Seeing Margaret Thatcher Whole

Her party still genuflects to her, and a core within it — aging members of the Conservative associations in the shires and no-longer-young fogies in Westminster — reflexively venerates her. In the bleak cities and the former pit villages of the north, the veterans of bitter labor struggles to save now-vanished industries habitually curse her, perhaps along with the party named for them that forsook them long ago. In the London of Cool Britannia’s tastemakers, loathing for her remains hot. She has always aroused a quasi-aesthetic repulsion within the metropolitan class; and, indeed, it is that continued detestation of what Jonathan Miller in the 1980s sneeringly called “her odious suburban gentility” that most potently keeps her memory alive.