By chance I knew Margaret Thatcher rather better than a junior civil servant might have been expected to, not least from giving her some maritime briefings during the First Gulf War. On another occasion Denis and I once got absolutely blind drunk in Lagos – I had been given him to look after for the day, and the itinerary started with the Guinness brewery and went on to the United Distillers bottling plant, before lunch at the golf club. I had to reunite him with his spouse for the State Banquet and quite literally fell out of the car. Happy days.
I can say I was on first name terms with her – she always called me by my first name. Except unfortunately she thought that was Peter. I recall she came out to Poland when I was in the Embassy there and I was embarrassed because she knew me, and thus greeted me more warmly than my Embassy superiors. The problem was lessened by her continuing to call me Peter very loudly, even after I corrected her twice.
In person she was frightfully sharp, she really was. If you gave her a briefing, she had an uncanny ability to seize on the one point where you did not have sufficient information. She also had that indescribable charisma – you really could feel when she entered a room in a way I have never experienced with anybody else, not Mandela or Walesa, for example. You may be surprised to hear that in person I found her quite likeable.
Yet she was a terrible, terrible disaster to this country. The utter devastation of heavy industry, the writing off of countless billions worth of tooling and equipment, the near total loss of the world’s greatest concentrated manufacturing skills base, the horrible political division of society and tearing of the bonds within our community. She was a complete, utter disaster.
Let me give one anecdote to which I can personally attest. In leaving office she became a “consultant” to US tobacco giant Phillip Morris. She immediately used her influence on behalf of Phillip Morris to persuade the FCO to lobby the Polish government to reduce the size of health warnings on Polish cigarette packets. Poland was applying to join the EU, and the Polish health warnings were larger than the EU stipulated size.
I was the official on whose desk the instruction landed to lobby for lower health warnings. I refused to do it. My then Ambassador, Michael Llewellyn Smith (for whom I had and have great respect) came up with the brilliant diplomatic solution of throwing the instruction in the bin, but telling London we had done it.
So as you drown in a sea of praise for Thatcher, remember this. She was prepared to promote lung cancer, for cash.
“she died following a “strike” instead. ” – Incredible! 😀
“She’s only been in hell for three hours and she’s already closed down three furnaces” – ROTFLAMO
I almost wish she came back to life – “I’m not quite dead” – so that a second round of these incredible lines will come about.
I have it on good authority that she is at this very moment causing a scene on account of being told that she does not have the correct paperwork for entrance into the blessed paradise.
Our resident non contributor said
“Spot on, again. And not only heavy industry (a Western European decline, in fact) but also light industry and manufacturing industry in general.”
No not so spot on, because some countries in western Europe were doing well namely Holland and Germany who’s financial as well as manufacturing structure was not marked by large shareholders demanding ever increasing appanage’s and stifling investment in modern machines, but by private share ownership which understood the value of modernisation and investing in the future, something Britain never understood after it lost much of its Commonwealth markets, which was easy to supply with old inferior equipment.
For example, Triumph. A largely successful company during the 40’s 50’s and 60’s, it was producing new motorbikes with the same old 1890’s machinery and expected to get away with shoddy work, it failed and the buying public went for a plethora of bikes, modern and reliable. Not unless some serious investment, re-modelling and modernisation took place in the 1990’s did they slowly regain some markets.
The lesson is that there is a fine balance between share returns to those who seem to live of nothing else, and the survival of a manufacturing company that competes in a rapidly evolving global environment, any manufacturing.
Even the developing world cannot be suckered with old clapped out technologies, they are clued up as to what is available, so it is more important to invest in modernisation to sustain a business long term, than to plod along and merely serve a market for max. returns to a fickle share ownership.
Unless this attitude changes, Britain will not return to the top manufacturing league.
Craig wrote
“British heavy industry was failing so it needed to be quickly and completely eliminated, thus ruining most of the country north of Watford. ”
Its shown that wholesale elimination is detrimental, evolution and modernisation seems to be the way to go.
Another example. Thatcher had a problem with the unions, but she failed to see the hard working communities behind the shouting man, Scargill, despite proclaiming to be ‘aiding the working class’
She had 4 bn. of coalboard funds to play with. Instead of investing in alternative energy generation, then coming up on the horizon, using the heavy industry still in place and making mining equipment to make wave and wind energy generators, being equipped with the best capapbilities in all of western Europe for these developments,, her and Heseltine wasted the money on the nuclear industry.
