The grocer’s daughter from Grantham goes

Although anticipated for such a long time as potentially happening at any moment, the death of Margaret Thatcher is still a bit of shock.  Even The Daily Telegraph was caught on the hop, beaten to breaking the news by the BBC, even though the baroness was staying in the Ritz Hotel (as she recuperated from an operation), an establishment in the hands of the Barclay brothers, owners of The Telegraph.  Cue predictable outpourings of warm reminiscences and fierce hostility.  One insightful strand of thought amongst all the headlines about being a divisive prime minister was that she was a leader, not following the crowd – whether one agreed with Thatcher or not, she laid out a clear path for the country until hubris got the better of her at the end of the 1980s.

It was noticeable that among the most prominent of the tributes was from former South African president, F. W. De Klerk, who finally dismantled apartheid.  Even if Nelson Mandela gave any public pronouncements, I imagine he would have kept quiet, with Mrs Thatcher quite unabashed in labelling him a terrorist (though she had no trouble with former guerrilla fighter-turned-president Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe).  She’s outlived some of her contemporaries – Ronald Reagan, Francois Mitterand, Edward Heath, Michael Foot, Jim Callaghan – yet others are still around – Arthur Scargill, Derek Hatton, Michael Heseltine, Helmut Kohl (who she called an ‘old man in a hurry’ despite him being younger than her), Mikhail Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush, whom she told not to have a ‘wobbly’ over Iraq in 1990.

I know some people have kept a bottle of champagne stored away for the day when Thatcher died, but Ed Miliband was right in saying she changed the centre ground and indeed what it means to be a Conservative (for her radicalism was very anti-conservative).  She defined a decade, with a risky but successful war that hastened the end of a brutal military junta, evisceration of the coal-mining and manufacturing sectors, a needed suppression of out-of-control trade unions, the get-rich-quick yuppie greed, the privatisation of the ‘family silver’ and calling IRA terrorism ‘criminality’ rather than declaring a war on it.  She was also an inspiration to many women that they could achieve the highest positions in the land on merit.  Now Sir John Major is the Elder Person of State, as the oldest living former prime minister.  I’m not a Thatcher supporter by any stretch or a Conservative but I still think it is sad that she has died.