The sullied goods of the grocer’s daughter

The obituaries were never going to be direct, only directed. 

Margaret Thatcher shrewdly corralled the British media: “Labour isn’t Working”, “Gotcha!”, “Up Yours, Delors” weren't instances of chance. An entire union movement wasn't tickled to death; it was strangled in its sleep. 

Democratic plurality in the Britain Thatcher gave us favours the successful first. Although we have heard the opinions of the Scottish, the northern Englander and the Catholic Irish, the voices of the elder statesmen, the businessmen and the homeowner have come first.

Like newspapers, TV news editors know that the audience often skim the body of the story and only follow the ledes. Those with idle concentration spans will be therefore left malnourished in their ideas about Thatcher and what she really did to this country.

Watching the obituaries roll in, you would think that you’ve stepped back into the 1980s again. The problem, however, is that twenty three years since her own cabinet sacked her, Britain has lost all sense of ideology thanks largely to the economic and cultural molestation Thatcherism – and New Labour -  performed as its one and only peccadillo.

What Thatcherism involved was enough to warrant a further autopsy - to roll back the frontiers of what we missed, or was not told in the first place. Like Reagan, Thatcher’s hands got dirty. Did the Belgrano really pose a military threat? If reported fully at the time, what damage would the Westland Affair have done to her reputation? And the Irish, the Scousers?  How close were they to being purged by the sheer propaganda heard in the words “terrorist” and “hooligan”? 

The library footage we have seen appears as a highly-charged episode of “I Love the 1980s”; all the ideological nutrients have been sucked from our memories during what was a terrible time for the many, not the few, under the Iron Lady grip. Instead, it’s become a television-shaped essence of history. 

Margaret Thatcher was the grocer’s daughter, whose only real wish was to sell us down the river.

In its reflection of the politics we had to suffer under her, the country is as it was in the 1980s: divided.