Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em – Malvolio – Twelfth Night

Margaret Thatcher’s death can hardly be regarded as a surprise. What has come to me as a surprise is the storm of over-reaction.

I remember Churchill’s funeral in 1965. I cannot say it moved me terribly. I was 10 and Churchill was already an historical figure. Moreover, though well regarded as a wartime leader, the rest of his career, from Gallipoli in 1915 through to Norway by way of the general strike of 1926 and the return to the gold standard in 1928 was suspect.  Churchill showed neither particular prescience nor particularly good political judgement in his long journey towards 1940. Even now, as his wartime reputation is gradually re-evaluated, more questions emerge about his judgment than seemed polite to ask in 1965. That said,  there will always be those for whom merely posing a hard question is an act of Lèse–majesté.

Mrs Thatcher’s legacy is necessarily even more equivocal  It causes me wry amusement that this Goddess Wise was unceremoniously defenestrated from her niche in Downing Street not by those who had cause to hate her but by those who professed undying love for her. They will bring the most florid tributes to her funeral. 

Carving heros from the febrile clay of our fellows is something at which humankind is well practised. Pomp and circumstance rarely last beyond the life of a single flower cut to canopy the hearse. These solemn occasions always end in tears of disappointment. Despite the admonishment of the First Commandment we’re just as inclined to worship false gods today as the Chosen people were when impatient of Moses they melted their gold to have Aron cast a Golden Calf.

What marks greatness; or makes greatness; or thrusts greatness upon another, is thought self-evident. In the aftermath of death we most often misjudge. The role of mock-heroics and myth-making in our easy exaggerations is a good subject from which to draw salutary lessons. Time gives us perspective; History’s long retrospect often rebalances early judgements. Often it turns out that the evidence for the self-evident was thinner than it appeared to be at the time. 

That is not to say for a moment I am immune from hero-worship. In my time I have engaged in it. In my adolescent days and beyond I have found much to admire in various political figures.  Of the great Britons I would choose Walpole; the elder Pitt; Gladstone; Lloyd George and Attlee. Of great Americans I would have Jefferson; Jackson; Lincoln; Wilson;  FDR; and JFK. Lyndon Johnson deserves more from history than he has been given; Nixon; Reagan and both Bush presidents considerably less. Another Wilson, Harold, was the man whom I greatly admired in my 1960’s boyhood. He was greater than the sum of the parts of the Labour movement which he led. That turned out to be his tragedy.

I guess, however, two emblematic figures stood out in my catholic, Irish childhood. Pope John XXIII and John F. Kennedy. Bobby Kennedy was special to me because his assassination came when I was 14 and on the edge of adulthood and at the height of my idealism: his loss appeared to me doubly tragic and doubly affecting. But because of his words JFK, for all we learned later, remained for me…the noblest Roman of them all…