Democracy works in mysterious ways. So mysterious in fact that in the week that we are supposed to elect our EuroMPs, most of us don’t have a clue about which of this faceless bunch of bureaucrats is supposed to represent us. But if my EuroMP looked like Charlotte Rampling I think I’d remember her.

In David Hare’s new film Paris by Night she plays such a creature. As Clara Paige, up and coming darling of the right, she is an ambitious EuroMP who appears to have it all. Her political philosophy is as immaculate as her clothes. Her image is of a successful Tory career woman, a woman who instinctively knows about hard work, ambition and the need for order.

Typically the price of her brilliant career—even in the work of a right-on dramatist such as Hare—is a messy private life. Apart from a hopeless alcoholic husband, Gerald (the wonderful Michael Gambon), Clara is plagued by anonymous telephone calls. In the middle of the night, a male voice breathes down the line, “I know who you are. I know what you’re doing.” Could this be Michael Swanton, a one-time business partner ruined by Gerald, who is trying to blackmail her? Or someone else?

Clara escapes through her work to Paris, to a conference where her brisk, but charming, manner wins over not only her colleagues but a young industrial designer, Wallace (Iain Glenn). She has dinner with him at his brother-in-law’s house: this is where we see Hare’s impossibly romanticised view of an extended family: good food, agreeable argument, witty conversation and sweet French kids. The richness of this scene provides an overstated and oversimplified contrast to Clara’s own impoverished family life, yet seems characteristic of a film which, while appearing to be a sophisticated indictment of Thatcherism, relies almost entirely on sloppy sixties ideas.

This is nowhere more apparent than in the treatment of Rampling’s character. Clara Paige is duplicitous, not simply because that’s the nature of politics, but because that’s the nature of women. Thus, like our leaderine herself, Clara can be the best man for the job. The right-wing woman provides an excuse for the insidious misogyny so well practised by members of that protected species—the lefty playwright.

Hare also uses a form—that of the noirish thriller—in which it is almost compulsory for the strong female character to be obliterated. But Rampling must be used to being destroyed in just about every film she appears in. Paris provides a backdrop for her downfall, as visually stunning as Rampling’s face, shot for much of the time in dramatic close-up. But even this cannot compensate for some appalling dialogue which may well sound meaningful on stage but, as a film script, is awkwardly pretentious.

“I shall walk around Paris all night,” says Clara significantly after her date with Wallace. On her stroll she meets Swanton and pushes him in the Seine. Woman just can’t help acting on impulse even if it means murder. The plot, as you may have gathered, gets as bloated as the body that is fished out of the river. Clara loses her cool as she tries to rationalise what she has done. Only Wallace knows the truth, but after a couple of love scenes, he is not going to tell.

And we are back to that old chestnut—the difference between private lives and public morality, which has never struck me as solely a problem for Tory politicians. What I object to, however, in this film is the way that this everyday conflict is played out through one-dimensional notions of sexual difference.

This successful working woman is successful because she represses traditionally feminine qualities. She says at one point that she hates shapelessness, promiscuity, softness. Her hardness, her relentless endorsement of the need for strong leadership and self-help is seen somehow as a denial of herself rather than as a consciously chosen worldview. It is only with Wallace that she reveals her other side.

For Hare this contradiction is what destroys her. And yet, as long as left-wing men such as Hare continue to articulate the machinations of conservative ideology and femininity in such a crass way, right-wing women will remain little more than fantasy figures. Conservatism is not some mutation from “natural” femininity or some kind of hormone imbalance that upsets the ability of women to vote Labour!

It goes without saying that right-wing women are much more than fantasies. They may well also, however, have a better understanding of the political nature of the fantasies constructed around power and gender than their critics. Fantasy has no problem at all with contradiction. Countless commentators have pointed out the inconsistencies in Thatcher’s public persona—but this has not diminished her position. She and her imitators seduce by denying sexual difference and promising an imaginary resolution of it by, as Bea Campbell, says uniting, “patriarchal and feminine discourses”.

In the limited and linear thought of certain parts of the left, this unity is a contradiction in terms and therefore not theoretically viable (as though contradiction is somehow an untenable and unliveable phenomenon). Practically, it sustains some of our most powerful politicians and popular fictions.

Maybe that’s why David Hare’s “heroine” ends up riddled with bullet holes, while both Mrs Thatcher and Alexis Colby/Dexter can wear a string of paradoxes around their necks as if they were pearls.