President Ronald Reagan welcomes Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher before their meetings at Camp David, 15 November 1986. Photograph: White House Photographic Office / National Archives and Records Administration. Public domain (U.S.).
By Beatrice Loxley
There are handbags, and then there are handbags that acquire a life beyond their original purpose. Margaret Thatcher's handbag was one of them. Long before the word “handbagging” entered the political vocabulary, the handbag itself had become part of the visual language of Thatcherism: structured, expensive, practical and carried with the particular firmness of someone who had no intention of being kept waiting.
The image is now so familiar that it is easy to overlook how unusual it was. British political life had always had its objects of recognition. Churchill had his cigar, Harold Wilson his pipe, Macmillan his hat. These things became part of the character of the politician. Thatcher's equivalent was a handbag, an object which might ordinarily have belonged to the world of shopping, social engagements and domestic life rather than Cabinet meetings and international diplomacy. Yet there it was, resting beside her at the Cabinet table, accompanying her into Downing Street and appearing in photographs from some of the most consequential years of late twentieth-century British politics.
It is worth remembering that Thatcher did not become less feminine as she became more powerful. She did almost the opposite. The suits, pearls, immaculate hair and carefully chosen accessories were part of an image that was recognisably feminine while being designed to withstand an overwhelmingly male political environment. The handbag belonged to this same language. It was not an attempt to disguise her femininity, but to make it entirely compatible with authority.
This is where fashion becomes rather more interesting than we sometimes allow it to be. A politician's clothes are often dismissed as superficial, particularly when the politician is a woman. Yet nobody would suggest that Churchill's hat or cigar was irrelevant to his public image. We understand instinctively that objects can become symbols of power. Thatcher's handbag simply happened to be one of them, and because it was a woman's accessory it became a source of jokes as well as fascination.
The joke eventually became “to handbag” someone: to deal with them forcefully, relentlessly and without much patience for opposition. It was an unusually successful piece of political slang because it captured something recognisable about Thatcher's manner while reducing it to an object everyone understood. The handbag became shorthand for a woman who could enter a room full of men and make it clear that she intended to run the meeting.
There is something rather pleasing, too, about the fact that the handbag associated with Thatcher was not some deliberately futuristic piece of design. It belonged to the tradition of good British leather goods: sturdy, polished and made to last. The great irony of modern fashion is that we are forever searching for objects that look timeless, while the most convincing examples of timelessness tend to be things that were never designed to be fashionable in the first place.
Thatcher understood the usefulness of this kind of permanence. Her clothes were rarely experimental for the sake of it. They were consistent, recognisable and carefully controlled. She understood that a woman in public life was being read visually before she had spoken, and she used that fact rather more effectively than many of her critics appreciated. The handbag was not the source of her authority, of course, but it became one of the ways in which that authority was communicated.
It is tempting to regard the whole thing as a curiosity of another age, particularly now that political wardrobes have become considerably more casual. Yet the principle has not disappeared. We still read meaning into what politicians wear; we simply like to pretend that we don't. A particular colour, a particular tie, a pair of shoes or a particular designer can generate days of commentary. The difference is that Thatcher understood the game rather openly.
Perhaps that is why the handbag remains such a memorable political object. It was useful, unmistakably feminine, perfectly respectable and just a little formidable. It belonged in the drawing room, but it was perfectly capable of entering the Cabinet room. Margaret Thatcher did not need the handbag to make her powerful. She simply understood that, in politics as in almost everything else, it helps to arrive looking as though you mean business.