Turns out Morrissey’s statement published on April 8, after Margaret Thatcher’s death, by the Daily Beast was not a post-mortem one, but dated back to when Ms. Thatcher was still alive. Nevertheless Morrissey has something to say about the ex-Prime Minister’s death, and did it on April 9 releasing a statement to the fan site True to You.

Apparently, Morrissey’s feelings did not change much. In this new comment about Margaret Thatcher’s death, the former frontman of The Smiths also addressed past and current British politics, as well as the media scene. About the dead politician he says “Thatcher was not a strong or formidable leader. She simply did not give a shit about people.” Read the full statement as follows:

“The difficulty with giving a comment on Margaret Thatcher’s death to the British tabloids is that, no matter how calmly and measured you speak, the comment must be reported as an “outburst” or an ”explosive attack” if your view is not pro-establishment.

If you reference “the Malvinas”, it will be switched to “the Falklands”, and your “Thatcher” will be softened to a “Maggie.” This is generally how things are structured in a non-democratic society. Thatcher’s name must be protected not because of all the wrong that she had done, but because the people around her allowed her to do it, and therefore any criticism of Thatcher throws a dangerously absurd light on the entire machinery of British politics.

Thatcher was not a strong or formidable leader. She simply did not give a shit about people, and this coarseness has been neatly transformed into bravery by the British press who are attempting to re-write history in order to protect patriotism. As a result, any opposing view is stifled or ridiculed, whereas we must all endure the obligatory praise for Thatcher from David Cameron without any suggestion from the BBC that his praise just might be an outburst of pro-Thatcher extremism  from someone whose praise might possibly protect his own current interests.

The fact that Thatcher ignited the British public into street-riots, violent demonstrations and a social disorder previously unseen in British history is completely ignored by David Cameron in 2013. In truth, of course, no British politician has ever been more despised by the British people than Margaret Thatcher.

Thatcher’s funeral on Wednesday will be heavily policed for fear that the British tax-payer will want to finally express their view of Thatcher. They are certain to be tear-gassed out of sight by the police.

United Kingdom? Syria? China? What’s the difference?”

Morrissey
9 April 2013

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On the day the ex-Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Margaret Thatcher, passed away, one of the music icons known for opposing the ideology of the British politician reacted with strong feelings. In an open letter written on the occasion of the politician’s death, English singer Morrissey defined Thatcher’s personality traits as completely negative, and the Lady herself as “a terror without an atom of humanity.” Morrissey also pointed out a relevant concern about females in politics “because of Thatcher, there will never again be another woman in power in British politics” he says. Here is the complete open letter published by The Daily Beast on April 8.

Thatcher is remembered as The Iron Lady only because she possessed completely negative traits such as persistent stubbornness and a determined refusal to listen to others.

Every move she made was charged by negativity; she destroyed the British manufacturing industry, she hated the miners, she hated the arts, she hated the Irish Freedom Fighters and allowed them to die, she hated the English poor and did nothing at all to help them, she hated Greenpeace and environmental protectionists, she was the only European political leader who opposed a ban on the Ivory Trade, she had no wit and no warmth and even her own Cabinet booted her out. She gave the order to blow up The Belgrano even though it was outside of the Malvinas Exclusion Zone – and was sailing AWAY from the islands! When the young Argentinean boys aboard The Belgrano had suffered a most appalling and unjust death, Thatcher gave the thumbs up sign for the British press.

Iron? No. Barbaric? Yes. She hated feminists even though it was largely due to the progression of the women’s movement that the British people allowed themselves to accept that a Prime Minister could actually be female. But because of Thatcher, there will never again be another woman in power in British politics, and rather than opening that particular door for other women, she closed it.

Thatcher will only be fondly remembered by sentimentalists who did not suffer under her leadership, but the majority of British working people have forgotten her already, and the people of Argentina will be celebrating her death. As a matter of recorded fact, Thatcher was a terror without an atom of humanity.

MORRISSEY.

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When I first heard that they were making a movie about Margaret Thatcher, I was worried. Even though it has been more than 20 years since she stepped down as Prime Minister, she remains a hugely controversial figure. To the right, she is a goddess; the woman who almost single-handedly put the ‘Great’ back in Great Britain and turned back the tide of socialism.

To the left, she is a demon; the woman who brutalized striking miners and drove the country to riot over the unpopular poll tax. I was afraid that ‘The Iron Lady’ would portray her as one of those two caricatures. Although that was not the case, the film ultimately proved to be something of a disappointment.

