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It’s the season for political cross-dressing

— PHOTO: AFP

Lady Thatcher and Prime Minister Gordon Brown outside 10 Downing Street on September 13.

We’re all familiar with the idea of strange bedfellows in politics. But political cross-dressers? They are a new breed, and if you haven’t heard of them welcome to Britain where, suddenly, they are all the rage. The once-staid British politics has broken out into a rash of some very curious cross-dressing and, as one commentator put it, we have a situation where “Gordo loves Maggie; Dave loves Tony, and everyone loves Ming.”

For those not on first-name terms with British politicians, “Gordo” is Prime Minister Gordon Brown; “Maggie,” Margaret Thatcher the controversial former Tory Prime Minister; “Dave,” David Cameron the current Tory leader; and “Ming,” Menzies Campbell, who leads the Liberal Democrats.

The strangest political spectacle of recent weeks has been Mr. Brown heaping praise on Lady Thatcher — once regarded as the Labour Party’s nemesis — and laying out the red carpet for her in Downing Street. Mr. Brown caused a flutter when he invited Lady Thatcher to tea two weeks ago — only days after hailing her as a “conviction politician” and proudly declaring that “I’m a conviction politician like her.”

The sight of Mr. Brown and his wife, Sarah, looking in thrall of Lady Thatcher as they welcomed her to No 10 infuriated Mr. Brown’s more old-fashioned Labour colleagues, especially on the Left who still break out in sweat when they recall the Thatcher era.

Photographs of the beaming Browns, leading Lady Thatcher through that famous black door had critics fuming. Wasn’t it from this very place, they asked, that she set out to demolish (and very nearly did) everything that Labour stood for, including the idea of a British society saying that there was no such thing as a society and that there were only individuals?

Angry Labour activists flung at Mr. Brown his own words to remind him of what Lady Thatcher represented. Here is what Mr. Brown said about her at the time: “She plans to eradicate the right to education and the health and social services as we know them”; “Britain’s first woman Prime Minister has done conspicuously little for Britain’s women”; “Poverty does not concern Mrs Thatcher”; “Mrs Thatcher … wanted to eliminate the public sector entirely from whole areas of national life”; “As support for Mrs Thatcher’s policies of social division dwindles she will discover that there are simply not enough City speculators without a conscience to keep her in power.”

Downing Street claimed there was nothing unusual about the Prime Minister inviting a predecessor to tea; others, too, had done it in the past. Lady Thatcher’s spokesman said she had visited each of her successors in Downing Street, including John Major and Tony Blair. Her former private secretary and Tory MP, John Whittingdale, termed it a “nice gesture” from Mr. Brown.

All right, all right, we understand all that, critics replied but couldn’t it all have been arranged more discreetly without the famously shy Prime Minister and his (supposedly) intensely private wife having to pose for television cameras with “that woman”? Did it have to be turned into a media circus? One left-wing Labour MP said that even though he understood the need to reach out to political opponents, the idea of Mr. Brown supping with “Maggie” stuck in his “craw.” Trade unions, who bore the brunt of Thatcherite assault on workers, were furious. One prominent trade union leader called it “a huge political mistake” which could damage Labour’s credibility with its core voters.

Tories were not amused either and accused Mr. Brown of “manipulating” a “frail and lonely” woman for his own political ends. According to them, at a time when Mr Cameron was trying desperately to rid the Conservative party of Thatcherite baggage and recast it as a modern and centrist party, Mr. Brown’s embrace of Lady Thatcher was a cynical ploy to embarrass him and divide the Tories.

The Prime Minister’s public wooing of Lady Thatcher was “self-serving and unscrupulous,” thundered one senior “Cameroon.” “Baroness Thatcher at 81 — we know she’s frail, we know she’s lonely, and she does have difficulty with her memory. I think Margaret Thatcher at the peak of her powers would certainly not have countenanced being used in this way. I think all the evidence is suggesting that she has been taken advantage of,” said Rob Wilson, a Tory frontbencher.

Another Shadow Minister described Mr. Brown’s move as “nauseating” and aimed at “trying to cash in on the public affection for Lady Thatcher.”

But wasn’t it Mr. Cameron who started the trend in opportunistic political cross-dressing, in the first place, when he showered praise on the then Prime Minister Tony Blair, losing no opportunity to pay tribute to his “modernising” instincts, even as the Labour Party was trying to get rid of him. He even started to talk and sound like Mr. Blair prompting the media to dub him “Tony Blair—Mark II.”

So, isn’t Mr. Cameron protesting too much now that he finds himself at the wrong end of the stick?

The Liberal Democrats haven’t done anything too outrageous yet but there are a few young Turks in the party keen on a make-over. Indeed, with all the three mainstream parties battling for the centre-ground of British politics, there is going to be a lot of stealing of each other’s clothes. The season in political cross-dressing has just begun.

Sign of the times: the backdrop to Mr. Brown’s speech at the Labour Party’s conference in Bournemouth on Monday was blue, the colour of the Conservative Party!

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