The Face of Power Face of Britain by Simon Schama

When we become human, when our eyes adjust to the raw light

of the world, the first thing we see is a face.

And before we can walk, before we can speak,

we become readers of faces.

And as we grow into ourselves and the world we live in,

this instinct stays with us.

We scan the world for connections and make snap judgements.

Friend or foe, cruel or kind?

An innocent glance, or the look of love?

Locking eyes helps us navigate through our lives.

But also navigate through our history.

When we look upon the faces of the past,

it's like combing through the family album of our nation.

Each one contains something of ourselves -

who we are, and who we've been.

But be warned - none of these faces can be taken at face value.

Because no portrait is as simple as it first seems.

Every portrait is the result of a three-way contest.

First of all, there's the vanity of the sitter, of course -

how we think we'd like to be seen.

But then there's the job of the artists who mischievously

complicate that vanity.

And then, not least, there is the verdict of the public.

And it's this three-way game which gives portraits their complexity,

their richness and their intrigue.

And when the portraits are of the powerful,

the battle of wills can get fierce.

But to know the story of those battles is to understand not just

how portraits got painted, but how Britain got made.

BELL CHIMES

As the firm, confident notes of Big Ben sound out,

we greet you from Parliament, where we now wait to do birthday homage to

the greatest of modern parliamentarians.

The 30th November 1954 was the day the nation came together to

celebrate the 80th birthday of Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

All members of both houses and the officials of Parliament,

and their wives, have assembled here.

Now, he comes down the stairs to the greetings of both houses.

Beamed into homes by the BBC, the climax of the ceremony was to be

the unveiling of a birthday present from Parliament.

It was a portrait that would immortalise the greatest Briton of all.

Churchill was a hero in our house.

We were rather a Labour Party family, but we made an exception

for Winston Churchill because he'd saved Britain from the Nazis.

Now, we all knew that Churchill was, to put it mildly, past his prime.

But everybody wanted some great climactic moment,

which rose above politics, when the nation could say, "Thank you."

But politics is rarely that simple.

A year earlier, Churchill had suffered a stroke.

He had recovered, but as he looked out at the audience, he knew that

among them were some that wanted to replace him with a younger face.

So, for Churchill, what lay behind the curtain was more than a portrait.

It had to be a proclamation of his undimmed vigour.

The story of the portrait began three months earlier

at Churchill's home of Chartwell.

As a keen amateur, he had his own painting studio

and it was here that he sat for the all-important portrait.

On the other side of the easel stood the painter, Graham Sutherland.

Hand-picked by Parliament,

he was celebrated for his unsparing scrutiny and penetrating portraits.

But as he set his sights on Churchill,

he found himself locked in a contest of wills.

It was a drama documented in an extraordinary set of photographs.

Well, I supposed you would have to call these remarkable images

war photography.

This was going to be one of the most tumultuous commissions ever.

Both the artist and, I think,

the sitter as well thought they were in a fight.

Wary of what the artist's eye might reveal,

Churchill immediately tried to take control of the sittings.

The first day, Churchill says to Sutherland,

"What would you like? The Bulldog or the Cherub?"

And of course it's insulting to Sutherland because it's saying there

are only two way in which my image is allowed to go into the public.

You can have the winsome baby face or the fighting bulldog.

And Sutherland gets more and more determined to do what he wants.

Sutherland soon realised he did not have a cooperative subject.

Churchill was constantly lighting up.

His moods would shift from amiable to growly.

The brandy snifter was never far away.

Churchill is such a difficult sitter,

he nods off after lunch, he's drowsy.

And there's not much Sutherland can do about it.

He has to say to him, "A little bit more of the old lion, sir."

So they're jousting about absolutely everything.

Taking the photographs and his many sketches with him,

Sutherland decided to work up the painting back at his own house.

This made Churchill suspicious of what the final product would look like.

What results from this clash of the titans, from this duel of egos,

nobody quite knew until the thing was unveiled.

As the congratulatory speeches wore on,

few were aware that Churchill had seen the painting and hated it.

Prime Minister and painter knew humiliation for them both was just seconds away.

Mr Prime Minister, I gladly join my colleagues

in presenting this token of our sincere regards to him.