That left hard working communities with no work,on the dole and with no hope, some living in areas with no other employment, were thrown into despair, the real victims. Heroin turned up in towns were there was no record of drug taking ever, that how hard the despair was after a long strike. She was a disaster to manufacturing, preferring to sell/Sid us something we already owned, she failed to see that the UK was not a corner shop that could be restocked at ease.
I detest the blanket coverage MSM and what other news it now smothers. Press officers all over the country working hard to bring over local issues are tearing their hair out.
Don’t entertain the trolls!
I am a time-served engineer and know exactly what happened to industry and mining under Thatcher. There are no indentured apprenticeships any more. She killed one industry after another. People who have never done a day’s work in their lives, who have never got their hands dirty as factors of the production process, presume to tell those who really know what happened how things were simply to raise tempers and disrupt the mutual respect most people on this blog share, should not be abjured but ignored.
Don’t feed the trolls.
I did not start it Sir, it was Pete who’s done it……:)
I see the right-wingers on this blog are revealing themselves in support of Mrs Thatcher
I withdraw my claim (8 Apr, 2013 – 11:46 pm ) that Thatcher was recruited at a Bilderberg meeting. She did attend one but it resulted in her being replaced by John Major. I do not withdraw my similar claims about Blair and Cameron.
I am extending my atheism lapse for another day so that not only can I continue to wish her to rot in Hell, but also so I can pray that the Government have a change of heart and call for a minute’s silence at all football matches this weekend.
Nevermind. You mention the mining industry. Just as she got Enthoven over from the US Rand Corporation to plan the commencement of the conversion of the NHS into a private insurance construct, she also acquired the services of McGregor, an Americanized Scot, to hack the miners into little pieces.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_MacGregor
Someone earlier said that she had never been involved in torture. I have no chapter and verse on this, but I am sure I have read that terrible practices went on in Long Kesh/the Maze prison. She loathed the Republicans with a great loathing.
PS How can the Queen and P Philip attend the ceremony next Wednesday? Troops (that is what’s left of the armed services) are to line the route, gun carriages, Chelsea pensioners, etc all out of the public purse which as so little left in it thanks to four of her ‘children’, Dave and Gideon and Tony and Gordon.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-22079749
Rumours abound that Satan has created a 10th circle of hell for Thatch with enough space for Bliar, Bush I + II.
IBS, sorry, IDS is trying is damnedest to qualify as the suicides rise.
@Kempe
“Oh and the banking industry hadn’t been in terminal decline for decades previously.”
It’s in terminal decline now.
I don’t know why people rail against individual politicians instead of against the whole political process. Politics is the art of brazenly lying in order to manipulate the behaviour of others against the rules of justice, equality and commonsense.
I would like to be able to present to you Islam. The process of not destroying people and capital through lying in order to benefit the political player. But I can’t, because Islam as it is represented in this country, and in the world, is engaged in the ‘reactionary’ process of responding to political pressure with counter-lies and counter-pressure.
Mrs Thatcher wanted to restore the values of Victorian England. David Cameron’s purpose is to continue that process, wherein employers have absolute power over the lives of their employees, landlords enslave families to their production process, capital is used to steer UK foreign policy against the minds and hearts of UK citizens.
In response to that, the Muslims, instead of offering an alternative construct of benign truthfulness and unity, have been paid/bought/bribed by the powers that be, to construct a parallel restoration of values slogan, Salafism, returning to the values of yesteryear.
Yes, but just as Mrs T did not want to us return to the fear of God and morality of respectable, Victorian England, so the Salafists do not want to return to the abscence of lying and absence of cheating and spying of the original Muslims.
Us Brits would like to be able to zap wogs with superior firepower and bend the rules of international law. The Salafis want to strut around in militaristic uniforms and terrify civilians with rifles and suicide bombs. Their political wing, the Muslim Brotherhood like Mursi, want to re-use the prisons of the dictators to receive the transgressors of thought crime caught on their sordid spy cameras.
Slogans are advertisements, intended to deceive and to deprive. Mrs Thatcher cranked up the use of slogans to deceive and handed the baton of deceit to Brown and Blair. They did not tell you that after you closed your coal industry China would open one a week blasting stench and maiming miners over there. They did not tell you that your Muslim Brotherhood leader would flood the tunnels that brought sustenance to Gaza.
I’ve just reminded myself of the time Thatcher made me happy.
