We will laugh the day that Thatcher dies, even though we know it's not right

"Just think, when you wake up tomorrow, Thatcher could be dead!"

Is what I said to cheer up a gloomy housemate, on the tube some time in 2005. Loudly. On the Victoria line. We got looks.


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"Wow, all those people who looked down on Americans for celebrating Bin Laden's death have really lost the moral high ground." In our defence, at least we didn't actually kill Thatcher.

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Without straining credulity too much, I can make a fairly compelling case for the idea that Margaret Thatcher ruined my life. The polarised political climate put a massive strain on my parents' marriage, along with my dad's redundancy (bad time to work in newspapers!) and the widespread economic uncertainty. (I'm told there was an Economic Miracle in the 80s. No one I know remembers this.)

Meanwhile, the breaking of the print unions, and the rise of the BNP - given respectability by Thatcher's racist pronouncements - both tipped my dad over the edge into mental breakdown, putting the final kibosh on their relationship. (So, brilliantly, I ended up being raised by a single mother... because of Margaret Thatcher. Nice work.)

Then there's the National Curriculum, the obsession with school league tables, the idea that kids are just there to get results to make their schools look good, which tipped me over the edge of sanity a decade or so after my dad went down his own personal rabbit hole.

Obviously, I can't say "Thatcher made me crazy", "Thatcher sent my dad mad" or "Thatcher split my parents up". It's not that simple. But she had a genuine role in all three of those things. Yeah, I was four when she left office, but you know the line about old sins and long shadows, right? Politics matters, and political decisions have ramifications which don't end when the shot-callers leave office.


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After Pinochet seized power in Chile in 1973, refugees flooded out of the country seeking asylum. A sizeable number of them ended up in Southampton. Some of these people drank in the same pubs as my parents. Hearing an immensely dignified Allende supporter, living in exile, explain to me over a pint of bitter exactly how it felt to watch Pinochet be warmly welcomed by the former Prime Minister - after facing precisely no punishment for presiding over the death or disappearance of over three thousand people - was one of those moments when you start to grasp how the world fits together, and how the world sees this green and pleasant land.

A lot of Irish people drank in those pubs, too. I was doing harmonies on songs about the hunger strikers before I'd even heard the national anthem.

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I'm pretty sure that the level of vitriol reserved especially for Thatcher owes a lot to misogyny. Yes, her policies were horrific, her pronouncements sickening, her ongoing effect on this country devastating - but I don't believe that she would have remained such a virulently despised figure (by my parish - obviously not by the entire country) had she been male. It's a tricky theory to test, though, as there genuinely isn't a male politician who's been quite so bad.

Then again, I believe it was Thatcher herself who said that "I owe nothing to women's lib. The feminists hate me, don't they? And I don't blame them. For I hate feminism. It is poison." So I'm not inclined to waste my energy telling people to hate her in the right way.

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We will laugh the day that Thatcher dies, even though we know it's not right

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I'm not saying it's right to celebrate someone's death - though I'm sure as hell not going to mourn. I'm just trying to explain, to anyone who is finding it distasteful, why it is that we can't help it.