Unseemly to talk about this while the old Lady still breathes. Unseemly but necessary. Peter Oborne considers the argument in the Telegraph today:
I believe it would be wrong to give Lady Thatcher a state funeral, even though I accept that she was a very great woman, one of the six or seven most important and admirable prime ministers to occupy Downing Street in the almost 300 years since the office was invented.
The problem is that talk of a state funeral for Lady Thatcher reflects a troubling failure to understand what such events are about. They are so very rarely awarded because they have been designed for a category of great men and women who have come to represent the nation as a whole, rather than a particular sect or faction.
Or, as my old friend Iain Martin tweeted, [A] state funeral for a politician should require greatness to be generally uncontested.
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