As the curtain drew back, what the audience saw...

..was a picture of the rugged truth.

Which was not what Churchill had wanted.

No bulldog, no baby face, just an obituary in paint.

The moment of retribution was at hand.

The portrait is a remarkable example of Modern Art.

LAUGHTER

The gale of laughter that swept the audience

was Churchill's revenge on Sutherland.

Sutherland is sitting there captive,

a prisoner inside this immense, formal, televised nightmare.

And Sutherland is distraught and humiliated by the whole thing

and they are both casualties,

they are both bloodied, humiliated, wounded.

Exactly the opposite of what everybody had wanted.

But in the aftermath of this great battle of wills,

the biggest casualty of all would be the painting itself.

After a few weeks at Churchill's London house, it disappeared.

Winston and his wife found the image so offensive,

it was never displayed and eventually...

..it was burned.

Well, this is all that we have left.

It's a transparency that belongs to the estate of the artist

and thank God we have it.

Because it let's us see that this

is actually one of the great masterpieces of British portraiture.

Not just British portraiture, actually -

it's up there with Rembrandt, Velasquez, with Holbein's Henry VIII.

This is an extraordinary, extraordinary painting.

And I'll tell you why it is so extraordinary.

Think of all the other official portraits, for God's sake.

Stalin, Castro, the hideous portraits of the tyrants like Hitler,

this is not that.

This is a portrait of a magnificent ruin.

Britain's triumph in the 1950s

is that it is full of magnificent ruins, being magnificent

and being ruined is the battle of Britain, it is British history.

It is portraiture of rugged nobility.

And the tragedy about this is that Winston didn't see this.

If only the picture was still here,

we would all love and revere it and say, "This is Britain."

All portraits are born of from a tug-of-war between sitter,

artist and public.

In this one, it was the portrait which was torn apart.

Sutherland would later brood that he should never have accepted the commission.

Perhaps it was, from the start, a hopeless challenge.

After all, how do you paint a saviour?

Deep in the Hertfordshire countryside

is a saviour from another age.

Here in the village of Piccotts End, it was hidden away for centuries.

This is a doorway to another world.

It's a time machine, this little cottage.

This house was once a hostel on an ancient route of pilgrimage.

It's easy to think of medieval carts

and pilgrims trudging to the nearby monastery,

where there is a relic of holy blood.

Painted over 500 years ago,

its walls are aglow with images of Christ, the Virgin, and the Saints,

all enveloped in a dense garden of leaves and flowers.

We'll never know who painted these beautiful things.

But it was a job that you had,

you had the job of providing these glorious images

for pilgrims and a Christian world that was full of being looked at.

There was never a moment when the faces of the Bible weren't

looking at you, and you could pause to look back at them for reassurance.

And you'd be blessed by those faces.

This is the important part of contemplation.

It is not just that we are contemplating Christ,

but Christ is looking at us.

"I exist because God looks at me."

You would see the images of Christ, the Mother of God,

the angels and the saints.

And you wouldn't just look at them

you would go and kiss them an honour them.

You would want a living relationship with them,

a tangible one.

Both the Greek and the Latin words for face also mean person,

person and face mean the same thing.

And it's interesting that a face has eyes to see the other,

ears to hear the other, lips to speak with the other,

so, person means communion, and it's essential for the Christian faith.

But then came the Reformation.

As Henry VIII carved England away from the rest of Christendom,

so the paintings here became condemned as Roman idolatry.

They had to go.

The defacing was done by Protestant reformers in the middle of the 1530s

because they were insecure about the power of faces to control the imagination.

"Defaced" means, like that, to take the face away,

so that you lose connection with talismanic presences.

You take away the magic and you leave a community,

in this case the community of Catholic England, without

someone to look to for prosperity, safety, happiness and abundance.

You're on your own.

But the architects of the Reformation understood

the psychological need for a powerful face.

And as they defaced Catholic imagery,

they made new icons of salvation.

Christ in majesty was replaced by the King in majesty.

But it was his daughter who would create an entirely new cult of images.

Exit the Virgin Mary...

..enter The Virgin Queen.

It was Elizabeth I who would construct a face of power that would

channel the old devotion to win a new allegiance.

Hatfield House.

