'Sliding doors': Man who questioned Thatcher as a child says it changed his life | Margaret Thatcher
The man who asked Margaret Thatcher on television as a child, described how this meeting helped him escape his poor background, despite his opposition to her politics.
Ernest Owusu was 13 in 1980 when he got the chance to appear in the audience of the BBC show In the Limelight, hosted by Leslie Judd, and asked Thatcher how she felt about the Russians calling her the Iron Lady.
Video of the meeting resurfaced in 2019 on the BBC a five-episode documentary series Thatcher: A Very British Revolution.
At the time, Owusu was on free school meals and living on a Brixton council estate where he and his sister were brought up by single mother Rose, a struggling hairdresser.
Now 57, Owusu looks a lot alike even with his graying beard. But his status in life has changed. The father-of-three is an HR director for a pharmaceutical company, owns a house in leafy West Wickham and is the first black captain of Addington Golf Club in its 110-year history.
Speaking at his club, Owusu describes his climb up the class ladder as a “Thatcherite journey”. And he says that it all started with the questioning of the woman herself.
“It still has an impact to this day. My confidence has changed since that sliding door moment. I'm not a conservative, but something about her resonated with me.”
Thatcher told Owusu that she liked being called the Iron Lady. “I think that's more of a compliment, don't you?” she said. “Because so often people have told me that when you do your job, you have to be soft and warm and human, but you have to have steel. You have to be pretty tough.”
Owusu recalls the moment: “I just remember her eye contact. She did not answer me on camera. She accepted the question saying that in this world you have to be cruel. And that stuck with me.”
After the show aired, Owusu said he became “a bit of a hero in Brixton for a good three months – remember that was when Thatcher was still popular”.
This was the pre-VCR era, so Owusu hadn't seen his performance on television until the music video came out this year.
Owusu had trouble thinking of a question to ask, so he borrowed the Iron Lady's question from his best friend Garfield, who came up with a few.
“He was kicking himself after that,” Owusu recalls. But both remained friends. As best man at Garfield's wedding, Owusu mentioned this incident in his speech as an example of the groom's generosity.
“That was a good question – it was quite cheeky and challenging,” Owusu said.
Thinking about it now, he thinks he wouldn't have gotten away with asking a similar question today. “I would get bashed for it on social media,” he said.
At the time, he received a rare international call from his father, who was a lawyer in Ghana, to praise him after news reached him that his son had “interviewed Mrs Thatcher on television”.
Owusu said: “I was a good person at school and I think I would still do relatively well, but all this has given me extra confidence. I became more comfortable in such conditions. Maybe the door didn't open so quickly. It was one of those catalyst moments to make you do things you might not have done otherwise.”
He asks, “Would I be the oldest at school? Would I like to be an HR director? It makes you think.”
He later had to hide his continuing admiration for Thatcher. “She became very unpopular, especially among black people. So I had to keep it under my hat.”
Owusu describes his politics as centre-left and has always voted Labour. He was opposed to Thatcher's cuts to public services and her militant approach to trade unions. In his dealings with unions as HR director, he says he has always tried to compromise and “find the middle ground.” He also insists that there is such a thing as society.
But he adds: “I was inspired by her personally, not politically – where she came from as a grocer's daughter. And she was groundbreaking as the first female prime minister. It was breaking glass ceilings for me as a young black guy.”
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/dec/24/man-who-questioned-margeret-thatcher-as-boy