Me and Maggie Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher, the first woman to be Prime Minister of Britain, died this week, she was 87.

That’s not a bad innings, but for much of the past decade, she’s been almost totally out of public life due to a series of strokes which has left her partially paralysed and with serious memory loss.

It’s a sad end for a woman who was the strongest, most charismatic leader the country has had since Winston Churchill, but we are all enfeebled by age and infirmity - something to look forward to!

I remember Thatcher being elected. I didn’t vote for her, but I didn’t vote for anyone in that election. I’d just moved from Warrington to Peterborough and then moved house in Peterborough and my vote hadn’t caught up with me. I could have sorted something out, but I really wasn’t that bothered.

I’d been through a shit year, the so-called “Winter of Discontent” when half the country had been on strike, inflation was as high as 15 per cent, the bins weren’t being emptied for weeks and even bodies couldn’t be buried because gravediggers had downed tools. It was an extraordinary time. It really did feel as if the country was about to collapse. I’d been on strike for six weeks during the winter and I’d been one of the officers of our union chapel, so management hadn’t taken it well. When we returned to work, I was being treated with all the joy of a turd floating in a swimming pool.

I moved to Peterborough to try my luck down there and, like the good trade unionist I was, I viewed Thatcher (and the Conservative party) as the enemy. I guess that during the next decade I grew closer to the Conservatives as I started a family, wanted better schools, to pay less tax - I stopped trying to kick the establishment and instead become part of it.

My three children were born under Thatcher, we saw her fight a successful war - the Falklands (costly but necessary, as one former colonial power prevents another from doing what it spent the previous century and a half doing itself); we saw her privatise state monopolies like British Telecom, The Gas Board and The Water Boards; we saw her take on and defeat trade unions, including the mighty National Union of Mineworkers; we saw her sell council houses to tenants and create a nation of property-owning working class people.

There was much more, much of it divisive, but that was inevitable as the changes being pushed through were massive. Was it Thatcher who was devise or the trade unions, the IRA or the Soviet Union who opposed her government. She rent the Tory party on Europe and on poll tax she thought she’d make people care about local government by making them all pay for it, but the press and her own party turned on her and she was forced to resign after 11 years as Prime Minister.

I think she left the country a better place; she did what needed to be done and didn’t always win popularity as a result, but Lord knows what Britain would have been like now if we hadn’t had her.

In 1979, if you wanted a telephone, you contacted the state-run provider British Telecom and they put you on a waiting list. You could wait for months to be connected and often you had to share a line with someone else. In Manchester Road, we had a telephone for my dad’s business, but it was a party line (shared) with another house. We had our own numbers, ours was Northwich 3352, but if the other house was on the line you could hear them if you picked up your phone and you couldn’t make a call. If you wanted to buy a gas fire or gas cooker, you had to buy it from the Gas Board showroom - it was a different world.

This afternoon, I was across in Ilford to see a customer - Archant London. Ilford is one of their main London offices, a busy centre from where (in new offices in the High Road) they produce a range of weeklies. It’s a busy newsroom, which is nice to see, and on my way back on the train to Liverpool Street I was approached by a young man who asked me if I’d heard that Margaret Thatcher had died.

He was a freelance journalist working for Radio France International and I wondered at first if this was a scam or spoof. He wanted to know what I thought of her and if I’d mind giving him a quote. He only wanted 20 seconds, so he could stitch together a vox pop and I was happy to oblige. I was spouting on about history when he shut me up, said thanks, have a nice evening and moved on into the crowd outside Liverpool Street. When he’d gone I thought of three or four cracking sound bites - too late.