Iron Lady Eases Her Grip on Handbag--for Good Cause

Churchill’s cigar and Chamberlain’s umbrella were equally famous, but only Margaret Thatcher’s trademark purse produced a verb for the English language: To handbag an opponent is to treat him ruthlessly, as the Iron Lady frequently did.

Forget that the former Conservative prime minister’s handbag often inspired fear. With a little luck it should provide a windfall for a private British charity when it goes on the auction block next week.

“This black Ferragamo handbag belonged to me and was used for many special occasions. I would only let it go for a good cause,” Thatcher wrote in a note accompanying her donation to a fund-raiser for Breast Cancer Care, which will be carried on a Web site devoted to women’s issues, https://www.handbag.com.

Many purse-carrying luminaries have contributed, but Thatcher’s bag is the most noteworthy. And in the face of her generosity, who would stoop to point out that Britain’s most ardent Euroskeptic has offered up an Italian bag?

Thatcher has not revealed any of the state secrets that might once have occupied that bag, which is still a powerful symbol of her 11-year reign.

“I often said I carry scars of the handbag, but it is more metaphorical than real,” said Charles Powell, who was Thatcher’s private secretary for many years. “It did contain almost anything anyone could need.”

Thatcher’s handbags featured prominently in her political career from the start. The former Tory leader ran for Britain’s top job in 1979 as an ordinary homemaker, storming into supermarkets with a purse swinging from her forearm to talk with shoppers and rifling through the bag for pennies to pay her food bill.

As the first woman to occupy 10 Downing St., she became the only British prime minister to carry a purse. Forever after, they seemed inseparable, whether in her moment of glory rejoicing over Britain’s recapture of the Falkland Islands from Argentina in 1982, or as she battled unsuccessfully to hang on to power in 1990.

The handbag was so much a part of her that Secretary of State George P. Shultz once presented her with “The Order of the Handbag.” Thatcher thought the humor a bit sexist, former aides said, but she accepted the honorific bag as a “useful if dangerous weapon.”

To the best of anyone’s knowledge, Thatcher never physically attacked an opponent with her handbag. She didn’t have to.

As a young and lowly member of the Labor opposition in Parliament, Tony Blair once asked Thatcher haughtily if it were possible that she had not read an essay on employment by the English economist John Maynard Keynes from the 1930s.

Thatcher responded that not only had she read it, she also happened to have a copy in her handbag. And she did.

Powell accompanied Thatcher on a trip to Hong Kong in 1984, stopping in Hawaii on the way. While Thatcher’s U.S. hosts thought that she would want to rest during the midnight stop, she insisted that she wanted to see the World War II memorial to the sunken battleship Arizona.

“They said, ‘That’s not possible, it’s too dark.’ But she said, ‘That’s not a problem. I have a torch [flashlight] here.’ She pulled one out of her handbag,” Powell said.

She had begun carrying a flashlight earlier that year after the Irish Republican Army blew up the hotel where she was staying in Brighton. She also pulled notes, documents, policy papers and handkerchiefs out of her handbag, and somewhere in there she must also have had a comb and lipstick because she was always freshly made up.

“The handbag was a symbol of her age, her upbringing and class and sex,” said Bernard Ingham, who served as Thatcher’s spokesman when she was prime minister.

“It came to be seen as a symbol of power because she was a woman in charge of knocking men into shape. But her sword was her mind and her mouth, not her purse,” Ingham said.

Still it is the purse that’s up for grabs. Norman Tebbit, a member of Thatcher’s Cabinet, said it is like the former prime minister to want to help a woman’s cause such as Breast Cancer Care.

“Sometimes it is forgotten that she is a woman because she was the best man in the country,” Tebbit said.