Blog

10 april 2013, this blessed plot

I remember vividly being woken quite rudely after a late night by a boisterous flatmate, to be told that maggie was gone, and just lying there rubbing my eyes and trying to understand. Like london was its capital, so margaret thatcher was britain's prime minister. A whole generation of us, thatcher's children like it or not, had grown up knowing nothing else, and at that moment couldn't really imagine it. I vaguely remember seeing david steel on some staircase after the 1979 election and conflating the sparse crowd greeting him with his 11 mps. As we came of age, it was thatcher and only thatcher that actually won general elections, the falklands, regular fights with the trades unions and pretty much everything else eventually, until she didn't, when incredibly suddenly she was gone. There have been so many obituaries and commentaries these last days that there's little that can be added, except to marvel at her durability and the incontestable fact that whether she did right or wrong, she certainly did things, and an awful lot of them. Which is not something, to a degree as a result of the blessed margaret, that too many politicians since can say. The global economic consensus she helped create is now the populist centre that most crowd to occupy, but without the polarised opinion she also brought, the winners and losers, the reverence and the loathing. Her most lasting legacies are probably that economic consensus, and britain's attitude to europe, which since her mounting of the barricades at bruges has been a remorseless one way street, across all parties. Setting the uk, or its english rump, on the path out of the union may yet be her most lasting memorial.