Thatcher won the economic wars, and she never lost an election. The liberal establishments who shape our culture have never been able to forgive her for this, or for the fact that they were largely irrelevant to her. So since her downfall in 1990, they have worked pretty tirelessly to take back "the narrative" of the Thatcher years, and have successfully managed to brand the 1980s as one of the darkest periods in modern British history, dominated by an individual with at the least dictatorial tendencies or more possibly a serious personality disorder. However supposedly balanced the portrayal of the lady herself, we are ultimately left in little doubt that she should be regarded ultimately as a Bad Thing, albeit one who possessed admirable personal traits of tenacity and drive and the like. In giving a little ground in this way, the overall negative view of her is confirmed. This was most strikingly illustrated by the BBC drama Margaret, in which Lindsay Duncan presented a spiteful, brittle prime minister whose bullying tactics managed at the same time to fascinate and carry the audience along.

There are many — including perhaps those who delight in telling us how they plan to celebrate Baroness Thatcher's death — who have doubtless been hoping the same of The Iron Lady. They will be disappointed, for those who, like Lord Tebbit, have talked of the film as being a left-wing fantasy, are very wide of the mark. Indeed it is hard to determine not just its political hue, but its very attitude to politics itself.

Told in flashback, the film is essentially a survey of one life and how it interacted with and, most importantly, shaped national events. We first see a rather doddery Lady Thatcher (an unrecognisable Streep in heavy make-up) attempting to buy a pint of milk at the local corner shop, alone, anonymous and bewildered by rising prices. Rattling around her house, and having decided to finally dispense with her late husband's clothes, she is assailed not just by memories and thoughts of her life and career but by the imagined presence of Denis (Jim Broadbent) himself. Their banter forms the setting in which the obviously wandering and befuddled former PM attempts to make sense not just of her past life but her much-reduced present. Wartime in Grantham, courtship and marriage, and adoption as parliamentary candidate through to electoral victory, the Falklands and the Brighton bomb are episodes which are touched on to varying degrees — sometimes as merely vignettes — and included insofar as they shed light on the central character.

Much of this is exhilarating in the way that cinema recreations of events from living memory (such as in The Queen, and The Baader Meinhof Complex) tend to be. Other characters — Airey Neave, Geoffrey Howe, Michael Heseltine (a terribly miscast Richard E. Grant) are sketchy at best, mere supporting players, there to bask in reflected glory or store up resentments for future use (strangely, there's not even a mention of Arthur Scargill). They have little to say, and hardly impinge — there is barely a scene in which Thatcher isn't central and dominant.