Zille zeitgeist?

“Premier appoints all male cabinet”, “All male cabinet is a betrayal of women” ranted the headlines in May. I am writing, of course, of the headlines in Britain’s newspapers when Margaret Hilda Thatcher, a grocer’s daughter, appointed an all-male cabinet thirty-years-ago. When Helen Zille was to do exactly the same in May of this year, her caricature as South Africa’s Margaret Thatcher was crystallised. Despite my dislike of lazy caricatures, the similarities between the trajectories of the two women’s careers and personalities are striking. Both women cut their teeth in education portfolios. Thatcher was the only female member of Edward Heath’s cabinet in the early 1970s, but few then saw a future leader in the stars. But I remember Tony Leon, in January 2000, showing me a copy of Leadership with a picture of the Western Cape’s highly-regarded education minister (without any aside). It was the first publication, I recall, in which Zille was mooted as a possible future leadership contender of the then Democratic Party.

Thatcher, like Zille, got great political capital from being a woman. Her femininity in a television interview she gave me in 2002 took me by surprise. “My good side,” she cooed, indicating which angle of her face she wanted to be filmed from. In an age of image, Thatcher was shrewd enough to embark on a self-enhancement programme that no male contemporary could have undertaken. At the behest of her style guru, Gordon Reece, whose clients included the evangelist Billy Graham, her hair was restyled, her voice lowered to a husky baritone and her wardrobe revamped. Mrs Thatcher was the first British celebrity politician groomed for a television age. Britannia in sharp tailoring, she was at her best among handsome men in uniform, and preferably on a battle tank, rather than, say, with Princess Diana or the Women’s Institute.

Zille, despite her protestations, understands the power of female visual imagery too. Her election pictures this year showed a wrinkle-free Botoxed peachy complexion, highlighted and coiffed blonde hair and a bleached white half-smile. Her primary colour threads may not be those of the Parisian or Milanese catwalks, but I am told, by a respectable journalist, that the ladies from Mitchells Plain to the Afrikaner platteland love them. She dresses like they would for special occasions. Then there is the style of leadership. One of her former staff members told me a few weeks ago of when Zille was recently due to visit a sandwich-making factory. The media rocked up to find Zille’s car outside, but no premier. Their enquiry of the leaderane’s whereabouts revealed that she had been in the factory for over an hour making sandwiches at a breakneck pace. I smiled at the retro image. There are countless photographs of an overall clad Thatcher on factory assembly lines making sandwiches or piping cakes as if she was born to it. A Tony Blair or a Tony Leon could never pull it off. Imagine either of them: “Would you like some rocket or basil with your cheese and tomato?”

Like Thatcher, Zille has also been seen hectoring young people to clean their litter up and berating messy neighbourhoods. In a sense, they both relish living up to their caricatures of the school headmistress. After all, why start confusing the electorate now? In interviews, Zille, like Thatcher used to, draws special attention to her solid marriage. Both praise their husband’s intellects and primary role as chief sounding boards. For Thatcher, the late Denis was “the golden thread” which ran through her life. In turn, Denis, when his wife was prime minister, like Professor Johann Maree now, to the best of my knowledge, never gave one media interview about his spouse. What about the two female politicians’ differences? The differences, as always in life, are more interesting. Shortly after becoming premier, Zille, I believe, made her biggest mistake yet. Thatcher would never have made the post-election statement that President Jacob Zuma is “a self-confessed womaniser with deeply sexist views, who put all his wives at risk by having unprotected sex with an HIV-positive woman”. Not because it was factually wrong, but because she always, to devastating effect, played the ball, and never the person. Nor would she have so badly misread the national mood. Thatcher never, for example, pronounced on the tribulations of the Liberal leader, Jeremy Thorpe, when he was on trial for the attempted murder of his homosexual lover.*

Thatcher, I also think had something else that Zille does not have yet, but she might still acquire: an unerring sense of certitude. Thatcher defined the zeitgeist. She grabbed her epoch with both hands and stamped her authority all over it. In the first few pages of her memoir The Downing Street Years, she writes that she felt that only she could change the course of British history and reverse the nation’s post-war decline. Zille, by contrast, says she is willing to hand over the baton to someone else if she feel thinks they might be more able to lead a united opposition force.

Such an idea would never have occurred to Thatcher. As Thatcher famously captured Britain’s C2s (the traditionally Labour conservative working-class vote) with Saatchi & Saatchi’s brilliant slogan Labour isn’t working, the Conservative party’s 1978 poster of a snaking line of people queuing for the unemployment office; the challenge for Zille today is to find a simple, but irresistible, narrative that speaks to all South Africans. It is what Robert Kennedy, speaking at UCT, described when speaking of the nature of youth, as a “quality of the imagination”. Thatcher’s narrative was a rhetorical synthesis of freedom, authority, individualism, common decency, respectability with a dash of patriotism. It is only within the realm of these ideas that her often disjointed policy programme of free markets, financial discipline, tight control over public expenditure, tax cuts, nationalism, “Victorian values” (of the self-help and self-reliant variety) and privatisation, can be understood. Zille’s task is to draw her movement’s disparate strands and obvious popularity together into one storyline. It the hardest of enterprises, perhaps not possible here, and it represents the difference between if Zille will be a significant or, like Thatcher, a towering figure of history.

*In a fascinating historical cross-current, Harold Wilson believed that the allegations were orchestrated by South Africa because of Thorpe’s opposition to apartheid, and was part of an attempt to destroy the Labour government — paranoia is not the exclusive preserve of the South African political-class).

This blog is the English translation of my article which was published in Rapport on October 25 2009. I promise not to write on Zille or Thatcher again this year, well, barring … !