You evil woman.
As you might guess, I did not like Margaret Thatcher. In fact, I loathed her and all that she stood for. I didn’t loathe her in the same way the miners did, but rather because just as James I and Charles I believed in the Divine Right of Kings, so Thatcher believed in the Divine Right of Prime Ministers, and Blair after her. That kind of pseudo-religious fervour makes me uncomfortable because it’s blind and unthinking, and it’s expected that the adherents should be just as blind and unthinking. In the same vein, I could never abide the Tories inability to comprehend that not everyone is born with the same opportunities and that hard work is not always rewarded.
There always seemed to be a little too much of “I’m wealthy; my friends are wealthy; how can the rest of society not be as successful as me?”
I also loathed her because of her destructive impact on the universities, which, I suspect, had its roots in Oxford refusing to award her with an honorary degree. One course of the destruction was regarding universities as mere adjuncts to business and industry (up with science; down with humanities); another course of the destruction was allowing polys to award degrees, which effectively increased the number of universities. This might look good on paper, but it devalued degrees. It also seemed to allow the government to play the spoilt university student card. The populace, by and large not so privileged, were not going to foot the bill for so many indolent middle class layabouts.
The whole business almost certainly contributed to my stillborn academic career as the universities were vindictively squeezed while being encouraged to overburden themselves with students.
Eventually, I came to see Thatcher as a dinosaur whose views and attitudes were out of date and belonged to a different age. She seemed to be as out of touch with reality as every other tyrant is. (Oddly enough – if I might be permitted an aside – I tend to see the EU in much the same way: it is an organisation which is a consequence of the aftermath of World War II, but which makes less sense in the modern world.)
I see the funeral is going to cost £10 million and that William Hague is saying the country can afford it. I’m sure it can, William, but there are much better and undoubtedly more urgent things on which to spend that sort of money than some divisive and deranged old woman.
Green Bamboo 