Friday, 30 December 2011

The Provisional Prime Minister

Margaret Thatcher was an unprotesting Cabinet Minister at the time of this country's only ever attempt to withdraw entirely from Ireland.

It is no surprise that she seriously considered making the same move. Nor is there anything new in the realisation that she was in constant contact with the IRA, giving it every reason to place its highest hopes in her.

How else did you think that she mysteriously "escaped" from the Brighton Bomb? It is time to look into that strange just-failure to blow her up, leading to her "heroic" and "miraculous" escape, a key part of her legend.

8 comments:

  1. You'll get yourself in a lot of trouble telling high table tales like that on this here internet, Mr. L. Then again, you have no doubt been authorised one way or another. She always was far too close to Washington and Israel for their tastes, and as you know the first of those relationships accounted for how the CIA's paid terrorists against Britain strangely just failed to hit her.

    ReplyDelete
  2. People who do not know these things are clearly not received, Lady Grantham.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I'm beginning to believe that Mr Lindsay cannot actually be a Catholic, so careless of the truth are his comments. To tout a lie like his about Mrs Thatcher is simply wicked. A dozen people were killed in that bomb and she would have been one of them had the man who placed the bomb not placed it in a bathroom months before rooms were allocated and therefore randomly killed wives and a member of the Tory Whips Office and seriously injured Norman Tebbit and his wife. However much you hate Mrs Thatcher, this is an allegation which disgraced your blog. It has no truth whatsoever.

    ReplyDelete
  4. What "allegation"? A question cannot be an allegation. And as of today, it is established once and for all as we all knew already: Thatcher was in continuous contact with the IRA, giving it every reason to have high hopes of her. A certain amount of investigation is very definitely called for.

    ReplyDelete
  5. A man who doesn't know where revisionism and contrarianism need to stop, and who, like many a left-wing hack before him, spends far too much time dining and drinking with the country house Old Right. This is where that ends up.

    ReplyDelete
  6. A Prime Minister whose father had been a prominent local businessman and politician who ran most of the committees and charities for miles around, sent her to a fee-paying school, and put her through Oxford without a scholarship, but whose daughter turned even that section of society from people like her father into people like her son.

    Britain turned into the country that Marxists had always said it was, even though, before her, it never actually had been: "This is where that ends up," indeed.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Let me quote the great man in the comments on a post elsewhere about Thatcher’s ironing board:

    "On here, that [the Tebbit question] is not really a question for me, is it?

    As of today, any remaining doubt in anyone’s mind can be no more: it is established once and for all that she was in constant contact with the IRA and quite open to giving it whatever it wanted. She did, of course, go on to sign the Anglo-Irish Agreement.

    If we still had political journalism in this country, then that, not least in relation to the IRA’s oddly close-but-no-cigar assassination attempt, would today be the biggest story in decades. But we have glorified gossip columnists instead. So it is all about ironing boards."

    Are you going to reproduce the greengrocer comment, or should I?

    ReplyDelete
  8. In reply to a description of her very wealthy and powerful father as a "greengrocer":

    "He was not a "greengrocer". He is more accurately seen as the last Victorian Liberal commercial baron from the provinces to exercise national political influence, albeit vicariously and posthumously through his daughter's memories of him. Landed Tories used to call them greengrocers, too."

    Now, I need to head back over there, in order to correct someone who has suggested that Thatcher was thrifty because she was a product of a state grammar school. She would sometimes construct sentences in such a way as to give the impression that she was. But she was not. Her very wealthy and powerful father had taken care of that.

    ReplyDelete