Parodic Reiterations: Representations of Margaret Thatcher and Thatcherism in Late Twentieth-Century British Political Cartoons

Abstract

The reoccurrence of Margaret Thatcher’s image and memory through single-frame political cartoons in the years surrounding the 1997 General Election signaled that in addition to the immediate question of leadership to be decided between John Major and Tony Blair, the election was also about the unresolved legacies of Thatcher and Thatcherism. Given the tendency of political cartoonists to portray the Conservative and Labour parties “only through their most recent leaders and supporters” (Mumford 2001, p. xi), political cartoons that gloss over Major (and Major’s successor William Hague) reflect Thatcher’s domination of the late twentieth-century political landscape despite her departure from political office. Depictions of Thatcher in relation to Blair by political cartoonists in both liberal and conservative dailies, in this respect, can be read as symptomatic of widespread anxieties regarding the continuation of Thatcherism in the late 1990s. Rather than setting Thatcher and Blair in opposition to each other as might be expected, however, Peter Brookes and Michael Cummings of the Times and Peter Schrank and Dave Brown of the Independent, for example, tend to efface differences between the politicians and, in doing so, treat Blair as either a repetition or parody of Thatcher.¹