{"id":61705,"date":"2021-02-24T01:00:38","date_gmt":"2021-02-24T06:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=61705"},"modified":"2021-05-27T09:00:21","modified_gmt":"2021-05-27T13:00:21","slug":"qotd-margaret-thatcher","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2021\/02\/24\/qotd-margaret-thatcher\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Margaret Thatcher"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"float:left; padding: 0px 15px 0px 0px\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"400\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-48672\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png 400w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-50x50.png 50w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a>I know I&#8217;m supposed to hate Margaret Thatcher. I know that someone with my politics is meant to detest her as a union-busting, milk-snatching, women&#8217;s-lib-baiting, <em>Belgrano<\/em>-sinking, Section-28-devising, society-destroying nightmare. I know that when Gillian Anderson was cast as Thatcher in series four of <em>The Crown<\/em>, I should have played up a shudder of disgust at Gillian Anderson, who is good, playing Thatcher, who is bad.<\/p>\n<p>But here&#8217;s the thing: I don&#8217;t hate Thatcher. It&#8217;s not that I&#8217;m a huge fan of her legacy or anything (although anyone who thinks that industrial relations were doing fine before her or that the Falklands were some kind of unjustified expedition is clearly a fantasist), it simply doesn&#8217;t matter whether I like her or not because she is just <em>too interesting<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Thatcher wasn&#8217;t the first woman to lead a country, but unlike her predecessors, Indira Gandhi in India or Isabel Mart\u00ednez de Per\u00f3n in Argentina, she didn&#8217;t arrive sanctified by a political dynasty. She was, as Prince Phillip snobbily points out to the Queen in <em>The Crown<\/em>, a grocer&#8217;s daughter. In real life, such condescension came strongly from the Left. The Blow Monkeys, one of the bands involved in the Red Wedge tour to support Labour, released an album called <em>She was only a Grocer&#8217;s Daughter<\/em> in 1987; and even though several pop songs fantasised about her death, that never seemed quite as ugly as supposed defenders of the working class announcing that Thatcher was just too common to rule.<\/p>\n<p>Sarah Ditum, <a href=\"https:\/\/unherd.com\/2020\/11\/how-thatcher-rejected-feminism\/\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;How Thatcher rejected feminism&#8221;, <em>UnHerd<\/em><\/a>, 2020-11-15.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I know I&#8217;m supposed to hate Margaret Thatcher. I know that someone with my politics is meant to detest her as a union-busting, milk-snatching, women&#8217;s-lib-baiting, Belgrano-sinking, Section-28-devising, society-destroying nightmare. I know that when Gillian Anderson was cast as Thatcher in series four of The Crown, I should have played up a shudder of disgust at [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7,53,41],"tags":[1391,1420,431,987,390,907],"class_list":["post-61705","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-history","category-politics","category-quotations","tag-biography","tag-classism","tag-conservatism","tag-feminism","tag-margaretthatcher","tag-snobbery"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-g3f","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61705","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61705"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61705\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64245,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61705\/revisions\/64245"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}