A centre of power during Elizabeth's long, often threatened, reign.

From here, her most trusted councillors maintained

constant vigilance over the realm.

Excommunication had given Catholic assassins license to kill,

and Elizabeth's failure to marry

and provide a Protestant heir put the realm in even greater jeopardy.

Elizabeth's councillors knew that the Queen image could be

a powerful weapon in securing the allegiance of hearts and minds.

But the image makers initially weren't very good.

From the moment of her accession,

jobbing painters had been turning out faces of the Queen.

Most of them were feeble and clumsy pictures.

So the council of state had to take decisive action.

"Her Majesty perceiveth that a great number of her loving subjects

"are much grieved and take great offence with the errors

"and deformities already committed by sundry persons."

'In 1563, a proclamation was drafted.'

'It banned anyone from producing unauthorised portraits of the Queen

'until an official image was designed and disseminated by the state.'

"..the showing or publication of such as are apparently deformed."

Illicit pictures of the Queen were to be destroyed

and the Queen's face re-branded.

The message was clear.

We control the picture of the Queen you are going to have.

It's in our power to tell you what the face of the Queen is.

We will tell you what the face of England is to be.

Usually, state-controlled image making is the kiss of death

to painterly inspiration.

But not this time.

This time, painters were inspired to make magic.

Elizabeth's natural face disappears inside a formulaic mask.

Perpetually luminous,

impervious to the ravages of time.

Her body becomes encrusted with symbols,

many of them adapted from the Virgin Mary.

Under the painter's spell, Elizabeth had become the Virgin Queen -

devoted to the care of her subjects, married to no-one but the realm.

But the radiance of the Virgin Queen reached its consummation

in the greatest of all her portraits.

It's known as the Rainbow Portrait.

This is fabulous, isn't it? And I mean literally fabulous.

This is the stuff of fable, legend, the imagination.

The older she got, the more fantastic the image had to be.

The painting was made just a few years before Elizabeth's death,

yet she remains untouched by age.

The real Elizabeth is an old lady in her mid-60s.

She is blackened toothed,

shrunken, complexion like jaundice.

So this won't do.

And if you concentrate enough on a stupendous image like this,

that's what will be imprinted in your mind. And we actually have

documents from ambassadors saying, "My God, she's still so beautiful."

And it doesn't get more beautiful, more amazing than this.

And as in so many of the later portraits of Elizabeth,

this one pulls you into a labyrinth of signs and symbols.

Emblem, allegory, symbol, fantasy,

visual hyperbole is what it's all about.

She belongs to some extraordinary sort of astral presence

that's looking after her subjects.

There is a suspended glove, a gauntlet

and that stands for trust, for faithfulness.

The jewelled serpent represents wisdom.

A bodice covered in spring flowers,

the emblem of perpetual future.

The rainbow is the symbol of peace and harmony

and future prosperity.

She grips it with her right hand.

And at the heart of the picture, almost its most telling,

certainly its most unusual feature, is this glorious golden robe.

The lustrous fabric is embroidered

with the most mysterious symbols of all.

Eyes, ears and mouths.

That suggests one meaning of this fantastic decoration,

namely, Elizabeth is the personification of fame.

The mouths speak her renown to the rest of the world.

The rest of the world's eyes and ears are on her.

But after a while, it all gets just a little worrying.

Another word for omniscience, after all, is spying.

So, it's extraordinarily spooky to have the ears constantly listening,

the eyes constantly watching.

It's an amazing piece of visual performance

which situates this picture exactly between the theatrical

and the spectacular on the one hand,

and the creepy and the paranoid and the vigilant on the other hand.

Elizabeth knew the power of the Royal stare.

She may have let herself be depicted like a goddess,

but she always stayed in touch with the mortal beneath the mask.

The same could not be said of her successors.

In 1626, London saw the coronation of a new monarch.

The Stuart King, Charles I, believed he was a little God on Earth.

Little he certainly was,

with a marked stammer.

But his sense of majesty was colossal

and he would let art help him do the talking.

His subjects would be dazzled into submission by spectacular painting,

which turned unprepossessing reality into imperial magnificence.

The best of them courtesy of the wonder-working artist Anthony van Dyck.

