Uncomfortable In Our Own Country

As Iain Martin (the Telegraph has been good on this point) recognises:

Much of the fuss surrounding the event will have jarred with millions of Britons. Was I alone in feeling that when Tory MPs demanded earlier this week that the clocks be stopped for the funeral, it was a crass mistake? They looked like boys raised on videos of the Eighties competing to do what they thought seemed very British, but isn’t. The martial element, the procession beforehand with soldiers, would certainly have been appropriate for a member of the Royal family, but it was not right for a politician – unless they had, like Winston Churchill, united the country for a sustained period across party lines in a war of national survival.

“It should have been much simpler. Just a proper service in St Paul’s and not all this,” as a family member from Scotland put it to me. That from someone who really respected Margaret Thatcher.

We are probably past the point when anyone is going to have their mind changed on the Thatcher legacy. We might have to agree to disagree. What a thought. I write as an admirer who does not worship at the shrine. For what it’s worth, I think she was a giant historical figure and a great prime minister. Her role in the end of the Cold War alone merits acclaim and her trade union reforms were essential. But she did have significant flaws, and democratic politicians are not religious icons.

And yet, millions, or tens of millions, of Britons go much further than that and do not like her legacy at all. From around the country, in texts from family and friends, in messages on Twitter from people who have ventured north of Watford recently, it is an observable phenomenon. A great many people did not like at all the way in which this business was handled in the last week.

The response to my raising this, from some of my friends on the centre-Right in London, might well be: put a sock in it, Jocko. How curious it is that some of those who reach most easily for the Union flag on these occasions don’t think more about the implications of Great Britain being disunited. One of the greatest weaknesses of contemporary Conservatism in the past two decades has been that its reach does not extend sufficiently to other parts of the United Kingdom.

It is perfectly possible to admire Margaret Thatcher, and to think she deserved the fitting send-off she was given inside St Paul’s, while still being deeply worried that what was done in her name made many decent Britons feel uncomfortable in their own country.