The Iron Lady begins in the present day, as a frail Margaret Thatcher (Meryl Streep) goes to buy a pint of milk. When she returns home, she proceeds to sit down to breakfast with her husband, Denis (Jim Broadbent). They talk and joke, but it soon becomes clear that all is not as it seems.

When one of Thatcher’s caretakers enters the kitchen, we are shown a POV shot from her perspective, which reveals that Thatcher is actually sitting alone. Throughout the rest of the film, Thatcher will interact with her dead husband, and although her caretakers believe this is a side-effect of her dementia, it is strongly implied that this is actually a conscious coping mechanism Thatcher has created to deal with her grief.

Thatcher starts to reminisce about her past, and we see her memories in the form of flashbacks. At first, they are merely a disconnected series of vignettes, but they eventually run together and form a continuous narrative. We watch as a young middle-class grocer’s daughter tries to break into the aristocratic, male-dominated Tory party.

When she eventually wins a seat in Parliament, we see her struggle to fit in as one of the few female MPs. Eventually, she gains her footing, and rises from Secretary of State for Education to Leader of the Conservative Party to Prime Minister. Along the way, she is motivated by an apparently earnest desire to “do something” and change Britain for the better. But her passion turns to dogmatism, and her relationship with her Cabinet, and the British people, steadily deteriorate.

The intertwining of these two storylines, past and present, could make for incredibly compelling cinema, but in this case, it falls flat. The political storyline is probably the weaker of the two. Because it is told as a series of flashbacks, it never really develops into a satisfying narrative.

Instead, we see a series of vignettes: Thatcher on the steps of Number 10 Downing Street after winning her first term as Prime Minister, Thatcher deciding to go to war over the Falkland Islands, Thatcher humiliating her deputy, Geoffrey Howe (Anthony Head) and causing a chain of events that leads to her own downfall. But these episodes are often presented without context, which greatly lessens their impact.

The most striking example of this is the scene where Thatcher’s close friend Airey Neave (Nicholas Farrell) is killed by a car bomb. Because the two of them only shared a few scenes together, the emotional impact of his sudden death is greatly diminished. The scenes with Geoffrey Howe are also curiously bland. His resignation would have been much more powerful if the viewer had realized that he had been in Thatcher’s Cabinet since the very beginning, and had been one of her most trusted lieutenants.

The film does deserve praise for its even-handed treatment of Thatcher’s politics. She is portrayed as neither the savior-goddess of the right or the vicious harridan of the left. It would have been easy to resort to caricature, but The Iron Lady does a nice job of emphasizing Thatcher’s humanity in both storylines.

Meryl Streep definitely deserves praise for her performance as Thatcher. She has done an excellent job of copying Thatcher’s voice, a feat made even more incredible by the fact that Streep is not a British actress. The makeup department was similarly adept at making her look like Thatcher.

Streep’s performance has garnered her an Oscar nomination, and it’s richly deserved. Jim Broadbent also did a fine job portraying Denis Thatcher. He captures Denis’ bombast and irreverence quite well. Anthony Head is sadly underutilized though. He deserved a much bigger role.

The Iron Lady could have been an excellent film had it focused on either Thatcher’s political story, or her personal struggles as she copes with old age and the loss of her husband. But by trying to do both, it bites off more than it can chew.

OVERALL GRADE: B

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Are you simply born to be charismatic, or is it a learnable skill – as Meryl Streep showed the world this past weekend in the nationwide release of the movie “The Iron Lady” in which she portrayed Margaret Thatcher, who transformed herself from a smart woman with little presence into a powerhouse of a Prime Minister by changing her voice, her style and her way of carrying herself.

“Charisma is a learnable skill, not simply a gift for the favored few, and is a way of focusing your behavior and attitude for greatest impact and connection. Charisma is also what separates the merely competent from the supremely capable,” says Cynthia Burnham, America’s #1 Charisma Coach, and author of ”The Charisma Edge: A How-To Guide For Turning on Your Leadership Power”. “Margaret Thatcher did it, and so can leaders and managers in companies.”

Ms. Burnham’s step-by-step system on how to be charismatic is based on 30 years of successful business experience with corporations including SVP for the Wall Street firm UBS, and various senior positions with Gillette and Duracell, as well as independent executive presence coaching and training for Sony, Booz Allen Hamilton, Northrop Grumman, Illumina and others.

This system shows how anyone can become more authentically compelling and powerful by using “nine levers of charisma,” including such things as voice, word choice, posture, and gestures, and how you can use them to look, act and become more charismatic, all based on natural human wiring and the neuroscience of confidence.

