When Winston Churchill died, Lady Violet Bonham Carter made her maiden speech in the House of Lords. ‘It is hard for us to realise,’ she said, ‘that that indomitable heart to which we all owe our freedom … has fought its last long battle and is still.’ Her words have application to Margaret Thatcher. But something else about them strikes me. Lady Violet was the daughter of a prime minister (Asquith). Before Churchill married, nearly 60 years earlier, she had been, more or less, his girlfriend. It is a reminder that Churchill was, from the first, in the circles of power and privilege. This does not lessen his achievement, but it points up what Mrs Thatcher had to fight for that he did not. She had to struggle even to enter, let alone to dominate, those circles. He was born in Blenheim Palace, she over a grocer’s shop. When she died, she had no former boyfriend in the Lords to remember her youth. At his funeral — which I watched, awed, from a window in Whitehall — Churchill’s hearse had a Guard of Honour formed of the Harrow School Combined Cadet Force. I don’t think Kesteven and Grantham Girls School could have offered the equivalent. When Churchill died, some of the best tributes paid to him were from his fellow members in the Other Club. At the end, as at the beginning, she had no club.
And even in death, the haughtiest elements of the establishment still want to put her down. While the Queen readily pays her the Churchillian tribute of attending her funeral, the BBC scours the country for people to condemn her. On Sunday morning, it lined up its regional stations and I gave interviews to about eight of them in sequence about Lady T. On Radio Nottingham, I had to listen first to an item about local reaction to her death. There were five speakers, all from a mining village, all attacking her. It wasn’t my job to comment on this — I was supposed to be talking about her religion — but since the BBC had offered no counter voice whatever, I pointed out on air that Nottinghamshire, stronghold of the working miners who refused to strike, had been persecuted by the violent pickets of Arthur Scargill. Mrs Thatcher was their ally, a fact effaced by the BBC’s photo-shop of history.
In my own region, BBC South-East, I took part in a television news programme about the Thatcher effect on the economy there. The main part of the package was about the devastation she had wrought by the closure of Betteshanger colliery in Kent. No mention of the coming of the M25 and the Channel Tunnel, or of the emergence of the region as one of the most prosperous in the entire world in the whole of human history! It really was ‘What have the Romans ever done for us?’ In the Sussex villages near where we live, there is huge respect and often affection for Mrs Thatcher. I am not speaking only of her political devotees, but of people fair-minded and perceptive enough to recognise patriotism and hard work. They are fascinated by the first woman who publicly achieved so much, her unique mixture of ordinariness and extraordinariness. Apart from an interesting item on the Today programme about Basildon, I have not heard or seen a single BBC programme all this week which contained the straightforward tributes of straightforward, unpolitical people; yet they are there, in their millions.
As I write, the funeral is about to start. The effort put in by those running it is impressive. I know an elderly widow, now in the West Country, who walked to school with Margaret Roberts. She wrote to me regretting that she was too frail to attend. I thought it might be possible to help her. I rang Ed Llewellyn, the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, late at night, and found him in a castle in Germany with David Cameron and Angela Merkel. In the course of the following day, the old lady had been persuaded to accept a ticket. The Cabinet Office also offered, unasked, a ticket for an old friend to help her. Then the friend fell ill. The ticket was efficiently transferred to her son. She will be there.
There is one aspect of the funeral where the critics are correct. It is unfitting that Parliament was recalled for the adjournment debate, and a pity that the funeral was so timed that Prime Minister’s Questions, the joust at which she excelled, were cancelled. The House of Commons should, of course, show respect for its great dead, but her death was not an emergency. The debate could have waited until the House returned. As for question time, she never shirked it in life, so why was it stilled in death? Once when she was Prime Minister, the chairman of the Procedure Committee came to her to suggest reducing Prime Minister’s Questions to once a week (a rotten idea, later introduced by Tony Blair). She looked at him rather coldly. ‘What does the House of Commons want?’ was her only question, the only right question.
The last bit of my book is the acknowledgments. I spent the weekend trying to get them right. There are about 400 people to thank by name, including 315 interviewees. It is agony, because I shall certainly have forgotten deserving people. Please let me exploit this column to apologise in advance and ask anyone who feels ill-used to tell me — I can put matters right in later editions and it may be that you helped me with Volume Two, not with this one. Sorry, sorry, sorry, as Boris would say.
At the Other Club meeting which paid tribute to Churchill, Oliver Lyttelton said, ‘He enjoyed a conflict of ideas, but not a conflict between people. He saw man as a noble and not as a mean creature. The only people he never forgave were those who, in the words he so often used, “fell below the level of events”.’ Those two sentences apply exactly to Margaret Thatcher — once you have changed the gender of the pronouns.
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