De mortibus...

Back in the 1980s, I was walking along a leafy suburban street with a fellow-student when my companion suddenly turned and spat viciously into an unremarkable front garden, before continuing onward as if nothing had happened.

I was appalled - although I did not know him well, there was nothing about this polite ex-public schoolboy, son of a notable academic, to suggest such behaviour was likely. I asked him what on earth he thought he was doing.

"Tory party HQ", he replied, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "The enemy stronghold".

Such was my introduction to the mentality that has spawned a thousand tasteless tweets since the death of Lady Thatcher. It never ceases to amaze me that a certain type of socialist can publicly vaunt his or her caring credentials and respect for mankind while at the same time heaping unwarranted and vicious personal abuse on the heads of political opponents.

Orwell, of course, had it perfectly summed-up with the concept of 'doublethink'; doubtless the left-wing politicians and comedians, who were still persisting with their tired and increasingly irrelevant anti-Thatcher jibes two decades after she left office, can see nothing inappropriate in publicly rejoicing at the death of an elderly grandmother.

I'm not advocating universal and unopposed hagiography, of course - we saw quite enough of that with the 'People's Princess' - but it saddens me to think that, while most of us can observe the decencies and respect the passing of another human being whether or not we agreed with her politics, some have clearly not yet attained that level of civilization.

One of the more depressing news stories described the cheers that greeted the announcement at the NUS conference. The vast majority of delegates were surely not even born when Margaret Thatcher left Downing Street  (unless, of course, the NUS is made up largely of mature students with a political axe to grind).

Hatred of 'Maggie Thatcher' has become a tenet of faith in certain circles; it trumps all common decency or manners to a disturbing extent. The crowds who celebrated her demise with a drunken looting spree in a Brixton charity shop may not have known any better but there is no excuse for the public figures who expressed themselves so tastelessly.

But, of course, the sentiments of George Galloway and the like were never really about Lady Thatcher; those tweets were attention-seeking of the highest order, competing to grab the headlines with the most egregious comments possible.

Still, crass and immature though it may be, there's no point in offence-seeking. I don't believe in an after-life but I'd like to think that if Lady Thatcher, restored to her full searing intellect, were reading those tweets now, she would be highly amused at the level to which her critics have sunk.


Update: if you haven't already done so, look in on Caedmon's Cat for a masterful and entertaining summing-up.