Van Dyck understood how the figure of the mounted prince,

in firm command of a noble steed,

could project an image of imperial power like no other pose.

Here he is, then, the British Caesar, riding high above mere mortals.

So powerful was this equestrian image that in the very same year

that it was painted, the King and his horse leapt off the canvas.

This is Charles I On Horseback.

Here he is riding towards Whitehall down there,

Trafalgar Square just behind him.

The person who made this was actually a French sculptor

a man called Hubert Le Sueur, who'd come over with

Charles I's French Queen, Henrietta Maria,

and it was based on the statue of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius in Rome.

This is a very short king, 5'4,

meant to be on a very big horse,

and the sculptor panicked a bit about his proportions,

so the horse is weirdly sausage-like

and it's too small, it looks almost like a training pony.

But never mind the details,

we'll forgive him his mediocre incompetence

because actually the story this has to tell us is very, very important.

It's a story about how a king

wished to have the face of his power represented,

and it has in it both the comedy of imperial pretentions

and Charles I's tragic end.

When the cavalier king was defeated, those who had pulled him down

from his high horse needed to get rid of any images

which might keep him in the saddle.

And it was then that the remarkable history of this statue began.

Oliver Cromwell himself had two objections to Le Sueur's creation -

that it was in itself a kind of idol,

and that, if not destroyed, it might become a focus for royalist diehards.

But when the destroyers came to break it up,

they found that the statue had disappeared.

For five years, they searched in vain,

until a tip-off led them here,

to the churchyard of St Paul's, Covent Garden.

The order is now to melt it down, to get rid of it.

No trace of Charles I On Horseback

around which secret royalists could rally.

They give it to someone called John Rivet, who's a master brazier.

But John Rivet was not a man who did what he was told.

He pretends to have dismantled

and melted the statue down.

What he actually does is to bury it, underground, in this garden.

I might be standing on the spot.

So you feel that actually Master Rivet, the brazier,

is giving Charles I, at least in statue form,

the proper burial which the beheaded king had been denied.

The statue would remain buried for another five years.

But in its place, a new and more potent face of the King emerged.

A circle of unrepentant royalists

was determined to keep the image of the King alive.

Within days of his beheading, his image was brought back to life.

A powerful new portrait was printed and distributed.

"Oh Lord, we offer unto thee,

"all praise and thanks for the glory of thy grace that shined forth

"in thine anointed servant, Charles."

It was an image that exalted the dead king.

And it was found

within the pages of a subversive text, the Eikon Basilike:

The Portrait Of The King.

"For that part of it here militant

"through thy son, thy blessed servant, Jesus Christ."

Three of the first publishers were arrested.

In 1649, it was a capital offence to question what Parliament had done.

It's very beautifully imprinted on the front

with an image of King Charles surrounded by the crown of thorns

and his celestial crown above.

But the spine of the book is completely plain

so if this was on a bookshelf and you were being searched

by Parliamentarians, it wouldn't stand out at all.

To own this book was an act of treason.

To open it was to see Charles transfigured.

No longer aloft on his high horse, Charles is shown on bended knee.

The mighty Emperor had become a humble martyr.

With his right foot, Charles is trampling on the earthly crown,

a crown he'd fought so bitterly and so hard to defend.

With his right hand, he's grasping that crown which identifies him

with the suffering and martyrdom of Jesus himself, the crown of thorns.

And with his eye, all in the same complicated

but immediately readable image,

he's eying the heavenly crown, the true crown.

Essentially, it sums up in image, in portraiture,

the sense that Charles had died as a martyr for the cause of God.

For true believers, this portrait turned political loyalty

into religious devotion.

I think If you look into the face,

you can see he was a man of the most extraordinary principle.

I mean, he did pray in forgiveness for those who beheaded him.

The portrait went through 35 editions in the first year alone.

Endlessly imitated, refined and embellished,

this sanctified face of the King

kept the flame of monarchy burning throughout those dangerous years.

And when the Restoration came, the statue of Charles was

disinterred and resurrected,

here in the heart of central London,

just a few hundred yards from where Charles had been executed.

But soon a new class of ruler would be in the saddle.

By the late 17th century,

country had displaced court as the true centre of British power.