I was at at Hampden in 1989, Scotland vs France, a World Cup qualifier The story went round that Thatcher was attending the match. I choose to believe she really was, although I can’t verify it. This was the year she foisted the poll tax on Scotland. For half an hour before the game began, 50,000 people sang with one voice, top of our lungs, to our captive audience of one …. “You can shove your f***ing poll tax up your a**e.” It was a very emotional experience, a wonderful feeling of unity. I imagined her squirming, unable to escape as our chanting made the very stadium vibrate.
We won 2 -0 and went on to qualify. What a great day. If anyone can verify that Thatcher was really present, I’d be delighted to hear from you. If you can prove the opposite, keep it to yourself, leave me my happy memories.
In honour of “old” Abe’s trilling with praise of his sainted Thatcher, the following is probably appropriate. “Old” Abe would probably agree with every word:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOFvgiCyChA
(“She played the Granthem Anthem, and she made the universe!” … her dozy supporters probably think this is all fair comment.)
For those nauseated already by the media coverage, “Le Monde”‘s edition on sale today contains no mention of an elderly female Daily Mail reader’s demise. It has a full page on the latest Wikileaks revelations re. very rich people avoiding their tax obligations, however.
The financial bubble which has deflated around our ears since 2007 was, in its British incarnation, Thatcher’s creation. It was her consistent policy to boost the finance and service sectors at the expense of primary production, and the idea of the population selling itself hamburgers for non-existent money was one which she embraced fervently. The incredible unaffordability of housing is another of her bequests.
I say, bugger the state funeral. Crossroads, midnight, stake.
John Pilger on her support for Pol Pot.
Lest We Forget
How Thatcher Gave Pol Pot a Hand
Almost two million Cambodians died as a result of Year Zero. John Pilger argues that, without the complicity of the US and Britain, it may never have happened.
April 08, 2013 “Information Clearing House” -“NS” – 17 April 2000 – On 17 April, it is 25 years since Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh. In the calendar of fanaticism, this was Year Zero; as many as two million people, a fifth of Cambodia’s population, were to die as a consequence. To mark the anniversary, the evil of Pol Pot will be recalled, almost as a ritual act for voyeurs of the politically dark and inexplicable. For the managers of western power, no true lessons will be drawn, because no connections will be made to them and to their predecessors, who were Pol Pot’s Faustian partners. Yet, without the complicity of the west, Year Zero might never have happened, nor the threat of its return maintained for so long.
Declassified United States government documents leave little doubt that the secret and illegal bombing of then neutral Cambodia by President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger between 1969 and 1973 caused such widespread death and devastation that it was critical in Pol Pot’s drive for power. “They are using damage caused by B52 strikes as the main theme of their propaganda,” the CIA director of operations reported on 2 May 1973. “This approach has resulted in the successful recruitment of young men. Residents say the propaganda campaign has been effective with refugees in areas that have been subject to B52 strikes.” In dropping the equivalent of five Hiroshimas on a peasant society, Nixon and Kissinger killed an estimated half a million people. Year Zero began, in effect, with them; the bombing was a catalyst for the rise of a small sectarian group, the Khmer Rouge, whose combination of Maoism and medievalism had no popular base.
/..
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34539.htm
Did anyone hear Kissinger croaking away about her on Radio 4 Today this morning?
@Glenn_UK: “In honour of “old” Abe’s trilling with praise of his sainted Thatcher”
I wouldn’t call her a saint. But we all make mistakes, so may the Real Maker of the universe have mercy on her.
Err, Mary…would you think the Khmer Rouge was in any way affected by the then British Education Minister’s parsimonious attitude to school milk in 1973? And is this Pilger’s contention?
Creaking 1973 kids’ programme here\\\\;
http://www.awesomestories.com/assets/day-in-the-life-of-a-young-margaret-thatcher
Just asking.
English Knight
The reason why I am not commenting at the moment is that until recently precious little of worth has been said on this blog (although I did note Mary’s disgusting “untermensch” reference but I have long got over expecting any shame from that quarter) – I was also taught that it was good manners not to speak ill of the dead until they were at least buried. I think if you bother to look through my past posts you will see that I am very far from being a Thatcherite or resident of Finchley – in fact Craig showed rather more enthusiasm for her Monetarist economics than I did as a social democratic Keynesian.
Will be happy to give my thoughts after next Wednesday.
Well I smoke heavily and am aware of the potential consequences, but I’m not going to blame Thatcher or Philip Morris for my habit, which is my choice.
I am a bit of a fence-sitter when it comes to Thatcher, but her policies won the day, whether you approve of them or not. The sheer vitriol and nastiness of many of the sneering lefties is down to the fact that she effectively destroyed their socialist politics. So spitting on her grave and organizing silly street parties are all they have left.
