August 01, 2006
The British equivalent of the CBC's "Tommy Douglas Story" folly.
Wrong, defeated, humiliated: why the Left still hates Lady Thatcher.
By: Simon Heffer (Filed: 21/06/2006).
From: The London Telegraph
http://opinion.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/06/21/do2102.xml
Next week, the charm factory known as the BBC's drama department will present a play about Sir Mark Thatcher and the abortive coup in Equatorial Guinea. Sir Mark can fight his own battles, and of his treatment by this programme I make no comment.
However, it also features a portrayal of Lady Thatcher, his mother, at a Christmas party at his house in Cape Town. Lady Thatcher used to visit her son at that time of year when he lived on the Cape. At least one book by investigative journalists has accurately documented her presence at the very time the coup was plotted.
However, it is at this point that what the BBC calls the writer's "interpretation" departs from recorded fact. Lady Thatcher is shown as a bellicose drunk, demolishing whiskies and importuning other guests for refills. Although written by a satirist, the play is said not to be funny. Having seen some of the writer's previous work, I can well believe that to be true.
However, whether it was comic or serious in its intent is beside the point. The fact is that a basic law of the charm factory has once again been proven: that no day is too short, and no opportunity too tangential, to vilify Lady Thatcher. To this, we might add another observation: that people with a certain cast of mind have come to see her as so inhuman that no act of vilification can be deemed too much.
Insults and obloquies normally cast only at the long dead, or criminals with no reputation to lose, are flung at her. Acquiescence in her demonisation has become one of the essentials of polite society. She was long ago de-feminised by men who wished to revile her. Now she is being dehumanised by those whose political creed is, they are always telling us, long on "compassion".
Unlike those who write such drivel, I know Lady Thatcher and see her socially quite regularly. I have yet, in many such meetings, to see her drunk. She has never importuned me, or anyone else in view, for drink or any other intoxicating substance.
It is supposed to be one of the geniuses of dramatic writing about real people that profound points can be made precisely by dealing with them accurately. This makes life difficult for those who make a living out of portraying Lady Thatcher. In private and in public, she has always had exquisite manners, reflecting the strictness and decency of her upbringing.
What she has also had, over the past four or five years, is a series of strokes that have to an extent incapacitated her. With great courage and determination, she has sought to fight the effects of these debilitating incidents by maintaining something approaching a normal life.
She is in her 81st year. Like many of that vintage, she can be forgetful or vague. Perhaps this has been mistaken for howling inebriation and dissipation; or perhaps, in trying to attack her, there is no affliction so unfortunate that it cannot be used to political ends, as part of the great campaign to revile her and poison her legacy.
Some of her more prominent friends, such as Sir Bernard Ingham and Lord Bell, have condemned this vilification, quite rightly, as offensive. That, sadly, will only encourage those who engineer it to believe that they have hit their target. If those who attack her simply see themselves as propagandists, then they have succeeded: just as Goebbels did, for example, by falsely portraying Jews as rats. After all, any fool can get a laugh from the gullible and unsuspecting by telling lies.
What should really concern us, though, is not the institutional Leftism of the BBC - which will only be solved by its eventual privatisation and submission to non-political forces - but why, after all these years, the mania for assaulting the reputation and legacy of Margaret Thatcher still continues. Having over the years seen and heard various examples of this on the BBC and elsewhere, I have struggled to fathom it.
No one under the age of about 25 can clearly recall what really happened when she was in power: so perhaps the Left is determined to prevent any young people from ever remotely understanding how great she was, by ensuring she is crudely depicted as mad and evil.
Like many viewers and listeners, I have been beaten into surrender about the dramatic and comic output of our state broadcaster. We accept, with due docility, that Right-of-centre playwrights, scriptwriters and comedians (I suppose there are such people, starving in garrets somewhere) simply cannot survive the commissioning process.
The BBC might respond that such people as it does commission routinely give Tony Blair and the Labour Government a kicking, too. So they do: but the kicking is always from the Left, and is administered (quite often by ex-public schoolboys) because of the Labour Party's class treachery in moving to the Right.
