Love's Tory

...It turns out to be Philip Freedman, who is 21 and finishing an economics...

...At a Conservative party press conference she interrupts and scolds less zealous members of her own cabinet for 'being squishy on some issue or another-prompting Labour's deputy . leader to refer to the poor fellows as a bunch of "neutered zombies"-but it doesn't hurt her with the viewers...

...degree at Trinity...

...Michael Foot was, of course, an easy target: the sight of the poor old fellow, an exhausted Rumpelstiltskin, slumped against Labour's red backdrops, wheezing about "jobs, jobs, jobs" and invoking memories of the Attlee government, provoked first disbelief, then embarrassment, and finally pity...

...But it was a difference in the audience, not the actress...

...In fact, cosmetic effects aside, she was entirely in character...

...Thatcher talks about will be a very long run, even if it all works out...

...And the Liberal-Social Democratic Alliance presented the most believable third force in British politics in sixty years...

...I'm not going to be able to stand this," a young Alliance supporter says as the news cuts to a tape of her reply...

...Unemployment remains horribly high, and the industrial base is still pervasively feeble...

...Philip says, yes, Rhodes James is a wet...

...provide...

...The sympathy of most students here may continue to lie a good deal to her left, and there are still some futile titters when her rigidly coiffed head first takes over the screen...

...The change is in the electorate: It is by developing a taste for her, however reluctantly, that more and more people over here are allowing themselves to feel she may be what this country would like to be, and has not been for a very long time-something substantial, a matter of consequence...

...But they've both got the ability to stare out of the television screen, promise you more hardship than you've already endured, and get you Thomas Mallon, currently on leave at Cambridge University, teaches English at Vassar College...

...Like Richard Nixon fifteen years ago, she's learned how to make a rather unappetizing package into an authoritative television "presence...

...But finally it all mattered less than she did...

...We sit down and talk...

...I ask how he'd talk me out of voting for these articulate Alliance people, and he says quietly that the Alliance's policies are all predicated upon an expanding economy that only the Conservatives can, in the long run, Elliott Banfield is a well-known graphic illustrator who lives and works in New York City...

...He is soon to go to work for a bank and is about as unfanatical as anyone imaginable- the sort of boy you'd like your sister to date...

...The long run Mrs...

...I am what I am," she was quoted as saying, "and I am too old to change...

...10 to thank the adoring...

...It's simply easier to get good notices when the play is about repelling an armed invader instead of the statistics of industrial production...

...he' talks, after all, about "progressive conservatism" and has the hornrimmed look of restrained noblesse oblige that one associates back home with Republicans from Manhattan...

...J. hings are not good over here...

...She knows the direction she wants to go in...

...It was of course the Falklands war-such a quick, skillful, and thoroughly justifiable one-that made them fall for her, that turned what looked like pigheadedness into the right stuff, rigidity into decisiveness...

...Division over the issues was deeper than ever before, a split Labour party opposing the Tories with a crackpot manifesto calling for withdrawal from the EEC, unilateral nuclear disarmament, and the massive infusion of paper pounds into Britain's rusty industries...

...the bar that is safely outside the range of the TV's sound...

...He gets up and heads for...

...I ask him then if he is, too...

...Over the years she has let her media people darken her hair, cap her teeth, and butch up her voice...

...It's for Robert Rhodes James, the local Conservative candidate...

...You can feel a little thrill come out of the telly and ripple through the room...

...Now it's chic to be awestruck...

...He replies that she convinces people (this is a British way of saying "me") that she has "clarity of mind, clarity of purpose...

...The four main spokesmen of the middle-of-the-roa.d Alliance, who came across as a brainy, sexy, and reasonable lot (and the syntax of whose remarks made one weep for the illiteracy of American i politicians), should have been more difficult to flatten...

...What the British thought they discovered in her then was really what had been on display all along...

...But in the end it is harder for a viewer to focus on several heads than one, and they became mere supporting players in the campaign...

...A reporter asks if she's intimidated by rumors of an IRA gunman stalking the candidates...

...But there is now this willingness to believe that conviction is not such a bad thing, that what seemed an unappealing inflexibility, looked at another way, may in fact be attractive, definite...

...I tell him that this fellow Rhodes James looks to be, from his leaflet, pretty "wet"-Mrs...

...He kvetches and she clucks...

...They love her when she's strict...

...Mrs...

...When the same deputy leader makes an imbecilic injection of the Falklands into the campaign, charging that she "glories in slaughter," he is pitching her such a slow lob that one almost trembles to think of the laser with which she'll pulverize it and him...

...In addition to the pages of The American Spectator, Mr...

...but now, like the National Gallery and Garbo's salary, she's the top...

...He's been distributing fliers and will be driving people to the polls...

...Finally, I ask him what he thinks of Margaret Thatcher as a person...

...Thatcher's scornful term for her party's moderates...

...Banfield's art appears each week in the New York Times Book Review and has also appeared in Time magazine, National Lampoon, the New York Times Magazineand other publications...

...Not a galvanizing answer, but a thoughtful and plain one...

...Margaret Thatcher was indisputably the star...

...but then, as her husky words are awaited, a sort of hush falls...

...Thatcher has not changed, not in the essentials...

...Philip Freedman is a quiet, polite young man, the son of a retired stock breeder in Berkshire...

...to vote for them with something like enthusiasm...

...Margaret Thatcher's presence dominated this election in a way that has become familiar to residents of New York City during the rule of Ed Koch: both she and he have shown they can govern as much by force of personality as anything else...

...D On the Monday morning before the election I'm at my desk upstairs when a leaflet comes sliding under the door...

...He may part company with the Prime Minister on matters like restoration of the death penalty, but he is happy to be called a Thatcherite on economics...

...always "resolute" (a favorite word...

...I go out into the hall to see if I can catch up with whomever it is who's put it there...

...She stares back at him and just says "No" in a long, throaty way...

...Margaret Thatcher has conviction, Philip Freedman tells me...

...He'd have been canvassing door-to-door these last weeks if not for the pressure of exams...

...For the last several weeks at the Cambridge college where.I'm on sabbatical, we've gathered around the television in the Combination Room in order to watch Maggie maul the opposition on the 9:00 News...

...Actually, this isn't so-not around the edges...

...what he'd call chutzpah she'd name firmness...

...Everyone knew it would be, just as they knew she'd win, and just as they knew she'd be wearing blue when she left No...

...Banfield's work has graced the cover of The American Spectator since the early days of the magazine...

...Banfield has done illustrations for a number of books, including R. Emmett Tyrrell's Public Nuisances.s Public Nuisances...

...The nagging schoolmarm has turned into the exquisite Pain Mistress of her countrymen's fantasies...

...Maggie was...

...No," is his reply, smiling but instantaneous...

...One used to laugh at her for being the shrill, cod-liverish grocer's daughter: bitch, bitch, bitch...

...It's been a terribly rainy three months over here, more like a biblical, punishment than a mere British spring...