By the time you read this it will all be over, but will it? I’ve had a bad feeling all along about those who opposed the result of the 2016 referendum. When they don’t get what they want, they play dirty — just look what they did to Lady T 29 years or so ago. And speaking of the greatest prime minister ever, Charles Moore’s biography of Maggie, a magnificent achievement, has left me open-mouthed at his scholarship and ability to write 3,000 pages in such a relatively short time.
It should be required reading in schools, but that, in turn, would require students to be able to read and concentrate, something the little darlings cannot be expected to do nowadays, what with Twitter and other such diversions that keep them occupied and as dumb as planks. Reading the book sure brought back lots of memories — of the three-day week when I first arrived to live in Britain, and the winter of discontent.
After Lady T had fixed the country and been repaid by types like Heseltine, she came to Switzerland and we fast became friends. She once asked me where all the heroes had gone. I should have said that she should know, she was the last one. I didn’t, out of shyness and not wanting to grovel. But I regret it to this day because the lady deserved it. She was definitely the last Brit hero — I use the masculine noun deliberately. She saved the bloody country, after all.
In a long review of Charles’s book in a Yankee weekly, a bitter sort of Brit complains that she showed no inner life: ‘…in all of Moore’s thousands of pages, there is not the slightest stirring of interiority.’
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