This is reflected, too, in some of the corporation's current affairs output: it is not unusual to hear private conversations on the Today programme between two Leftists, one of whom is a minister and the other of whom, attacking from the orthodox liberal Left, is a BBC interviewer. The Right has no place in such exclusive discourse, which is, perhaps, why David Cameron now affects to be a Leftist, too, and urges his friends on in the same direction.
However, last week a light was shone in on my ignorance. A long-time servant of the BBC explained to me, in a moment of stunning insight, why the Leftists in that organisation, and the Leftist contributors to it, are so bilious and angry even 16 years after Lady Thatcher left office: it is because they lost. They were wrong. They were humiliated. They have become bores with nothing else to say. They were not, of course, defeated just by Lady Thatcher: the coming down of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War defeated them, too.
Their defeat was then compounded by the speed with which the party of the Left - Labour - abandoned many of its historic principles and, in order to be elected, adopted what can only be described as a Thatcherite consensus. And finally, Mr Blair put the icing on the cake by (we are told) promising that, at her death, Lady Thatcher will be granted the state funeral she deserves.
Consider how angry, how seethingly, dribblingly, incontinently, steamingly angry, you would be if you were a Leftist, as you reflected on the past 25 years or so. First, Lady Thatcher had policies that, after a period of bloody but necessary economic restructuring, improved not merely the growth rate and prosperity of the private sector in general, but also helped create wealth for millions of people who had hitherto owed everything to the state. People suddenly owned their homes, owned shares, and had the freedom to spend more of their disposable income.
Second, her example flashed around a world benighted by socialism, so much so that she remains a heroine in those nations liberated from it. Freedom, choice and prosperity have replaced oppression, uniformity and poverty. Do these people ever ask Poles, or Latvians, whether they wish the clock could be turned back to the age of socialism? How do they explain that things in such lands are so much better, and people so much happier, now?
Finally, why hasn't "their" party undone all the "damage" of Thatcherism? Why do trade union laws remain unrepealed, and industries privatised? Why has there been no uprooting of the property-owning democracy? It is because she was right, and they know she was right. They cannot, however, bear to admit it. All they can do instead is tell lies, call her names and spit with rage. Don't laugh at them. Pity them.
By: Simon Heffer (Filed: 21/06/2006).
From: The London Telegraph
http://opinion.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/06/21/do2102.xml
Next week, the charm factory known as the BBC's drama department will present a play about Sir Mark Thatcher and the abortive coup in Equatorial Guinea. Sir Mark can fight his own battles, and of his treatment by this programme I make no comment.
However, it also features a portrayal of Lady Thatcher, his mother, at a Christmas party at his house in Cape Town. Lady Thatcher used to visit her son at that time of year when he lived on the Cape. At least one book by investigative journalists has accurately documented her presence at the very time the coup was plotted.
However, it is at this point that what the BBC calls the writer's "interpretation" departs from recorded fact. Lady Thatcher is shown as a bellicose drunk, demolishing whiskies and importuning other guests for refills. Although written by a satirist, the play is said not to be funny. Having seen some of the writer's previous work, I can well believe that to be true.
However, whether it was comic or serious in its intent is beside the point. The fact is that a basic law of the charm factory has once again been proven: that no day is too short, and no opportunity too tangential, to vilify Lady Thatcher. To this, we might add another observation: that people with a certain cast of mind have come to see her as so inhuman that no act of vilification can be deemed too much.
Insults and obloquies normally cast only at the long dead, or criminals with no reputation to lose, are flung at her. Acquiescence in her demonisation has become one of the essentials of polite society. She was long ago de-feminised by men who wished to revile her. Now she is being dehumanised by those whose political creed is, they are always telling us, long on "compassion".
Unlike those who write such drivel, I know Lady Thatcher and see her socially quite regularly. I have yet, in many such meetings, to see her drunk. She has never importuned me, or anyone else in view, for drink or any other intoxicating substance.
It is supposed to be one of the geniuses of dramatic writing about real people that profound points can be made precisely by dealing with them accurately. This makes life difficult for those who make a living out of portraying Lady Thatcher. In private and in public, she has always had exquisite manners, reflecting the strictness and decency of her upbringing.
