A man who questioned Margaret Thatcher on television as a child has described how the encounter helped him escape his deprived background, despite his opposition to her policies. Ernest Owusu was 13 in 1980 when he was given the opportunity to appear in the audience of the BBC show In the Limelight, presented by Lesley Judd, and asked Thatcher how she felt about the Russians calling her the Iron Lady. A clip of the encounter remerged in the BBC’s 2019 five-part 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 being raised by their single mother Rose, a struggling hairdresser. Now 57, Owusu looks remarkably similar even with a greying beard. But his status in life has transformed. The father-of-three is the human resources director at a pharmaceutical company, a homeowner in leafy West Wickham and the first black captain of the Addington golf club in its 110-year history. Speaking in its clubhouse, Owusu describes his ascent up the class ladder as a “Thatcherite journey”. And he says it began by quizzing the woman herself. “To this day it still has an impact. My confidence changed from that particular sliding door moment. I’m not a Conservative but something about her resonated with me.”
Thatcher told Owusu she relished being called the Iron Lady. “I think it’s rather a compliment, don’t you?” she said. “Because so often people have said to me if you’re in your job you’ve got to be soft and warm and human, but you’ve got to have a touch of steel. You do need to be pretty firm.” Owusu recalls the moment: “I just remember her eye contact. She was answering me not the camera. She embraced the question saying you’ve got to be tough in this world. And that stuck with me.” After the show was broadcast Owusu said he became “a little hero in Brixton for a good three months – remember this was when Thatcher was still popular”. It was an era before video recorders so Owusu did not see his TV appearance again until a clip appeared this year. Owusu had struggled to think of a good of question to submit, so he borrowed the Iron Lady one from his best friend, Garfield, who had come up with several. “He was kicking himself afterwards,” Owusu recalls. But the two have remained friends. As best man at Garfield’s wedding, Owusu mentioned the incident in his speech as an example of the groom’s generosity. “It was a good question – it was quite cheeky and challenging,” said Owusu. Reflecting on it now he reckons he would not have got away with asking a similar question today. “I would be hammered for it on social media,” he said. At the time he got 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 goody two shoes at school and think I would still have done relatively well, but it all gave me extra confidence. I became more comfortable in such environments. Doors might not have opened so quickly. It was one of those catalyst moments to make you do things maybe you wouldn’t otherwise have done.” He asks: “Would I have been head boy at school? Would I have wanted to be an HR director? It makes you wonder.” Later he had to hide his lingering admiration for Thatcher. “She became very unpopular, particularly in the black community. So I had to keep it under my hat.” Owusu describes his politics as left of centre and has always voted Labour. He was against Thatcher’s cuts to public services and her belligerent approach to trade unions. In his dealings with unions, as an HR director, he says he has always tried to compromise and “find a middle ground”. He also insists there is such a thing as society. But he adds: “I was inspired by her personally rather than politically – where she’d come from as a grocer’s daughter. And she was groundbreaking as the first woman prime minister. For me as a young black guy it was about breaking glass ceilings.”