“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 … !
Thanks Jon, another brilliant piece and thoroughly enjoyable (though I do admit to being enormously biased to the Zille Gorilla)!
So when are you gonna stop being an untethered liberal democrat and join the DA already?
Don’t forget to mention that, unfortunately for the so called democracy of this nation, Zille continues to enjoy praises and eulogizes from most while led media houses. She is the darling of the print media, none of them dare to criticise nor analyse her failures. Even Zapiro struggles to draw something untoward about her.
A living example would be “the 100 days” after she took reigns in the Western Caope, not even one paper dedicated a slot, column, blog or anything scrutinising her failures or otherwise. What a pity of democracy!
Not so sure about that. ZA News does a pretty good job of grilling Zille. I love how they play on the caricature of the DA as a complaining party that opposes for the sake of opposing when the Zille character says, “We will not allow the similitude between our policies and those of the ANC to stop us from opposing everything they do and criticising their corrupt, incompetent cronies who have no idea how to govern a modern democracy!” Lol!
On the unerring sense of certitude. It has become the case, hasn’t it, that the major difference between conservatives and liberals, certainly in the US, is the former’s lack of doubt with regards to their philosophy. Put 3 Dems together and you’ll more than 6 opinions every hour.
Of course, this certainty can have devastating consequences, as in Bush’s folly in Iraq.
Zille? Feminine? I’ve seen telephone poles that are more feminine!
Jabba – thank you. Liberal democracy transcends any political party and, according to the late Alan Paton, is a ‘tolerance of others’, a ‘generosity of spirit’ and a ‘love of freedom’ – I don’t need to sign up to the DA (yet!) to subscribe to those values.
Siphiwo Siphiwo – you make a really good point. Thatcher certainly never got Zille’s – I think – easyish ride with the media. And yes, it is bad for democracy.
Sipza, what’s the significance of 100 days? Is it a mystic number?
@ Kit “There is nothing magic about the number, and many presidential aides over the years have complained that it is an artificial yardstick. But it has been used by the public, the media, and scholars as a gauge of presidential success and activism since Franklin D. Roosevelt pioneered the 100-day concept when he took office in 1933. He was faced with the calamity of the Depression—and he moved with unprecedented dispatch to address the problem. “The first hundred days of the New Deal have served as a model for future presidents of bold leadership and executive-legislative harmony,” writes Cambridge University historian Anthony Badger in FDR: The First Hundred Days.” Kenneth T. Walsh
The underlying assumption Kit is that leaders tend to be most effective when they first take office – but, of course, many leaders only get into their stride mid-term. And many never at all!
@ Kylie
Zille? Feminine? I’ve seen telephone poles that are more feminine!
Meowwwwl >:)
@ – Siphiwo*2
A living example would be “the 100 days” after she took reigns in the Western Caope, not even one paper dedicated a slot, column, blog or anything scrutinising her failures or otherwise. What a pity of democracy!
Except for good ole Siphiwo*2 – the good lapdog from Liliput house – using all his literary skills gained from his imaginary Vivisectionist Masters Degree from the James Cook University in Queensland.
Unfortunately her major failure is that she is so far ahead of any of the drunken kleptos
Hmmmm?
Jon, I think you’ve completely missed the point of why I ask Siphiwo the question – not entirely surprising since it was on the curt side.
Go through the coverage of JZ’s first 100 days’ tenure and look through what aspects of that 100 days are discussed. Divide it up into: repetition of pre-election statements, jubilant ‘we did it!’ propaganda (the SABC’s adverts with the smiling Prez taking his oath typify that), and real honest-to-goodness movement towards solving crises.
The point that people forget is that Zille is merely a premier of a province. Since they’re all elected at the same time there or thereabouts, why would national media carry much if anything about one of a bunch of provincial leaders? Because she has a bigger mouth than the rest? Because she received a lot of political flak, particularly from Julius Malema, who claims that most of his commentary directed towards her pre-election was merely a divergence?