Pathetic.
For all those still banging on about the Belgrano, it was a warship, in a warzone, playing a part in an aggressive and unprovoked war. Sinking it does not make Thatcher a “war-criminal”, however desperate you are to tarnish her name.
News from the Con constituencies.
Conor Burns, Con MP Bournemouth W, has been holding back the tears on BBC South Today about the fact that his dear friend Mrs T who he visited weekly until the end, is no more and that he will not see her again. His mouth was trembling at the end of the piece.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conor_Burns
Claire Perry, Con Swindon, previously Agent Cameron’s advisor on family matters and latterly Hammond’s PPS, and motor mouth on QT, is getting divorced.
She recently visited Afghanistan.
http://www.marilynstowe.co.uk/2013/03/22/tory-mp-claire-perry-announces-divorce-after-growing-apart-from-husband/
And in New York Ms Mensch would not be left out. She even managed a plug for her new website and another for a dress designer. Incorrigible. Chutzpah. No shame.
unfashionista @unfashionista 1h
New: in Herve Leger this morning – black dress for #Thatcher. too early for hair. http://unfashionistas.com/1124524
https://twitter.com/LouiseMensch
Belgrano. Thatcher. Diana Gould.
Margaret Thatcher’s Roasting
Margaret Thatcher is torn apart by angry citizen Diana Gould over the circumstances surrounding the sinking of the Argentinian battleship, The General Belgarno during the Falklands War.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O184yGKknSQ
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-22077834
USGS estimating Level 4 shaking in vicinity of nuclear plant. Hopefully not too serious.
http://rt.com/news/iran-bushehr-quake-nuclear-562/
Give the ‘establishment a contrivance ‘Mary’ to brush the busby, polish the brass and enter everybody’s living room and they will pounce.
Meanwhile:
“There are currently 3.6 million children living in poverty in the UK . That’s almost a third of all children. 1.6 million of these children live in severe poverty . In the UK 58% of children living in poverty are in a family where someone works .
These child poverty statistics and facts will help to give you an idea of the scale of child poverty in the UK and the affect it can have on:
a child’s education
a child’s health
the day to day lives of families.”
Barnardo – Believe in Children
Meanwhile:
Welfare reform kills.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/may/08/jobcentre-staff-guidelines-suicide-threats
According to a senior Jobcentre employee, staff have been sent guidelines advising them on how to cope with clients who say will kill themselves.
This Thatcher dualistic coalition no longer acts for it’s people and screaming in their faces will only promote screams of ‘austerity’ and help! we need more ‘green-backs’ for that Trident project first agreed by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and US President Jimmy Carter and more British tax-payers dosh for the W76-1 ++100Kton weapon of mass destruction.
http://blogs.fas.org/security/2011/04/britishw76-1/
Giles
9 Apr, 2013 – 1:45 pm
“For all those still banging on about the Belgrano, it was a warship, in a warzone, playing a part in an aggressive and unprovoked war.
Sinking it does not make Thatcher a “war-criminal”, however desperate you are to tarnish her name.”
The Belgrano was not in a war zone at the time of its sinking and it was sailing away from the Faulkland Island at the time.
You are a liar Giles but that’s what right-wingers do; they have no stomach for the truth.
The Belgrano was steaming full ahead just outside the 12 mile limit and had been repeatedly been warned to reverse course..it did not so it was torpedoed….end of story really!
Mary 2.09 pm your link to Mrs Gould tearing the ignorant and interrupting Thatcher’s argument apart adequately shows in what a minority (Giles 1.45 pm) and other dissenters are to the fact that the General Belgrano was sailing away from the Falkland Islands and well outside the exclusion zone. She tarnished her own name. Nobody did it for her. We knew long before the 30 years were up what a bare-faced liar she was. War could have been avoided. The other striking feature of her defeat in this argument was the way she kept referring to armed servicemen, some of whom had given their lives in an unnecessary war, with lashings of smarm as ‘our boys’. Those on board HMS Sheffield were as disposable to her as the poor servicemen who died in the General Belgrano. The General Belgrano was a warship outside of a war zone. So Giles, get your facts right.
Talking of Generals, she protected the mass murderer, Pinochet, and as John Pilger points out, Pol Pot too.
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/53763
How can these Thatcher-praisers hold their heads up when it is well-known that people are judged by the company they keep. The woman was obscene. Her policies were obscene.