One of the first gags I ever wrote for the BBC radio show Naked Video was about the high-ranking official of the Free Church of Scotland who had the bare-faced effrontery to attend the funeral of a Roman Catholic acquaintance.
‘You’re not being censured for going to the funeral’, said the chairman of the disciplinary committee convened to chastise the hapless miscreant. ‘You’re being censured for not dancing on the grave’.
As news of Mrs Thatcher’s demise found its way to Australia, with clips of suspiciously-too-young-to-remember-her post-punks dancing Highland flings in George Square appearing on telly a lot more often than any reverential tributes did, I felt a bit like the Wee Free man at the funeral mass.
A traitor.
Because, for me, there is nothing to celebrate. Mrs Thatcher is dead? I thought she died years ago.
Don’t get me wrong. At the time, I hated her more than anyone. Well, as much as everyone else did, anyway. I paid my dues - I was there, mate, in the thick of it –Maggie, Maggie, Maggie’d regularly every weekend at rallies and demonstrations, didn’t pay the poll tax and even had a three month stint decamped with striking miners in Glengarnock operating as a flying picket.
Thatcher was truly my enemy – I hated everything about her, right down from the could-withstand-a-hurricane steel helmet of a hairstyle, hopelessly contrived posh accent and fussy crimplene dresses with bows through to the premeditated, heartless political ideology designed to rob the working class of any advantage they’d worked for decades to achieve.
But, as Oscar Wilde had it – ‘nothing annoys an enemy more than forgiving them’ –so I unilaterally gave up hating Mrs Thatcher 20 years ago and subsequently find it particularly hard to rekindle my venom now just because a frail, faded and evidently utterly bewildered wee woman who used to be Prime Minister has finally dropped off the perch.
After all, one of the reasons we purported to hate her all those years ago was as a result of her lack of compassion and regard for the plight of others, a quality which I’d like to think everyone who believes in the principles of Socialism considers to be non-negotiable. (Yeah, right.)
Truth is, she did die years ago.
When she was ousted, by her own pals remember, her own party at any rate, a situation that always seemed a bit unfair to me; after all we hated her the most and therefore should have been given the chance to hand her her jotters.
She died, then. When she left office, Mrs Thatcher’s life fall apart.
Deprived of the thing she loved more than anything else – power and influence and the opportunity to inspire adulation and – let’s face it, she loved it – extreme animosity every time she appeared in public, Mrs T was a dead woman walking.
Any time she subsequently materialised on TV she came across as the sad, bitter and twisted old crone she apparently was – a figure of pity, an assessment certainly not diluted by her later descent into the shadowy and muddled world of dementia.
How much better for Mrs T if she’d developed an interesting hobby, a passion which could have taken the place of her previous obsessive involvement in world and domestic political decision-making.
I mean, money wasn’t a problem, she could have done anything - taken up the banjo, farmed alpacas, or become a fanatical Rangers supporter – something a bit frivolous and pointless that would have helped her while away her long, interminable leisure hours.
But no, she never did, always being content – or so it seemed – to be seen as that woman who used to be Mrs T – a somehow entirely unreal character more caricature than anything else, which didn’t in any way help to portray her as the human being she – no matter how hard it is to accept –indisputably was.
Politics aside, there were two aspects of Maggie I couldn’t get my head around. Firstly, there was humour.
Plainly she didn’t have a sense of humour and although there were rumours that she lapped up episodes of Yes, Minister, you just knew that she probably thought it was a documentary.
(On the other hand, she did spend 17 consecutive New Year’s Eve’s with Jimmy Savile, which quite obviously would be impossible to bear unless you had some sense of the comically absurd.)
The second problem I have with her is sex.
The idea of Mrs T being in any way seductive is so outlandish to me that I actually find it a bit uncomfortable to even have the words: ‘Margaret Thatcher’ and ‘sexy’ in the same sentence, which I admit, says more about me than it does her.
I’m pretty sure this ‘difficulty’ could well be rooted in the fact that Mrs T bore an uncanny resemblance to Miss Crawford, my old Primary 1 Teacher, a genuine ogre who lamped me across the back of the head on my first day at School for talking.
Compared to Miss Crawford, Thatcher was probably an unassuming, kind, tender creature but they did look alike, a detail which possibly explains my later wholesale aversion for Tory policies and the thought of either of them garbed provocatively in a negligee.
So I won’t be celebrating. Or commiserating. Life and death are interchangeable and a birth certificate is a cast iron guarantee of a death certificate as one of my great comedy heroes Bob Monkhouse once said.
Bob, was of course, a Maggie fan, along with a number of other so called celebrities in the mid 80’s including – and I bet he doesn’t care to be reminded of it these days - football pundit Charlie Nicholas.
I wonder if Charlie will be rejoicing or sympathizing.
Oh, I think I know the answer to that.
‘Defina-tely, Jim’
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