Following the Glorious Revolution of 1688, kings and queens would

rule only by permission of the landed aristocracy.

And they would harness the image of the horse

to justify their new claim to power.

Althorp in Northamptonshire is the ancient seat of the Spencer dynasty.

Step inside and you find yourself surrounded

by a new expression of power in paint.

This is the portrait gallery of the Spencers,

except what you see are horses.

You see this magnificent 18th century symphony

to the horsey and hunting life.

The Spencers are here actually as chaps, but they don't dominate the landscape.

Here, they're swallowed up by a melee of dogs and horses

and the exquisite beauty of the estate itself,

acres and acres of true English land.

No 18th century visitor could fail to be impressed

by such abundance and affluence.

But there's another more essential message in these paintings.

The horses and the dogs speak of an obsession with breeding,

blood-stock and lineage.

These were the founding principles of the aristocratic right to rule.

So, power in England rested on dynasty, pedigree,

blood-stock - the purity of the family entitlement.

So, in a sense this is a wonderful, idealised

harmony of everything that goes to make up the true rulers of England.

And it was here at Althorp that one historic event would confirm

aristocratic supremacy over the Crown.

In 1695, Robert Spencer, the Earl of Sunderland,

invited King William III to Althorp.

They dined in the Long Gallery,

overlooked by his collection of beauties and blue bloods.

We have eyewitness accounts of a huge banquet

in that room for William III when he came to visit,

and the whole place was apparently ablaze with plate.

It must have been very much part of our history,

the great handing over of power from the Crown to Parliament.

Looking down on the King, these faces made an emphatic statement:

You are outnumbered, outclassed, outbred.

The message was clear.

This is a grand family that's here to support you...

..and, in return, you're going to have to do some of our bidding.

On the walls of the country houses,

dynastic portraits held sway.

But in Parliament and the city,

their control over their image was not so secure.

It was a revolution in art.

Attack portraits with the power to make or kill a political career.

And the lethal weapon was laughter.

Comic satire twisted the face of power...

..and exposed it to the snigger of the streets.

And when reverence turned to raspberries,

you were just another clown in power.

-RADIO:

-'The headlines this morning:

'MPs have warned that the public is losing faith in the

'Chilcott Enquiry into the invasion of Iraq when it was revealed that

'the findings would not be published until after the General Election.'

These buggers are put there to have control

over our lives, and what you're doing is saying

"Hey, wait a minute."

You've got to laugh at these people, you've got to attack these people,

you've got to pull them down a peg or two,

and there's nothing more upsetting to a politician than to be laughed at.

Of course, they have to pass it off as though they enjoy the joke

when I don't think they do.

Political satire that we know and love began in the 18th century.

And its greatest exponent was James Gillray.

This is an absolutely amazing image,

because it represents everything that's special about Gillray.

This cartoon was published in 1791.

And in it, Gillray takes aim at Prime Minister William Pitt.

So what does Gillray do to the great national leader?

He turns him into a toadstool.

So, Pitt's face, with the weak, disappearing, toffish chin,

the nose, besides which Pinocchio's nose is merely retrousse,

is on this kind of horrible mushroomy stalk

and it's planted upon a heap of crap.

And what is the heap of crap?

It's the royal family,

because the roots of the toadstool

form the unmistakable shape of a crown.

If this is an image of comic hatred,

it's an image of intense artistic love, too.

It's produced with all the intense care that would be

lavished on a great oil painting.

It's very, very exquisitely done,

it's restless,

it kind of curls and curves and moves.

Fabulous form.

Gillray's poison pen didn't stop with the Prime Minister.

The royal family was fair game, too,

and he made no-holds-barred images of them,

unthinkable today.

Every time you turn over a page, it's still shocking.

George III falling in and out of sanity.

The licentious Prince Regent.

The Queen.

Giving us the licence to laugh at the powerful,

satire was a uniquely British tool in keeping despotism from the door.

The freedom of British politics is attached to the liberties

it could take with solemn portraits.

And that tells us something about a democracy of vision,

a democracy of vision which is charged with political dynamite,

is being created here in Britain and only in Britain.

