There was the usual carping when it was announced that Streep was to play Thatcher. But having seen her, I now cannot envisage an English actress who could have pulled it off so spectacularly. The things which tend to get in the way with this actress — the chilly technique, the mannerisms, the layer of artifice, that studied quality — all of these become strengths here, coalescing to bring to life a figure who, while surrounded by people, is always apart from them, always singular. It is a remarkable performance. Perhaps that Streep is American helps bring out further the fact that for much of her political career, Thatcher was something of an alien being in her chosen landscape — a lower middle-class woman, not of the Establishment, not accepting of the political orthodoxies and, initially, not taken seriously.

She is given some speeches in which she clearly sets out her principles. At no point is she obviously mocked. The sexism and snobbery she faced at the beginning make themselves felt time and time again and we are invited to admire her response. The lack of guile, the complete sincerity will surely flummox younger viewers for whom politics naturally means just spin and dissembling.

And for older ones, it might bring on intense nostalgia. The script, by Abi Morgan, completely conveys the brilliant clarity of the character, a clarity which ensured that whether you adored her or fiercely loathed her, Thatcher paid you the compliment of meaning exactly what she said. But it's not just the quality of public life depicted in the film which might make some wistful. It is quite simply that the country Thatcher governed — glimpsed here in archive footage — already looks unrecognisable (clips of the massed ranks at the Tory party conference show how remarkably shrunken party politics now is). Contrary to the official line pushed by BBC apparatchiks and the like, there was during that time a remarkable unleashing of energy, a real sense of renewal. Much of that zest has been squandered; it is hard sometimes not to feel that Britain has carried on where it left off, that Thatcher's 11 years was a kind of hiatus and that we are back on the wrong road. But her time — which coincided with my twenties, after years of being formed by vaguely left-wing teachers and college lecturers — allowed one a feeling of heady relief; one could believe for the first time that the national game was not necessarily up, that decline wasn't the only option open to us, that we should celebrate this, and the fact that there was somebody who instinctively thought and felt the same as us residing in Downing Street.  

Nostalgia, admiration, even inspiration — I felt all these things on leaving the screening of The Iron Lady. Why, then, do I hope and pray that Baroness Thatcher never gets to see it? It is simply this: it has been made almost as though she is no longer with us. When Helen Mirren played the Queen, the events depicted were already a decade old. There was a safe distance into which fiction could step. Here, when Streep settles down on the floor to look distractedly at old home movies, when she converses at length about the price of milk with her long gone husband, we are forced to assume that this is how Lady Thatcher now lives. Has any other real life figure ever been portrayed in such a way? It is unquestionably movingly done, and structurally, it works. But the timing is badly wrong.