Among the powerful first impression tips she provides in her consulting, speaking and in her book are:

• Reduce extraneous nodding. Nod decisively, or not at all. Stillness is powerful.
• End your words. Put the final consonants back on your words. Most Americans drop them, which makes their speech sloppier and less compelling.
• Lower your pitch. Low voices for both men and women are considered stronger, wiser and more believable (and also sexier).
• Pause three seconds for dignity. Wait before answering any question – from “What do you want for lunch?” to “Will you accept [e.g. three times your normal rate]” to “Will you marry me?” Waiting makes you appear more thoughtful, and also gives your brain time to formulate a powerful response.

Burnham’s coaching services will help people who want to be seen as powerful leaders who have executive presence, including:

• Corporate executives (and high-potentials) who want to move to the next level
• Leaders who want to have a bigger “voice” and a greater impact
• Leaders & managers who are great technicians but are dead in the water when it comes to being inspirational
• Leaders who want to know how to stand in front of the room and be dynamic, compelling, and unafraid
• Individuals who want to make a powerful first impression for networking or internal/external career path reasons
• Women who are struggling to be heard

Ms. Burnham will be speaking in public and private events about executive presence and the power of charisma.  Public events include:

• Speaker, January 19th, Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association of Southern California, Brandman University, Irvine, CA.
• Group sessions facilitator, February 2nd, Executive Next Practices Institute “Valued Leader” Branding Summit, Brandman University, Irvine, CA.
• Book Signing, March 18th, “Weekends With Locals,” Warwick’s Books, La Jolla CA
• Speaker, March 21st, Women In Defense San Diego Symposium, Coronado, CA
• Guest lecturer, April 30th, Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, UCSD, La Jolla, CA

“When you know how to be charismatic, people want to listen to you and follow you. They say ‘Yes, I could work for her. She has a larger vision that I want to be part of,” said Burnham, who had been Senior Vice President, Director of Employee Relations & Development for UBS, the global financial services firm.

“Margaret Thatcher wasn’t always charming and she was called bossy, but she was a woman who was able to get people to follow her when there were extremely few women in power or in government. That’s charisma.”

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The Iron Lady, a movie directed by Phyllida Lloyd was released last week; it stars Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher, England’s first and only female prime minister. The Iron Lady is the first feature film about the former prime minister, where she is depicted as an old lonely woman with dementia, reminiscing on past experiences while having imaginary conversations with her late husband and businessman, Dennis Thatcher, portrayed by Jim Broadbent.

Thatcher earned the nickname the “Iron Lady” due to her strict conservative policies and opposition to the Soviet Union. However, instead of focusing on her political career, the filmmakers focused more on her personal life, saying that they never meant to make a film biography about politics. According to Jill Serjeant from Reuters, British director Phyllida Lloyd and screenwriter Abi Morgan mainly “relied on her published memoirs, input from 1980s politicians, and hours of TV footage and speeches” in order to represent her as a regular woman who rose to great power only to lose it in 1990, “after losing the support of her cabinet.”

As a response to the biopic, Rob Wilson, a Conservative legislator said, “I just wonder why the filmmakers had to go so heavily on the mental illness, the dementia side, when Baroness Thatcher has had a very important life in the politics of this country and the world.” Norman Tebbit, a government minister under Thatcher, also criticized the film, saying, Thatcher was not like the “half-hysterical, overemotional, overacting woman portrayed by Meryl Streep.”

The Iron Lady begins with a frail Thatcher wandering unrecognized into a small grocery store to buy some milk. The former prime minister occasionally goes down memory lane, where she sees herself as a young girl sheltering under a table at her father’s grocery store; the biopic always returns to Thatcher in the present.

One of the most painful scenes was when her daughter Carol sat by her bed and told her that her husband was dead, her son, Mark was in South Africa and that she was no longer the prime minister. The film focuses on Thatcher’s human side, where she remembers events of the past and forgets those that are very recent. The elderly Thatcher evokes sympathy that a lot of people may relate to with their own mothers.

According to The Telegraph, a friend of Thatcher’s family said “Sir Mark and Carol are appalled at what they have learnt about the film; they think it sounds like some Left-wing fantasy. They feel strongly about it, but will not speak publicly for fear of giving it more publicity.”

StarTribune reported that Lloyd discards the criticisms, though, she says she is not shocked by them. “It is a Shakespearean story about power and loss, and the cost of a huge life, and letting go” Lloyd told Reuters. According to the Los Angeles times, the director also said, “The Iron Lady is not a political film, except it’s political in wanting to put an old lady at the center of it.”

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