What she has also had, over the past four or five years, is a series of strokes that have to an extent incapacitated her. With great courage and determination, she has sought to fight the effects of these debilitating incidents by maintaining something approaching a normal life.
She is in her 81st year. Like many of that vintage, she can be forgetful or vague. Perhaps this has been mistaken for howling inebriation and dissipation; or perhaps, in trying to attack her, there is no affliction so unfortunate that it cannot be used to political ends, as part of the great campaign to revile her and poison her legacy.
Some of her more prominent friends, such as Sir Bernard Ingham and Lord Bell, have condemned this vilification, quite rightly, as offensive. That, sadly, will only encourage those who engineer it to believe that they have hit their target. If those who attack her simply see themselves as propagandists, then they have succeeded: just as Goebbels did, for example, by falsely portraying Jews as rats. After all, any fool can get a laugh from the gullible and unsuspecting by telling lies.
What should really concern us, though, is not the institutional Leftism of the BBC - which will only be solved by its eventual privatisation and submission to non-political forces - but why, after all these years, the mania for assaulting the reputation and legacy of Margaret Thatcher still continues. Having over the years seen and heard various examples of this on the BBC and elsewhere, I have struggled to fathom it.
No one under the age of about 25 can clearly recall what really happened when she was in power: so perhaps the Left is determined to prevent any young people from ever remotely understanding how great she was, by ensuring she is crudely depicted as mad and evil.
Like many viewers and listeners, I have been beaten into surrender about the dramatic and comic output of our state broadcaster. We accept, with due docility, that Right-of-centre playwrights, scriptwriters and comedians (I suppose there are such people, starving in garrets somewhere) simply cannot survive the commissioning process.
The BBC might respond that such people as it does commission routinely give Tony Blair and the Labour Government a kicking, too. So they do: but the kicking is always from the Left, and is administered (quite often by ex-public schoolboys) because of the Labour Party's class treachery in moving to the Right.
This is reflected, too, in some of the corporation's current affairs output: it is not unusual to hear private conversations on the Today programme between two Leftists, one of whom is a minister and the other of whom, attacking from the orthodox liberal Left, is a BBC interviewer. The Right has no place in such exclusive discourse, which is, perhaps, why David Cameron now affects to be a Leftist, too, and urges his friends on in the same direction.
However, last week a light was shone in on my ignorance. A long-time servant of the BBC explained to me, in a moment of stunning insight, why the Leftists in that organisation, and the Leftist contributors to it, are so bilious and angry even 16 years after Lady Thatcher left office: it is because they lost. They were wrong. They were humiliated. They have become bores with nothing else to say. They were not, of course, defeated just by Lady Thatcher: the coming down of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War defeated them, too.
Their defeat was then compounded by the speed with which the party of the Left - Labour - abandoned many of its historic principles and, in order to be elected, adopted what can only be described as a Thatcherite consensus. And finally, Mr Blair put the icing on the cake by (we are told) promising that, at her death, Lady Thatcher will be granted the state funeral she deserves.
Consider how angry, how seethingly, dribblingly, incontinently, steamingly angry, you would be if you were a Leftist, as you reflected on the past 25 years or so. First, Lady Thatcher had policies that, after a period of bloody but necessary economic restructuring, improved not merely the growth rate and prosperity of the private sector in general, but also helped create wealth for millions of people who had hitherto owed everything to the state. People suddenly owned their homes, owned shares, and had the freedom to spend more of their disposable income.
Second, her example flashed around a world benighted by socialism, so much so that she remains a heroine in those nations liberated from it. Freedom, choice and prosperity have replaced oppression, uniformity and poverty. Do these people ever ask Poles, or Latvians, whether they wish the clock could be turned back to the age of socialism? How do they explain that things in such lands are so much better, and people so much happier, now?
Finally, why hasn't "their" party undone all the "damage" of Thatcherism? Why do trade union laws remain unrepealed, and industries privatised? Why has there been no uprooting of the property-owning democracy? It is because she was right, and they know she was right. They cannot, however, bear to admit it. All they can do instead is tell lies, call her names and spit with rage. Don't laugh at them. Pity them.
