SOURCE: Kellaway, Kate. “Playing at Politics.” New Statesman 27, no. 4411 (13 November 1998): 36.

In the following review, Kellaway discusses the tone and pacing of Ugly Rumours.

There is a madwoman in the cellar of No 10 Downing Street. Her name is Margaret Thatcher. Her triple-stringed pearls are intact but her twin-set suit, though tightly buttoned, is adrift with cobwebs. She needs dusting but does not know it. She is, in Sylvia Syms' entertaining portrayal of her, a merry but slightly sinister ghost. She still sees herself as the most influential person in the country. She carries about her person a “Thatcher extractor”, a sort of portable Hoover designed to suck socialism out of the body. It seems to work on Tony Blair—and she is pleased with him.

Howard Brenton and Tariq Ali have done wisely to include Thatcher in their satire of new Labour, Ugly Rumours. For Blair does not lend...