Margaret thatcher

Algy Cluff is the longest-serving oilman in the North Sea. He was one of the first to drill for oil there, in 1972, and at the last government handout of drilling licences, two years ago, there he was again, making a handsome gas discovery. Now 76, he’s also the least likely oilman you can imagine. Tall, rangy, dressed in Savile Row pinstripes; he is no J.R. Ewing. His diffident, patrician voice is so gentle that I have to turn my tape recorder up to transcribe this interview. Cluff’s Who’s Who entry lists membership of 11 clubs. But there is no clubman stuffiness about him. He’s full of wonderful anecdotes, many

If you need to know how properly posh you are there’s a very simple test: are you pro- or anti-Brexit? Until the European referendum campaign got going, I thought it was a no–brainer which side all smart friends would take. They’d be for ‘out’, obviously, for a number of reasons: healthy suspicion of foreigners, ingrained national pride, unwillingness to be ruled by Germans having so recently won family DSOs defeating them, and so on. What I also factored in is that these people aren’t stupid. I’m not talking about Tim Nice-But-Dims here. I mean distinguished parliamentarians, captains of industry, City whiz-kids, high-level professionals: the kind of people who read the

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/fightingovercrumbs-euroscepticsandtheeudeal/media.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth and Vote Leave’s Stephen Parkinson discuss Euroscepticsm”] To be quite so desperate, quite so early, in the pre-referendum campaign as the In campaigners must be to wheel out Lord Powell of Bayswater with his proxy, post-humous Thatcher endorsement is not a good sign for them. Charles Powell even suggests of David Cameron’s package that Mrs Thatcher “would have gone along with what is on offer, indeed negotiated something similar herself”. I would find this assertion astonishing had Charles not got form on the subject. At the time of the bitterly fought Maastricht Treaty and later, he insisted that Margaret Thatcher would have eventually signed up to

Margaret Thatcher has been out of power for twenty-six years and dead for three, but in our brave new world of virtue signalling (defined in this magazine by its creator James Bartholomew as ‘the way in which many people say or write things to indicate that they are virtuous…one of the crucial aspects of virtue signalling is that it does not require actually doing anything virtuous’) she has become the El Cid of politics, strapped to her trusty steed and sent out into the fray one more time. But interestingly, her corpse is being repeatedly trotted out by her enemies, rather than by those who guard her flame – and what

It is good to learn that the current management of the V&A want to reverse their predecessors’ lack of interest in Margaret Thatcher’s clothes. The museum’s original refusal showed a lack of imagination about how women have tried to gain greater power in a man’s world, and how clothes tell this story. Museums love to have suits of medieval armour. They reveal the amazing combination of defensive utility and elegant display which the age required. Even better if the armour was worn by a great warrior on a great occasion, like the Black Prince at Crecy. Mrs Thatcher’s clothes were her armour on her fields of battle — in Parliament,

One of the best of P.G. Wodehouse’s works is The Inimitable Jeeves, which I have recently re-read. In order to impress his friend Bingo Little’s rich uncle, Lord Bittlesham, Bertie Wooster has to pretend that he is the romantic novelist Rosie M. Banks, whose writing Bittlesham greatly admires. The trick succeeds. Eventually, when Bingo wishes to marry a waitress without being cut out of his uncle’s money, he begs Bertie to go and plead with Lord Bittlesham on his behalf. He advises him to ‘start off by sending the old boy an autographed copy of your latest effort with a flattering inscription’. ‘What is my latest?’ asks Bertie, who is

An enjoyable aspect of parliamentary rules and conventions is that almost no one understands them. This has become acutely true in an age when the media no longer regularly reports proceedings in Parliament. So when the House of Lords threatened to derail the government tax credit cuts this week, no one, that I spotted, foresaw what actually happened. Knowing that the measure came forward as a statutory instrument, not a Bill, and was therefore (in both Houses) unamendable, its opponents in the Lords voted not to reject it but to delay considering it. They set conditions which had to be met before they would do so. Thus they defied the government

It is one of the great counterfactuals of contemporary history, what if Mikhail Gorbachev had walked out of that Chequers lunch with Margaret Thatcher in 1984? As Charles Moore explained at last night’s Spectator event to celebrate the launch of the second volume of his Thatcher biography, that lunch—where Thatcher and Gorbachev debated capitalism and Communism—was key to the ending of the Cold War. For Thatcher then persuaded Ronald Reagan that he should meet Gorbachev and that Gorbachev was someone they could do business with. But Gorbachev had almost left Chequers early, his wife had mouthed to him across the table ‘should we go now?’ as Thatcher hammered away at