Mrs Thatcher…as she came to see herself

Mrs Thatcher was a year younger than my mother Creena. Although brought up in conservative, Catholic Ireland; although in many ways mum was as much a striver as Mrs Thatcher; although mum embraced the home-owning values of post war Britain, Creena viscerally disliked Thatcher – Maggie as she dismissively called her. She hated her hats; she hated her voice; she hated her values. She hated the way Mrs Thatcher talked-down to people.

The Man once her friend & patron who came to hate her more than her political enemies

In leafy Maidenhead mum was in a small minority. In Maidenhead, in the Home counties, in southern England, Margaret Thatcher was emblematic: a cross between an English Joan of Arc and the mythic Queen Elizabeth I. She was Winston Churchill in a frock.

Yet as her supporters start to build their shrine to her we should remember: Mrs Thatcher was the friend of Pinochet and the enemy of Nelson Mandela. She made Mugabi. She was wrong about Ireland. She fought for the freedom of a thousand white Britons in the Falklands but signed away the freedoms of a million or more Chinese living in Hong Kong. She deliberately divided the mining communities to win her battle with Scargill but then abandoned her allies in those very villages to their own fate. To disguise the unemployment that followed the destruction of manufacturing industry she put more individuals on Incapacity Benefit than any other PM before or since – a million in total – an abuse of the proper purpose of public Welfare for easy political ends. Its consequence haunts us today – uniquely her bastard child.

Now she is dead. She belongs from this point to History. But History is no impartial judge and Mrs Thatcher will have her noisy partisans in death as she had in life. They will wish to set her in the silver sea of England as an Empire; the daughter of Destiny; the mother’s Pride. But what is most interesting is Thatcher’s images and imagery belong quintessentially to England south of the Trent: the England of the middle-brow; the middle class England of Miss Marple; this is the little England of the small town; this is the England that thinks Britain is just another word for England.

The Conservative Lady from Finchley

Mrs Thatcher grew up in the Imperial England of the twentieth century; hers was the England wrapped in the Union flag; the England of Empire Day; the England that sang Land of Hope & Glory at the last night of the Proms. It was the England that ate strawberries at Wimbledon; wore hats at Ascot; and wished it might go to Henley. In that sense Thatcher was a regional figure with regional values. In that Thatcher was divisive like Oliver Cromwell rather than inclusive like say Charles II or Queen Anne.

At the heart of what Margaret Thatcher represented were the sectional interests of class; the moneyed interests of the haves; the amoral brotherhood of freebooting financiers; and their sister superiorities of Edwardian elitism. In a sense she was the England of Margo Leadbetter in the Good Life made flesh. And like Margot she was both a force of Nature and singularly unable to laugh at herself. Gradually Mrs Thatcher became the victim of her own strangulated vowels as she came to think of herself in terms of ‘we’ rather than ‘I’; uttering without any sense of irony that most bizarre of phrases ‘we are a grandmother.’

In her political lexicon the United Kingdom was only one kingdom, England; it spoke only in her very English accent. She could hear no other nation or region speak. Like Mary Whitehouse she engaged only with those with whom she agreed. She argued her case but never persuaded. Her sense of being right became synonymous with being right. Ultimately her self belief in the way of high tragedy became her undoing. At the end she no longer listened to reason; only to those who told what she wished to hear. She came to see the world of politics as one of treachery; only in the terms of her betrayal; forgetting entirely her own earlier betrayal of Edward Heath in 1975.

In her sixteen years as a Party Leader Mrs Thatcher took the Conservative Party from being a party of the United Kingdom to being a party of the southern English. For example in 1955, 36 of the seventy-odd Scots MPs were Conservatives; in 1970 there were 22; in 1979 there were 23; in 1987, 10; in 1992, 3 and in 1997 none. A similar trend has overtaken the Welsh Conservatives and also Conservative representation in the great cities of England outside London has also collapsed over the same period since 1979.

The BBC and the Media is giving us saturation coverage of this national event. There is plenty of anecdotal commentary passing itself off as analysis. This morning I had to turn off Radio 4 Today as it almost choked itself on self-congratulation as it played us of old interviews done by the Today team which naturally are more insightful than anyone else’s old interviews. There is little perspective offered over and above the carpet bomb replays of her triumphs. I lived through those long eleven years.  It was not pretty. Some of us never felt she represented anything we valued. And in clause 28 and in the initial reactions to HIV/AIDS her prejudices made many lives worse than they needed to be. And she will be accorded both a ceremonial funeral with military honours- in the presence of the Queen it is a State Funeral in all but name.

In making it so the Queen forgets those of her subjects who have reason to rue the days of her longest serving premier. From my humble Irish viewpoint that is a very English mistake. I will not watch the grand funeral. It will of course draw comparisons with Churchill in 1965. But this will not be a moment of a country coming together. That in itself should cause us pause. As Mark Antony says of assassinated Roman Dictator: ‘the evil that men do lives after them the good is oft interred with their bones – so let it be with Caesar….’

The famous satirical poster of the poster boy & poster girl of the New Right

I have no wish to see Mrs Thatcher deprived of Heaven for the hell she made on earth for some of the poorest in our society. This was price which she believed had to be paid. It is now for her conscience. I will observe of her remarks upon religion only she could imagine the Parable of the Good Samaritan was about him having the money to look after the man set upon by thieves. Mrs Thatcher refused to see that the others who had already passed-by on the other side also had owned both the means and the moral obligation to help the victim who was one of their own. It was rather the Samaritan, who owed no obligation to help who in fact stopped and did more than was needed.

Nor did she see that many thought she lowered the moral bar in our society by abandoning our post war social obligation genuinely to help the poor. Indeed many thought many of her policies let loose the self-same thieves in our society who had set upon the man in the Parable.

Now she is in the eternal market she may barter as she will. She will have all the time in the world to debate the true meaning of the Parable with its author. She may also run into my mother who might well give her a few choice words of her own regarding this and that. As for Mrs Thatcher’s religion I cannot speak of it beyond saying she must have had a healthy disregard for the admonitions of St Paul:

And therein I can find something upon which she & I would wholly agree.