Comparing her with Thatcher is both an insult and flattery. Zille’s relevance is nowhere near that of Thatcher’s, nor is her intransigence and inability to ever be wrong as pronounced. More than the remnants of Thatcherism can be found in modern-day Britain’s current crisis.
If the media give Zille an easy ride that’s easy enough to change. Start asking the right questions yourself. If the media give JZ too hard a ride, his minions should provide concrete information on his successes.
Siphiwo, you never fail in your comments. So predicitable!!!!!!! Are you hoping your brown nosing will get noticed????? Zilla doesn’t have to spout her mouth off and boast. She rolls up her sleeves and gets on with it while your dear comrades are sipping their MOET champaigne. And she does all this driving around in a second hand toyota!!!!!!!
@Kit, Zille gets so much media attention not because she is a premier, but because she is a successful opposition leader. A leader that has led the DA to great heights, which would not have been achieved by Tony Leon. Many people would never have thought that Soweto residents would give the DA more than the odd vote, now the DA receives quite a few votes in Soweto VDs.
Don’t blame Britain’s current economic woes on Thatcher; in fact, you’re mistaken, New Labour’s pussyfooted centrism is to blame. The Tory party’s current leader David Cameron – a mild Thatcherite himself – is leading in the pre-election polls… why? Because of New Labour’s failures. Not Thatcher’s sometimes unpopular reign decades ago.
To compare Thatcher’s all-male cabinet 30 YEARS AGO to Zille’s all-male cabinet in this day and age is ludicrous!
Zille’s leadership has steered the DA into the train wreck that it has become, a racist political party, still dominated by whites in the upper echelons of power even after 15 years!
They borrow strategies directly from the playbook of the racist US neocons in:
- engaging in gutter politics
- vehemently opposing AA
- serving the interests of a privileged minority
The utter failure of the DA as an opposition party and mediocre performance of COPE in the last election has placed our entire nascent democracy at risk. This has just fueled racial polarization and the rise of militant forces within our rainbow nation. In spite of all Thatcher’s faults, at least the world understood that Thatcher was not playing with a full deck. Zille on the other hand, has no excuse and her failure in leading the DA into becoming a true opposition party worthy of standing up to the ANC, and will be remembered as one of the greatest missed opportunities in post-apartheid SA.
Siphiwo,
Let’s compare Zuma and Zille.
Zuma – to his credit – some action on accountability. Debit: courtcases “passed over” and comrades appointed with dubious backgrounds. Favours people of poor education as leaders. Quite a bit of associated scandal…
Zille – no scandal. Delivery focus. No big WaBenzi issues, hotel bills etc.
Which makes it more puzzling for me: why do you flounder around in an attempt to discredit her?
Are you a South African – or just an ANC supporter? Because the ANC has had a lot more failures in Zuma’s first 100 days than has Zille !
But of course you ignore that…
While Zille may hire an all-male crew, she — like Maggie Thatcher — leaves nobody in any doubt that the Big Admiral of the Fleet is a woman and that all those men are going to be taking their orders from her.
What can possibly be more empowering to other women than seeing THAT going on? Far more empowering that the limp-wristed wimpy tokenism of “representivity”!
@Kit
Thank you for this interesting and well-argued comment-. My comparison with Thatcher is not an endorsement of Thatcherism (as a liberal, I could never have voted for the lady myself although I believe she was the most significant and certainly the most ideological post-war prime minister), but between two significant female leaders in different times and places. Zille, I would argue, is of enormous relevance: she is the political leader of four million people (the leader of the opposition) as well as the premier of the Western Cape. Thus this is a bigger question than the mechanics of provincial government delivery (which, as you allude to, has limited competences); it is about two alternative visions of society. The crisp question I ask is: will Zille be able to provide a compelling and alternative national vision to that of the ANC? Love or loath Thatcher, she lent her name to a political ideology which trumped the cozy post-war consensus between Labour and the Conservatives. I maintain that the media here are fixated on personalities, rather than on public policy issues. If they did, as my previous blogs indicate, I believe Zuma’s administration would not pass serious muster.
