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Thursday 4 December 2008

It’s so unfair

Margaret Thatcher - the Long Walk to Finchley (BBC4) 

But enough self-pity. Actually, no, more self-pity — for I haven’t got to the most depressing thing of all about the Tories being back in charge. I refer, of course, to the mill our fair nation has had to go through in order to get them there. After 11 years of Blair and Brown we are once more the economic basket case we were in 1979. Our gold reserves have been sold for peanuts, our public services are a shambles, the Thatcher legacy has been squandered, everything that could have gone wrong has gone wrong.

And I didn’t vote for any of it, that’s what annoys me. Unlike some of my friends — Damian, hang your head in shame — I never once believed in the Blair project or the Brown project, not ever, ever, ever. I’m a deeply ideological right-wing libertarian and if the country had just been destroyed by people with politics akin to mine I’d take it on the chin and say, ‘OK. My whole philosophy has been proved wrong. I deserve it.’ Instead I feel rather as you do in the classroom when the naughty kid has put a condom on teacher’s chair and because no one will own up the whole class is going to be punished. But why should I be? I’ve been in the right all along. It’s so unfair.

Which leaves me just the briefest of space to say how much I enjoyed Margaret Thatcher — the Long Walk To Finchley (BBC4, Thursday). Besides some stellar performances from the luminous Andrea Riseborough (her pert bottom sashaying beneath her nip-waisted Fifties jackets is going to haunt me for months to come) and Rory Kinnear as a loyal, chirpy, jack-the-lad Denis, it abounded in great jokes none the worse for being sledgehammer subtle.

There was the one where young Mark Thatcher taunts his sister Carol: ‘When are you ever going to go to the jungle?’ (she went on to win I’m a Celebrity..., geddit?), and the one near the end where they go to the beach and, titter, Mark gets himself lost in the sand dunes. I also liked the one where Ted Heath (an enjoyably vicious caricature by Sam West) treats the ambitious young Margaret to a threatening orchestral analogy about overloud French horns drowning out their more subtle neighbours. ‘Is that why you prefer to be on your own, playing with your organ, Mr Heath?’ a blue rinse innocently inquires. Ah, those oldies never stale!

More articles from: James Delingpole | this section

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