They Can't Let Maggie Go

On this Feast of Saint John Henry Newman, I find that I am not only older than a Cardinal, but also older than both remaining candidates for Leader of the Conservative Party. I have already been older than the Prime Minister, but even so.

Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick are both just about of my generation, yet they are obsessed with Margaret Thatcher, who left office when they were still in primary school. Their party has had six Prime Ministers since then, three of them have won overall majorities at General Elections, and all six are still alive. Yet someone who has been dead for 11 years, and out of power for 34, continues to preoccupy it, a Captain Kirk who can never be equalled, much less surpassed. One wonders how people who thought like that could feel themselves capable of being Prime Minister in her stead.

Despite the efforts of many others, the only organisation that ever succeeded in getting rid of Thatcher was the Conservative Party. She did not even contest the subsequent General Election, which her party won with what remains the largest vote ever cast for a British political party. No party will ever again take 14 million votes, so John Major's record will stand forever. As an electoral machine, his party had clearly been right to remove his predecessor. Yet it has entirely forgotten that it ever did so, and would probably deny it.

Speaking of Thatcher, "My uncle nearly lost his life when his ship was torpedoed defending the Falklands," said Keir Starmer at today's Prime Minister's Questions. Unless his uncle was aboard the only vessel to have been torpedoed during the Falklands War, the General Belgrano, then that was a lie. By the Prime Minister. To Parliament. Since Argentina held the Falkland Islands at the point that the Belgrano was sunk, then it could technically have been said to have been defending them. But if Starmer had anything like this in his background, then we might have heard about it by now.

That those Islands are British today, or will be in the future, is not because of the war. If that victory had been sufficient, then there would have been no referendum in 2013. They are British because that is the will of the people living there, more than half of whom, like more than half of the people in the United Kingdom, were born after 1982. Or has that ceased to be the case? If the Chagossians cannot have self-determination, and must instead be offensively recategorised as "Mauritians of Chagossian origin", then why should the Falkland Islanders? And four Royal Navy ships were indeed hit when Exocets were launched from the Skyhawks that had been supplied to Argentina by Israel. Can anyone track down this uncle of Starmer's? If only he had had one who had been Palestinian or Lebanese.