Interesting, well-written article. Over the next five years we will probably see if Helen Zille can take the next step. She has been instrumental in the DA growing by nearly 1000% since 1994, and bringing in large numbers of votes from coloured and black communities. Obviously there is a long way to go before a serious challenge to the ANC can be mounted, but Zille may well be the woman for the job. As you point out, she needs to avoid ad hominem attacks, no matter how justified and truthful – she did the DA no favours with stating a simple truth about Jacob Zuma’s infidelity.
Jon
” I maintain that the media here are fixated on personalities, rather than on public policy issues.”
Point perfectly made. To prove that, could anyone explain to me the DA’s stance on Rural redevelopment policy, land redistribution, farming, public insurance scheme, Public Works programme, Job creation plan, Climate Change policy….in fact in anything that affects the ordinary Joe in the street–rather than opposing everything proposed by the ANC.
I agree, the media is dismally failing us
Its a pity that people tend to overlook major flaws in Zille, simply because she fooldhardedly takes on the Government. I want to tell a real story of real people – the people of Atlantis, part of Zille’s former kingdom of Cape Town. The only thing Zille did for the people of Atlantis during her tenure as mayor was to bring a busload of “Muslims” to from “Mitchell’s Plain” to protest against drugs; in the month of Ramadan! After that she came to seek the people’s endorsement of a City budget that seeks to bring more services to affluent areas, away from Atlantis. Now she and Dan Plankton wants to build a shanty town in Atlantis for people from Ogieskraal and Vissershok; thereby putting further pressure on meagre services your premier and mayor refuse to upgrade – even though those services was intended for less than half the people living in Atlantis.
I really wish that some journalist somewhere would be brave enough to do proper research on how services are delivered by the City and the province (DA county) in poor areas other than the overt windowdressing going on in Mitchell’s Plain and Guguleto.
I dont think the Zille star would be shining that bright…
@ Dave Harris, “The utter failure of the DA as an opposition party…” 15 years of constant growth from a 2% to an almost 17% party (when EVERY other party has shrunk or stagnated) AND winning a province and you call that ‘failure’? Get real…
The DA is not a racist party nor does it oppose AA entirely (we oppose the incorrect implementation of it where it generally serves as a fig-leaf for cronyism with little true empowerment for the disadvantaged). As for “serving the interests of a privileged minority”, that’s the biggest bogeyman of them all and is more aptly applied to the ANC whose modus operandi is the Closed, Crony Society for Some, i.e. the well-connected and those loyal to the faction in power at any given time.
@ Siphiwo Siphiwo, regarding your request that someone “explain to [you] the DA’s stance on Rural redevelopment policy, land redistribution, farming, public insurance scheme, Public Works programme, Job creation plan, Climate Change policy”, I urge you to check out the DA’s policy platform: http://www.da.org.za/our_policies.htm.
You’ll find that it’s more than a wishlist or half-hearted attempt at coming up with solutions. It’s a well-researched, carefully-costed plan of action for a government-in-waiting.
@ Moegamat, the services provided by the DA in the Western Cape and Cape Town still rival those formerly provided by the ANC. If you have a problem with the way your city is run, contact the DA – they tend to listen when their constituents speak up.
@ Dave, you’re talking rubbish. What you’ve said doesn’t even merit a response.
@ Siphiwo Siphiwo, you were asking for the DA’s plan to address climate change?
See here: “The DA has a plan to deal with climate change”, http://www.da.org.za/newsroom.htm?action=view-news-item&id=6526
Thatcher, and the glories of Britain: Now British universities offer 1 year MSc’s where the students don’t even read academic papers – what the hell is a MSc in underwater welding? The whole reason being that that way, the British universities can accept Nigerian students, who cannot otherwise afford to go to school (in North America, graduate students are paid to do their MSc’s), while still doing a job on the side (or is that study on the side?) while paying the universities, and getting a dubious MSc… Lovely, and thank you to Labour for continuing the Maggot’s policies. Creeps…