handbag [M19th] The Conservative MP Julian Critchley introduced handbag to mean ‘to attack or crush verbally’. In 1982 he said of Margaret Thatcher, then British prime minister, that ‘she can’t look at a British institution without hitting it with her handbag’. The article in The Economist that reported his comment went on to say that ‘Treasury figures published last week show how good she has proved at handbagging the Civil Service’. Since the 1980s a histrionic confrontation has sometimes been described as handbags, or handbags at three (or ten) paces as if describing duelling.