The runners who will gather for the London Marathon this weekend will converge on the greatest target in the world. Winston Churchill was the first to see the problem. ‘With our enormous metropolis here… [we are] a kind of tremendous fat cow, a valuable cow tied up to attract the beasts of prey,’ he told
Home With the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, the 2,300 invited to attend Lady Thatcher’s funeral in St Paul’s cathedral included the three surviving former prime ministers, members of her cabinets, the leader of the opposition, F.W. de Klerk, June Whitfield, Joan Collins, Dame Shirley Bassey and Sir Terry Wogan. Mikhail Gorbachev did not attend,
One of Lady Thatcher’s least publicised qualities, which raised her above any other politician I have known, was the complete absence of schadenfreude or triumphalism. In 1992, I was fortunate enough to be asked by Alistair McAlpine, Lady Thatcher’s former Treasurer and close friend, to spend election night with the recently deposed premier and her
Every Polly in the country is up in arms about the ‘divisiveness’ of Mrs Thatcher. But for ancient Greeks, opposition, or polarity, was as inherent in the nature of things as it is in our adversarial political system. The first Greek philosopher Thales said: ‘There are three attributes for which I am grateful to Fortune:
What to do about PMQs Sir: Charles Moore (Notes, 6 April) is right to propose that Prime Minister’s Questions revert to the long-standing previous practice of two 15-minute sessions a week (on a Tuesday and Thursday) in place of the current 30-minute session. Tony Blair introduced the present arrangement at the beginning of his premiership