So, whatever else is wrong with aristocratic, unreformed Parliament,

the monarchy, or whatever, something extraordinary has

happened in the relationship between art, portraiture and the people.

Laughter and liberty danced freely around the pretentions of the mighty.

But after the French Revolution had given not just the Crown

but almost all of Britain a terrible scare,

there was a real need to rebrand the monarchy.

And a spectacular new art form came along which could do just that.

Photography came to Britain in the 1840s and it captured

the Victorian imagination with its alchemy of science and art.

In photographic studios like this one,

thousands upon thousands of faces lined up for the lens-man.

Their image taken from the world and miraculously, perfectly fixed.

Once, the portrait had been the preserve of the rich,

but now almost anyone could own an image of themselves and their families.

Look at these faces and you see the awakening of modern democracy.

Victorian reforms meant that these were the people in whose hands

power was destined to arrive.

And it was with them that the monarchy now sought to build a connection,

and they did so in the most intimate way.

These amazing images are so touchingly beautiful.

They are unlike any other image of the royals there'd ever been.

These photographs of Victoria and Albert

created a new image of monarchy,

not as a grand dynasty, but as a loving family.

Victorian life, with all its hypocrisies,

and all of its repressed nervy secrets and desires and anguishes

was built around the possibility of leading a perfect family and married life.

So here is the hero and heroine of our story,

and here's hubby sitting down reading as Prince Consulate liked to do,

something serious, and here's the Queen standing next to him.

But look at that pose - she's got her arm round his shoulders.

That is a happily married couple, isn't it?

That's a happily married, comfortable couple.

A husband and wife.

Moved by these portraits of simple, unadorned affection,

the public placed 60,000 orders in the first days alone.

And set on side tables across the land,

they allowed the British to live with

pictures of the royal family, and treat them as one of their own.

The royal family, and the way we love it

and the way we engage with it as a family,

the possibility of identifying with them, begins through these images.

I think everybody should have one item

with the royal family on,

just to say, you know, that's our royal family.

I know I've got more than that,

but I think everybody should have something.

People do say to me, "It sounds as though they're

"an extension of your family," and in a way they are.

I was always interested from the age of eight, really, because that's

when King George VI died, and I remember my parents were very upset.

It was like someone in my family had died.

The idea of the royals as our exemplary national family

generated deep affection from their subjects.

But no sooner had the hearts of the people been won

than this royal love story lost its leading man.

Following the death of Prince Albert in 1861,

the Queen went into deep mourning,

shutting herself off within the walls of Windsor Castle.

As if to fill the void left by the abrupt withdrawal of her actual presence,

Victoria issued a new set of photographs that were more revealing than ever before.

The inconsolable widow sits with her eyes shut,

with her chin slumped on her hand, thinking of her terrible loss.

And the dignified face of Prince Albert that had

appeared in the early photos, is now framed on the wall.

This must've actually, in a way, been really quite hard for her to do.

But she was really determined to do it.

We think about Victoria as very stuck in her ways,

but how adaptable she must have been to doing this.

Even in the midst of her own personal tragedy,

the Queen understood the importance of being visible to her subjects, come rain or shine.

I mean, the royal family,

especially the Queen, knows that they're there to be seen.

I mean, she has see-through umbrellas so that if it's raining, people can still see her.

I think if you can't see the face of your monarch, it is a great loss.

You want to see them, you just do.

But face-time with ordinary people would become

all-important in our own age of mass democracy.

Today, power resides with us all - in theory, at least.

But public suspicion of politicians is a way of life.

And so, it's more important than ever for the powerful to

shape an image of themselves we can all relate to.

No-one had that political art nailed better than Margaret Thatcher.

And her most brilliant coup at image making took place here.

19 Flood Street in Chelsea was once the home of Mrs Thatcher.

This was her power base as she plotted to oust Edward Heath

and become leader of the Tory party.

-MARGARET THATCHER:

-Well, Mr Heath's been leader for ten years,

and the party decided that there should be a contest.

You can't have a contest without a contestant, obviously.

And I'm one of the main ones.

Her challenge was to persuade the Tories

that a woman could lead the party, and even the nation, too.

But as the party faithful prepared to vote,

it seemed that Thatcher's bid was doomed.

