Missing Maggie

The closer we get to the Great Disappointment — aka the forthcoming Heath administration — the more I miss Margaret Thatcher.

The closer we get to the Great Disappointment — aka the forthcoming Heath administration — the more I miss Margaret Thatcher. Just how much I was reminded by Michael Cockerell’s new series The Great Offices of State (BBC4, Thursday). This particular episode was about Surrender Monkey Central — aka the Foreign Office — and featured Maggie in her pomp, eyes ablaze, holding forth on the only way to deal with jumped-up foreigners like Galtieri.

‘I’m not in the business of appeasement. It is not part of my psyche!’ she declared. ‘You can’t negotiate away an invasion!’ she said. As for her tone when she talked about the FO’s love of ‘compromise, negotiation, diplomacy’: she made it sound more like ‘mass rape, paedophilia, genocide’.