And that is a mistake.
Peter Oborne is the voice of the traditional Toryism that respects Constitution and convention, and which believes in national unity:
State occasions can only work if they bring the British people together as a nation. Most Conservatives will feel comfortable with Lady Thatcher’s funeral arrangements. But what about the many people who suffered terribly during the Thatcher years? Welsh miners or workers from the shattered manufacturing centres of northern England are every bit as British.
The dockers dipped the cranes when Churchill’s coffin came up the Thames in 1965. Would they have dipped their cranes for Margaret Thatcher? Yesterday the Daily Mirror, not a paper with which I usually sympathise, posed the question: “Why is Britain’s most divisive Prime Minister getting a ceremonial funeral fit for a Queen?” It was a very fair question to ask.
I am afraid that the decision to turn Lady Thatcher’s funeral into a state occasion was a constitutional innovation and, like almost all such innovations, both foolish and wrong. Since it is too late to change minds, all one can do now is hope that next week’s funeral is not allowed to turn into a triumphalist Tory occasion that inflicts permanent damage on the monarchy and also our system of government.
Peter Oborne is the voice of the traditional Toryism that respects Constitution and convention, and which believes in national unity:
State occasions can only work if they bring the British people together as a nation. Most Conservatives will feel comfortable with Lady Thatcher’s funeral arrangements. But what about the many people who suffered terribly during the Thatcher years? Welsh miners or workers from the shattered manufacturing centres of northern England are every bit as British.
The dockers dipped the cranes when Churchill’s coffin came up the Thames in 1965. Would they have dipped their cranes for Margaret Thatcher? Yesterday the Daily Mirror, not a paper with which I usually sympathise, posed the question: “Why is Britain’s most divisive Prime Minister getting a ceremonial funeral fit for a Queen?” It was a very fair question to ask.
I am afraid that the decision to turn Lady Thatcher’s funeral into a state occasion was a constitutional innovation and, like almost all such innovations, both foolish and wrong. Since it is too late to change minds, all one can do now is hope that next week’s funeral is not allowed to turn into a triumphalist Tory occasion that inflicts permanent damage on the monarchy and also our system of government.
The thing that bothers me most and it shouldn't....is the spectacle of Sir Mark Thatcher as chief mourner.
ReplyDeleteHis father Dennis...love him or not....was at least a successful business man who would, I think have merited an honour for being so. Or for the very real task of being the Prime Ministers "rock" for eleven years. Clearly he could not have accepted one while his wife was in office.
So just a few weeks after her resignation he got an honour.
But curiously he did not get a Life Peerage or a Knighthood. Both would have died with him.
And a hereditary peerage was unlikely.
Instead he got a baronetcy...which is neither. I am guessing here that SIr Dennis Thatcher, already 75 is the first baronet since about the 1950s.
And I cannot think of any since Dennis.
But significantly a baronetcy is hereditary.
And the title passed to Mark.
I can't see how Mark could ever have got a knighthood in his own right.
And in the week that Sir James Crosby reconsiders his entitlement to a knighthood over HBOS...it is worth noting that Sir Mark has made no such offer (although he may believe his honour is effectively the property of his descendants)
Lets not forget that Sir Mark is a convicted criminal. Indeed organising and financing a coup in a small oil rich African nation is criminality of a pretty disgraceful kind.
Fully deserving of the massive fine. And Sir Mark narrowly escaped prison...is his four year sentence still suspended?
Yet it seems totally inappropriate that next week he will be the Chief Mourner at a de facto state funeral.
Vulgar, Vulgar, Vulgar...as someone said about another issue.
FitzjamesHorse.
I thought it was something that fell short of a state funeral? Admittedly my sole source is the American news media.
ReplyDeleteIn all but name. I am about to do a post about it.
ReplyDeleteIt is a DE FACTO State Funeral
ReplyDeleteFJH