Thatcher

Even my father, a die hard capitalist, hated Margaret Thatcher. That became news to me when I bought her biography for him one Christmas. His view of her is something I've never quite understood, but I'm sure it's something to do with investment in manufacturing, and the fact that even my father rather disliked his own bosses (the financiers, the elite- like Giles caricatures; puffing cigars and riding in Bentleys) in the board room, and sensed something other than grocer's daughter's economics was required to save British industry. For me, of a rather different disposition (and even as I listen to my father wonder -nearly blind now at ninety- that 'he may be changing his views' and I nearly fall off my chair) perhaps it's the fact she died in her care home of choice; The Ritz, that says it all. The Ritz! Sod the collective then, even in death! In my view she was not a politician, she was not good at that, but she was an ideologue and she was very good at that; she represents something more out of Walter Scott; from nothing to everything via virtue, but it's a phony virtue, just as we might consume in those fifties movies; men in tights. It does not appear rigorous, merely bloody minded. It wasn't virtue, it was Iron Lady as Ivanhoe.