There's a week to go before the crucial leadership poll,

and Margaret Thatcher is so much the underdog.

She's running a poor third.

So, on that weekend before the election,

reporters come to her house here,

and they want her to make a prediction about what's going to happen, and she won't do that.

And she does something brilliant instead - it's turned into a photo op.

As the press lay in wait, Thatcher stepped out of her home.

But she avoided a queenly wave, and instead did something remarkable.

She took a broom and decided to sweep her path.

The image taken would grab the headlines the following day

and forever change Thatcher's political fortunes.

She's got perfectly coiffed hair but it's a practical hair cut,

she's got her sleeves rolled up for the task ahead.

And above all is the broom - the broom emerges.

She has a weapon.

The weapon is going change Britain, but it's also

the weapon of a woman, the new broom that is going to sweep clean.

And as much as Elizabeth I is festooned in the pearls of her virginity,

this is a perfectly simple, effective icon

of a woman who's determined to take power.

This Boudicca with the broom brushed Heath aside

and it became the sword in her political crusade.

With this sort of image, she cuts to the quick of British life,

which is profoundly domestic, about keeping house and home together,

and she's going to do it with kind of militant briskness.

Mrs Thatcher, the morning after your election. How do you feel about it now?

There's so much to be done.

Are you a little apprehensive about this new job?

Of course. Of course. Everyone is, starting a new job.

Have you thought at all about Mr Heath this morning?

Of course I have.

From there on, Thatcher was resolute in the planning

and control of her image.

But when the dignity of a painted portrait was bestowed on her,

the result was a frozen icon.

The picture was commissioned in 1983 from the artist Rodrigo Moynihan,

following another Conservative triumph at the polls.

No sooner had work begun

than Thatcher's interfering got out of hand.

Over eight sittings, the hair was deemed a little off-colour.

An unflattering squint was endlessly re-worked.

And the deep blue eyes were made a steely shade of grey.

All at the Prime Minister's behest.

The result is something which was acceptable, unobjectionable -

the kiss of death to great portraiture.

But there's one last portrait.

And its story is about what happens when the powerful lose control,

if only for a minute.

The result can be unpredictable and miraculous.

No place captures the spirit of British democracy like Number 10.

Its walls lined with Prime Ministers past and present,

their portraits ostentatious in their modesty.

But when that democracy came under threat,

a portrait was made which itself became a weapon.

A portrait of the man who began this history.

Winston Churchill.

Late 1941. Continental Europe had fallen to the Nazis.

As the German war machine rolled on, Churchill went to North America,

desperate for resources on which the future of the war depended.

He's feeling very tired,

he's feeling the weight of the war, Britain's near isolation,

the struggle, he's feeling it in his bones in his blood and his body.

Yet another great welcome awaited Mr Churchill in the Canadian House of Commons.

In Ottowa, Churchill summoned up his last

reserves of strength to deliver one of his finest speeches.

We shall never descend to the German and Japanese level.

But if anybody likes to play rough, we can play rough, too.

Words which brought the House to its feet.

Exhausted, Churchill left for the speaker's chamber,

looking forward to a much-needed Scotch.

And he's hit by an immense bank of floodlights and spotlights.

He's going to have a photo session and he is furious about it.

This is not what he wants to do at this particular moment.

Behind the camera was a photographer by the name of Yousuf Karsh.

And as he looked Churchill in the eye,

he was seized by a bolt of creative audacity.

He walks up to Churchill.

He reaches for that face, and pulls the cigar out of Churchill's mouth.

Everybody is stricken with horror and terror.

Karsh simply walks back to his camera and releases the shutter

and what he catches is that look on Churchill's face of petulant fury.

What Karsh had captured was

one of the greatest portraits

of the 20th century.

One that's defined our memory of Winston Churchill.

It's a portrait that says over and over, "We will never surrender."

But it had come about exactly when Churchill had surrendered,

to the brilliant instinct of the artist.

Because at that decisive moment, it was the photographer,

not the Prime Minister, who knew exactly what the people needed.

Karsh said, "I think I've given them the Churchill they wanted."

What they wanted was bulldog bravura, implacable strength,

indomitable resolve.

No-one needed to know that what the world was looking at

was just the face of a man who had lost his cigar.