Let’s honour our greatest post-war Prime Minister
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WINSTON Churchill once said to a young MP who was under sustained political attack: “You have enemies? Good. That means you have stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
Churchill’s words are perfectly applicable to the career of Margaret Thatcher, who never shied away from a fight.
It was her courageous resolution that made her one of Britain’s greatest leaders, with a formidable record of achievement. She rebuilt our economy, tamed the bullying trade unions, shrank the overmighty state, helped to win the Cold War, thwarted violent Irish republicanism and defeated Argentinian military aggression in the Falklands.
“The Lady’s not for turning,” she told the Tory conference in 1981, a phrase that encapsulated her clarity of purpose.
But it was precisely that epic spirit of determination that made her such a focus for anger, especially on the far Left. Used to soggy, evasive politicians retreating at the first whiff of trouble, her opponents could not abide a figure who actually stood by her convictions. Their apoplexy was compounded by the fact that her success during the 1980s exposed the folly of their policies and unpopularity of their dogma.
Tragically, that same frothing rage now prevents our nation from properly honouring the memory of Mrs Thatcher, who died in 2013. The Left’s demented fury has become a barrier to the respect that her legacy deserves. Last year, in a supine move, Westminster City Council rejected a proposal to place a magnificent statue of her in Parliament Square.
CREATED by the internationally renowned artist Douglas Jennings, the £300,000 bronze sculpture did not cost the taxpayer anything since it was privately funded, just as Baroness Thatcher would have advocated. But even then, the Westminster burghers did not want it, partly because they feared that it could be the focus of “civil disobedience and vandalism”.
It was a shameful decision, dictated by cowardice. Fortunately, South Kesteven District Council, which covers Baroness Thatcher’s Lincolnshire home town of Grantham, has now stepped in and accepted Jennings’ monumental work.
At a meeting of the borough’s planning committee this week, South Kesteven councillors agreed that the statute should be erected on a green in the heart of the town, though again the fears of politicised criminality were all too clear. One Conservative member even said the sculpture should be sited in a pond “to stop people climbing up and making a nuisance of themselves”. Eventually it was decided that to prevent damage, the statue will be placed on a plinth more than 10 feet high, as tall as the sculpture itself.
For all such caution, the Grantham move is welcome. At present, the only tribute to Margaret Thatcher in her birthplace is a blue plaque above her father’s former grocery store.
Yet the common sense of the South Kesteven municipality just emphasises the error of the timorous London authorities. For the heart of Westminster is where an impressive statue really belongs. The bear pit of the Commons is where she fought some of her greatest battles and established her supremacy in the political landscape.
To reject a monument to her here, because of concerns about potential vandalism, is nothing more than a surrender to the mob. It is institutional feebleness, allowing the political extremists to dictate the terms of our civic reverence for the past. Mrs Thatcher herself would not have tolerated such spineless behaviour. Even on the morning after the lethal Brighton bomb in 1984, she gave a barnstorming speech in which she heroically declared that “all attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail”.
THE nihilists should be challenged, not appeased. Viewing everything through the prism of their own warped ideology, they have no respect for our heritage. They want to obliterate anything from history that does not match their hardline creed.
Last year, Left-wing writer Afua Hirsch even called for Nelson’s column to be pulled down, because the great admiral was supposedly a “white supremacist” who used his public position to support “tyranny, serial rape and exploitation.”
The same ignorant impulse led vandals last month to throw white paint on the Bomber Command memorial, while in 2002 theatre producer Paul Kelleher decapitated a statue of Mrs Thatcher at the Guildhall gallery in London, absurdly claiming that he had acted out of “respect, love, peace, care, understanding, faith, hope and happiness”.
The Iron Lady deserves better. She is one of the three great British prime ministers of the 20th century, alongside war winners David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. Both those men have been honoured by statues in Parliament Square, and now Mrs Thatcher should be as well.
Indeed, the omission is all the more glaring given some of the other politicians who have statues in Parliament Square, including the 14th Earl of Derby, a largely ineffectual PM who never held office for longer than two years.
Even those who dislike her politics have to admit that she was a true icon. As Britain’s first female prime minister, she blazed a trial for the advancement of women across public life. She defied snobbery at her provincial roots and prejudice at her gender to become the longest-serving premier in the history of our democracy.
If there is any justice, the capital will follow Grantham’s example.