Mantel's 'Assassination of Margaret Thatcher' remains a work of utter bigotry - and the BBC should know this...

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When there was an earlier brouhaha about Hilary Mantel's deliberately egregious story, 'The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher' I wrote how it revealed more about Mantel's bigotry than about the character of Maggie:

What we see here from Ms Mantel is something that, in truth, is foreign to those of us who share Margaret Thatcher's lower middle class background. Taking the trouble to construct a fiction based entirely on your hatred of a caricature of a women you have never met is something peculiar to the bien pensant left. What this short story tells us about Hilary Mantel - bitter, bigoted, ignorant - is far more important than any flicker of insight into the motives of the Provisional IRA or the character of Margaret Thatcher.

The kerfuffle has return as the BBC chose this (to be fair the Thatcher story is just one in a series of short pieces) for broadcast as 'Book at Bedtime'. Again, in and of itself, there's no problem with this except that the BBC will have known exactly what the response would be. This is the 'official' response (I gather):

“Book at Bedtime offers the best of modern and classic literature and, in doing so, presents a wide range of perspectives from around the world. The work of Hilary Mantel – a double Booker prize-winning author – is of significant interest to the public and we will not shy away from the controversial subject matter that features in one of the four stories read across the week.”

Here we see 'Booker prize-winning author' being used in the same manner that the tern 'Nobel prize winning scientist' is sometimes used. Mantel didn't win (and isn't going to win) the Booker prize for 'The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher' - any more that Sir Paul Judge got his nobel prize for stuff about climate change - yet the fact of her winning said prize for a different book is presented as some sort of defence by the BBC.

The BBC chose this book in order to provoke. It really is as simple as that - rather than any one of a thousand other books of great merit (including some by celebrated winners of book prizes) that could have been chosen, they chose this rather second-rate story; a thing of shallow stereotype, bias and bigotry rather than something bringing insight or understanding.

If, dear reader, you can suspend disbelief for a paragraph or two imagine this. I'm an award-winning writer and I write a brief polemic masquerading as literature about a conversation between a lawyer and a politician, a conversation leading to the execution of Nelson Mandela for terrorism. And a conversation that is sympathetic to those who held - or hold - the view that Mandela was indeed a terrorist. Do you think that any newspaper would publish such a story in full? And would there be any chance of it being chosen - from all the literature available - for broadcast on a national broadcaster's flagship speech radio channel?

This wouldn't happen. Yet we're told by the BBC that:

"...our audience is sophisticated enough to accept a broad range of viewpoints, and we are loth to censor or avoid significant works of literature because they might be controversial.”

What we know - from the discussion of climate change, from the manner in which some people are given sainthood and from the presentation of the arts in general - is that the BBC will only entertain controversial views if they either attack the BBC's cultural enemires or conform to the rather snide and certainly bigoted world view of the bien pensant left.

The BBC knew exactly what is was doing when it chose this book. That is exactly why it made that choice. And exactly why the decision reveals the corporation's bigotry.

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Carefully crafted bigotry - a comment on Hilary Mantel's 'Assassination of Margaret Thatcher'

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Hilary Mantel, I'm told, writes historical fiction. I haven't read anything that she has written before today.I am unlikely to read anything she has written or will write in the future.

However, Ms Mantel has written a little short story about the assassination of Margaret Thatcher and is defending herself from the criticism that her writing inevitably precipitated. Now, I've no real issue with Ms Mantel writing such a story, just so long as she is willing to countenance counterfactual history written from a perspective that challenges her prejudices (which I somehow doubt - imagine a story where the assassination of JFK failed and he led the US into WWIII or one where Nelson Mandela was executed for terrorism).

However, her defence (or at least the part quoted in The Guardian) is something of a confused concoction:

“I think it would be unconscionable to say this is too dark we can’t examine it. We can’t be running away from history. We have to face it head on, because the repercussions of Mrs Thatcher’s reign have fed the nation. It is still resonating."

The first sentence is fine. Of course we can contemplate why someone might want to assassinate Margaret Thatcher. Indeed, we don't have to go far to understand that mindset because a man who actually did try to assassinate Margaret Thatcher is alive, well and living in freedom (which says a great deal about our society). However, the second sentence - from someone who has made a fortune from exploiting history - displays a profound misunderstanding of even some history within my living memory. It is Ms Mantel who is running away from history, choosing instead a slanted rewrite formed out of prejudice rather than a real analysis.

In the end all this is fine - I've read the story and it's filled with the sort of bien pensant hatred we've come to expect from the UK's literary elite. It gives us a sort of stage Scouse Irishman as a suitable mirror to Mantel's personal hatreds, a kind of justification for her carefully crafted bigotry:

''It's the fake femininity I can't stand, and the counterfeit voice. The way she boasts about her dad the grocer and what he taught her, but you know she would change it all if she could, and be born to rich people. It's the way she loves the rich, the way she worships them. It's her philistinism, her ignorance, and the way she revels in her ignorance. It's her lack of pity. Why does she need an eye operation? Is it because she can't cry?''

As an analysis of Margaret Thatcher this is useless but as a revealing insight into Hilary Mantel's hateful bigotry it is really valuable. Everything about the paragraph resonates with the dismissal of an inferior (Thatcher) by her superior (Mantel). Just as the working class man in Ms Mantel's little story is shallow, cardboard, a thing to be patronised, Margaret Thatcher is provincial, suburban, a little bit ordinary. In both cases unlike Hilary Mantel. But the working-class terrorist is portrayed as a victim whereas the lower middle-class shopkeeper's daughter who became prime minister is the villain.

Speaking personally, I find it hard to contemplate creating a false history purely from blind - and ignorant - hatred. Not the fictional vehicle of a conversation between a terrorist and a women whose home he'd barged into - that's a fine basis for a short story. The blind and ignorant hatred is the caricature of Margaret Thatcher, the view that this is the sort of women - indeed Ms Mantel can barely call her a women - who is so unlike me as to be a monster. Ms Mantel goes on and on about how Margaret Thatcher wouldn't like her hair, how she doesn't like the way Thatcher walks, her handbag - she casts herself as some sort of Anti-Thatcher, as a thing entirely built from the PM's disapproval.

What we see here from Ms Mantel is something that, in truth, is foreign to those of us who share Margaret Thatcher's lower middle class background. Taking the trouble to construct a fiction based entirely on your hatred of a caricature of a women you have never met is something peculiar to the bien pensant left. What this short story tells us about Hilary Mantel - bitter, bigoted, ignorant - is far more important than any flicker of insight into the motives of the Provisional IRA or the character of Margaret Thatcher.

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