisling after Kromags (basically evolved Neandarthals) invaded. After they were successfully repelled, the word "Thatcher" remained synonymous with "selling out your kind"/"collaborating with the enemy". Sliders does have the habit of hitting the British at every chance it makes/gets.
• Season 3's third episode of Ashes to Ashes (2008) depicts the 1983 election, complete with clips of Thatcher and bomb threats against her — after which Alex assures everyone the IRA isn't behind this bombing, since their only attempt failed. The characters also discuss Tory vs. Labour, The Falklands War, and Gene dubs Thatcher "the great handbag". This is rather ironic considering that, in Life On Mars, Gene famously commented "there will never be a woman Prime Minister as long as I have a hole in my arse."
• Maid Marian and Her Merry Men had a house repairer character called 'Margaret The Thatcher'.
• In the opening montage of the Blackadder special Back and Forth, a doctored stock photo shows Thatcher holding her arms aloft in a triumphant pose while an incarnation of Edmund Blackadder reacts to the stink from her armpits.
• On Parks and Recreation, Leslie has this to say about her mother Marlene: "She's a big mucky-muck in the county school system. She's my hero. How do I explain her? She's as respected as Mother Teresa, she's as powerful as Stalin and she's as beautiful as Margaret Thatcher." In a later episode, we learn that Marlene is nicknamed "The Iron <long bleep> of Pawnee".
• A sketch on The Lenny Henry Show parodying Doctor Who had Lenny Henry as the Doctor confronting the big-haired alien dictator Thatchos (and her ineffectual underling Denos).
• The main character in BBC mini-series The Line of Beauty, set in the early to mid-1980s, takes a turn with her.
• Thatcher still manages to make political satire shows. As summed up with this quote from Mock the Week's Frankie Boyle upon being told the projected cost of Thatcher's funeral is £3 million.
  Frankie: For £3 million we could give everyone in Scotland a shovel, and we would dig a hole so deep we could hand her over to Satan personally.
• Insulted, mocked and reviled in every single episode of The Young Ones.
  Rick: Thatcher's Britain! Thatcher's bloody Britain!!
• The first two series of The New Statesman coincided with her final term as PM, so she was at least mentioned in almost every episode. She also was The Ghost in three episodes, with the plots generally revolving around the main character, a Villain Protagonist who was a Straw Character of Tory MPs taken up to eleven, trying to regain her favor after doing something particularly stupid.
  • The first Comic Relief telethon in 1988 had a New Statesman skit featuring Steve Nallon's Mrs T (see below), and ended with Alan, stripped to his union jack boxers, attempting to snog her.
• The Goodies: During their time as Scouts, Bill and Graeme are awarded their "Initiative Badge" for...
  Tim: "Stealing a pair of Margaret Thatcher's bloomers?!"
  • More to the trope is the episode "Politics" with Tim running for Prime Minister as a crossdressing 'Maggie' whose election platform includes "on the glorious twelfth each year, the nice people will be allowed to hold a workers cull (with Bill shown being clubbed like a seal pup as he lays around doing nothing), invoking the death penalty for "people who walk behind the bowlers arm at Lords" (as Bill detonates in a huge explosion for doing just that), abolishing the National Health Service so that "people will be encouraged to save doctors' time and money by treating themselves" (with Bill shown sawing his leg off, stuffing it into a bin and then promptly fainting at the sight of the grisly aftermath!) and treating union officials as "naughty schoolboys" that deserve a good spanking. In the end England gets the real Margaret Thatcher as a booby prize.
• Following Thatcher's death, Saturday Night Live paid tribute of sorts with a Mockumentary bit about Ian Rubbish, a perfectly stereotypical British punk rocker whose songs trashed everything that was wrong with late 1970s-early 1980s Britain except for one thing...he absolutely loved Margaret Thatcher. It's recounted how Ian, much to the bewilderment of his own bandmates, wrote songs praising Thatcher, even as his other songs attacked the police, the Queen, and the monarchy in general. The reason why Ian didn't trash Margaret Thatcher: she reminded him of his mother and Thatcher found solace in his music when she was kicked out of office. See it here.
• In A Bit of Fry and Laurie sketch, Stephen Fry reads a Strongly Worded Letter about how they criticize everything but never offer an alternative:
  Stephen: "It's oh so simple, for instance, to knock Mrs Thatcher, isn't it? But what are you suggesting should go in the place of the institutions and people you so viciously decry?" Well of course he's absolutely right. It's ludicrously easy to knock Mrs. Thatcher, isn't it? It's the simplest, easiest and most obvious thing in the world to remark that she's a shameful, putrid scab, an embarrassing, ludicrous monstrosity that makes one frankly ashamed to be British and that her ideas and standards are a stain on our national history. That's easy, anyone can see that. Nothing difficult about that. But after tonight, no one can accuse us of failing to come up with something to take her place. Hugh.
  (Hugh holds up a coat hanger.)
• During Britain's Mad Cow Disease scare, Australian skit show Full Frontal parodied a contemporary lamb ad with a skit portraying a butcher selling British beef. After the customer fails to grasp this via a Union Jack and a picture of the Queen, the shopkeeper puts a picture of Margaret Thatcher on it, and he gets the "mad cow" message.
• The Comic Strip Presents produced GLC which was supposed to be how a Hollywood film might portray the fall of the Greater London Council. Jennifer Saunders played Brigitte Nielsen playing Margaret Thatcher as a murderous cyborg.
• House of Cards does not actually show Thatcher, but its triggering event is her decision to retire. By a remarkable coincidence, the first episode aired a mere four days before she was actually forced to resign (the episode aired 18 November 1990; she was forced to announce her resignation 22 November, and left office six days later).
• One Hundred Greatest Britons: Thatcher was elected at #16, the highest living Briton at time of broadcast (2002).
• Steve Nallon, the voice of Spitting Image's Thatcher, developed his characterisation into a "Mrs T" drag act which appeared on various satire shows throughout her premiership, and beyond. Last seen in the 2003 The Weakest Link "1980s Special".
• In the television adaptation of The Line of Beauty, Nick, drunk and high, invites Thatcher to dance with him at a party.
• In Psychobitches, she is portrayed by Michelle Gomez in a Whole-Plot Reference to the interrogation scene from The Silence of the Lambs, in which she rants chillingly about "the socialist shitarse".
• Thatcher is a major character in series 4 of The Crown, which takes place during her premiership. She's portrayed by Gillian Anderson.

