Remembering Margaret, Lady Thatcher

"Thatcher was accused of snobbery by both Left and Right, but the charge was absurd, and in fact it was they who were the snobs. She was widely despised on both sides for her lower-middle-class origins. Yet it was she who, almost single-handed, got the working class off their knees, freed them from their traditional shackles to both their quasi-feudal Tory ‘superiors’ and their largely self-appointed class leadership and gave them en masse, almost for the first time, a real stake in society and a chance to rise in the world, as so many did. It may be that she did not do enough for those who remained where they were, nor for those whom her policies had put out of work, and whose local communities had consequently been blighted. These things have left a legacy of understandable bitterness among some who suffered; but they cannot account for the wholly fantastic, vicious, pathological outbursts of hatred and resentment in the past week, very often from people too young to have had any memory of her governments, and too ignorant to have much idea even of who their imaginary target was.

Emotions so grossly inflamed rarely have their ultimate origin in the external world. All I can suggest is that they issue from an acute, unacknowledged self-hatred, provoked by the spectacle of those who grasped the novel opportunities which the Thatcher revolution offered to all, and of one’s own failure to follow suit. This self-hatred is subsequently turned outwards against such people, against the remarkable woman who liberated them, and against the country she transformed, so that it could once more take its place in the world. Those who, by their success, even by their very existence, continuously torment one with the reminders of one’s own inferiority can only be kept at a mental distance by ritual cursing. I would suppose Thatcher-hatred of this extreme kind to be really a classic case of envy and resentment, and as such resistant to any kind of rational medication. The very hatred she (surprisingly) continues to excite is a measure of her success, and of the admiration she deserves."