Missing Maggie

The closer we get to the Great Disappointment — aka the forthcoming Heath administration — the more I miss Margaret Thatcher. Just how much I was reminded by Michael Cockerell’s new series The Great Offices of State (BBC4, Thursday). This particular episode was about Surrender Monkey Central — aka the Foreign Office — and featured Maggie in her pomp, eyes ablaze, holding forth on the only way to deal with jumped-up foreigners like Galtieri.

‘I’m not in the business of appeasement. It is not part of my psyche!’ she declared. ‘You can’t negotiate away an invasion!’ she said. As for her tone when she talked about the FO’s love of ‘compromise, negotiation, diplomacy’: she made it sound more like ‘mass rape, paedophilia, genocide’.

Yeah, yeah. I know. It’s the Foreign Office’s job to keep us out of war at all costs, thus saving us blood and treasure. And, yes, I appreciate that Britain is no longer the force it was in the world, not after Suez, still less after the previous Heath administration begged and bribed and wormtongued our disastrous entry into the EEC.

Even so, you looked at the footage of Thatcher, then you looked at the footage of David Miliband pretending to be a big grown-up Foreign Secretary and bleating about how ‘we’ve got to be a country that approaches things in a serious way’, and you couldn’t help thinking, ‘Jesus! How did we fall so far so quickly?’

The programme, being the BBC, I suppose, was infected by this same self-hating, Milibandian malaise. Much surprise was expressed by the voiceover that we still have a ‘seat at the top table’ in international negotiations (as if, somehow, we were already 70th rather than our current — though not for long, eh, George? — 7th in the world economic league tables); the imperial grandeur of Palmerston’s Foreign Office building was repeatedly invoked not in pride but out of apparent embarrassment that the loser nation we are today could ever have had such an inflated idea of its own self-worth.

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