Music

• Thatcher holds the "interesting" distinction of being the political figure with the most pop songs celebrating her death written while she was still alive.
• Frequently criticized by the 2 Tone Ska revival. Jerry Dammers of The Specials wrote the band's last hit Ghost Town as an attack on her economic policies and Dave Wakeling of The Beat (who was from a working class background and believed that the PM was denying her similar upbringing and pretending to be something she wasn't) covered the Prince Buster song Whine and Grine with the addition of a refrain of "Stand down Margaret/Stand down please,/Stand down Margaret". The Specials' cover of Bob Dylan's "Maggie's Farm" also had some definite associations.^note Thatcher was a Parliamentarian when Dylan's original came out in 1965.
• Pink Floyd's Roger Waters is a vocal critic of Thatcher, and the band's 1983 album The Final Cut was his response to The Falklands War; among other things, "The Fletcher Memorial Home" names Thatcher as one of many "incurable tyrants and kings" who ought to be interred at the titular asylum. After going solo in 1984, he replaced the reference to British censor Mary Whitehouse in "Pigs (Three Different Ones)" (from 1977's Animals) with Thatcher.
• And then there is Morrissey's "Margaret on the Guillotine"...
• French singer Renaud wrote a song ("Miss Maggie") where he expressed how men were violent, vulgar and stupidly proud, and finishing each verse by stating how no woman would lower herself to such a behavior, "à part bien sûr Mme Thatcher" ("except of course Mrs. Thatcher"). He finished by saying that after his death, rather than going to a Hell full of stupid men, he would rather stay on Earth as a dog, provided he could use Margaret Thatcher as a street lamp to pee on. The song notably opens and concludes with the eight first notes of the Westminster Chimes.
• Elvis Costello wrote a song on his 1989 album Spike, titled "Tramp the Dirt Down", which explains how he would like to do as much to "Maggie" when she dies.
• Frank Turner, being the punk he is, wrote the bluntly-titled "Thatcher Fucked The Kids".
• Even Turner is probably topped for bluntness by the Exploited's enchantingly nasty "Maggie You Cunt".
• In another frank statement of opinion, the notorious cover of Iron Maiden's single "Sanctuary" showed the band's undead Metal Band Mascot "Eddie" standing over a dead Thatcher with a bloody dagger in his hand. Thatcher got her revenge on the cover of the band's next single "Women in Uniform" which depicted her preparing to ambush Eddie with a Sterling submachine gun.
• Somewhat less crude is Tears for Fears' "Sowing the Seeds of Love", which encourages Britons to kick out the "Politician granny with [her] high ideals" and accuses her of "smashing any hope of democracy."
• On a more positive note, the punk rock band Notsensibles released "I'm in Love With Margaret Thatcher", a somewhat tongue-in-cheek song. It charted at number 35 following Thatcher's death, and lead singer Michael Hargreaves claimed to have a "great reverence for Thatcher".

Print Media

• Private Eye's prime ministerial parody was The Dear Bill Letters, in which Thatcher's husband Denis (presented, not entirely inaccurately, as something of a drinker) wrote letters on topical subjects to ancient Telegraph correspondent Bill Deedes.
  • This led to a stage play and (separately) to a ZX Spectrum text adventure game, Denis Through the Drinking Glass.
  • They also had at least two comic strips in which she featured: Battle for Britain, where "Herr Thachler" was a Rommel caricature commanding the Tories as stand-ins for the Nazi Afrika Corps in the North African Front of World War II (while Labour were the British Desert Rats), and Dan Dire: Pilot of the Future?, a Dan Dare parody with Neil Kinnock as the title character and Thatcher as 'the Maggon', standing in for Dare's enemy the Mekon.
  • Later prime ministerial parodies would also mention her; in St Albion's Parish News, the Reverend Blair would occasionally invoke Deaconess Thatcher as someone he disagreed with on a lot of points but who nonetheless knew how to get her message across. And a Running Gag early in St Theresa's Grammar School Newsletter was Mrs May demurring comparisons to "a former headmistress" that it was clear nobody except her had ever made.

Puppet Shows

• She appears regularly (and highly derisively) in the British puppet satire series Spitting Image where she was depicted as a cross-dressing, cigar smoking tyrant (who used the urinals along with the men, no less) who hated the French, despised the poor and ruled her party with an iron fist. Contrary to expectations it has been suggested that Thatcher's depiction in the show actually helped her real-life image as someone not to be messed with. It is also generally accepted that the show's quality dipped when Thatcher resigned and John Major, who was seen as far less interesting, came to power. Thatcher's contempt for everyone around her was best shown in this classic sketch involves her ordering a raw steak at a dinner with her Cabinet:
  Waiter: What about the vegetables?
  Thatcher: Oh, they'll have the same as me.

Radio

• The BBC Radio 4 sitcom Little-Blighty-on-the-Down was set in a fictional town that was a microcosm of British politics at the time (1988-1992). For the first three seasons the parish council leader was Mrs Roberts, played by Jo Kendell. (In season four she was replaced by John Barnum.)

Tabletop Games

• You Are Maggie Thatcher is a roleplaying game where you have to win the election in bizarre and hilarious manners.
• Diana: Warrior Princess is a roleplaying game about a future holo-vision show full of Future Imperfect. As a result, it has Princess Diana and Toni the Vampire Slayer going up against the sorceress Thatcher and the war god Landmines.
• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay gives the reign of "Empress Magraritha" as the nadir in the Empire's history; she was elected in the Imperial Calendar's year of 1979.
• Warhammer 40,000: Some fans believe the ork warlord Ghazgkull Mag Uruk Thraka (best known for ravaging the industrial planet of Armageddon) is a Take That! to Thatcher. A former game designer Andy Chambers◊, however, said that the name just came out putting together bits of Black Speech from Tolkien's works to create a name to the effect of "big orc leader, metal skull" that was used for live roleplaying.

Theatre

• The opening of the second act of Billy Elliot is a song called "Merry Christmas, Maggie Thatcher", an upbeat tune with lyrics celebrating that Christmas is "one day closer to [her] death." Not to mention that poor government policy is the whole reason the town's miners are on strike. Some performances even feature a giant, puppeteer-esque INFLATABLE Maggie Thatcher◊ looming over the stage/audience like a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon from Hell.
• Even the Dead Parrot Sketch wasn't immune to Thatcher.
• Thatcher appears as a character in the Doctor Who stage play (yes) "The Ultimate Adventure".
• Thatcher is one of the several Prime Ministers of Elizabeth II to appear in The Audience, although surprisingly enough given her tenure (she is the longest-serving of Her Majesty's PMs) and her notoriety, her role is not as large as that of several other PMs. (Still, she'd be pleased to know her former boss and eternal rival Edward Heath has never appeared in any staging of the play.)
• Dead Sheep is centred on the breakdown of Thatcher's working relationship with Geoffrey Howe, leading up to the resignation speech that ended her government.

Video Games

• The Doom II mod Thatcher's Techbase depicts Thatcher coming back from the dead as a demon (in fact, the cover art outright has her take the Cyberdemon's place, cybernetic augments and all!), requiring Doomguy to travel to the United Kingdom in order to take her down.
• Grand Theft Auto:
  • She's referenced during a cutscene in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. While CJ is talking to Mike Toreno, in the background we see that Kent Paul has locked Maccer in a recording studio, refusing to let him out until he gets over his addiction to masturbation. As a suggestion, Kent tells him to think of Thatcher. Doesn't work.
  • During an radio interview in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, the Straw Feminist character mistakenly names Thatcher alongside Reagan and Gorbachev while ranting about how everything was being run by men.
  • During Vice City Stories, one of the DJs on Wave 103 (the New Wave station), Trish Camden, mentions Thatcher pejoratively. Adam First, her co-worker, comes off in contrast as very much a Thatcherite.
• Wanted: Monty Mole was based on the infamous Miners' Strike against Thatcher's policies that lead to the destruction of several British industries.
• In The New Order Last Days Of Europe, an Alternate-History Nazi Victory mod for Hearts of Iron IV, Margaret Thatcher acts as a politician in the Nazi Collaborationist Kingdom of England and as a potential Prime Minister after the English Civil War. Her tenure as a Prime Minister is charaterized by creeping authoritarianism and commitment to Realpolitik, especially in relationship with the recovering Nazi Germany.
• In the computer version of Nuclear War, she is "P.M. Satcher".
• Thatcher appears in Tropico 4 under the name "Brunhilde Van Hoof" but the head shot is very clearly meant to be her. Funnily enough she's thought to be Dutch in game and is a representative of the UN rather than being tied to the UK.

Web Comics

• Erf World has a Captain Ersatz of Mrs Thatcher as one of its more important side characters — she's affectionately known as "Maggie" and is actually one of the more likable people in the cast.
• Subnormality casts Thatcher as a literal monster who loves two things; nuclear weapons and Ronald Reagan.

Web Original

• Tends to show up in a lot of Alternate History stories set in the 1970s and the 1980s.
  • In the famously dystopian What if Gordon Banks Had Played? timeline, Thatcher is Home Secretary in the cabinet of PM Enoch Powell and is put on trial for human rights abuses in the prison camps in Northern Ireland after Powell's government falls.
  • She also appears in Fear, Loathing and Gumbo on the Campaign Trail '72, this time as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. Once more, she is shown implementing authoritarian anti-terror measures against the PIRA. However, Edward Heath gives her this job because he hopes it will break her.
  • Thaxted imagines what might have happened if a young Margaret Hilda Roberts had become a Marxist instead of a Conservative.
  • A Greater Britain is more concerned with the first half of the 20th century, but Margaret Thatcher appears in an epilogue — as a member of the Labour Party.
• In Half in the Bag's review of The Devil Inside and Flyin' Ryan, there's a bit where Mike and Jay push Mr. Plinkett, dressed in an American flag-colored windbreaker, off a bridge. At the end, it's revealed that the two had actually killed Thatcher, who had been on a good-will tour to the States (the jacket was a present from Bill Clinton).

Western Animation

• Gains mention during an episode of Family Guy. Discussing what woman they'd most want if they weren't married, Cleveland answers with Thatcher. Peter, Joe, and Quagmire are instantly revolted, leading to this quote from Cleveland.
  Cleveland: So no one here thinks power is sexy? Not one of you finds power sexy?
• On the American Dad! episode "I Can't Stan You"^note where Stan evacuates everyone in the neighborhood after hearing them talk about how much of a loser he is, one of the objects in the CIA contraband room is a robot version of Margaret Thatcher.

---