Thatcher planned funeral down to final details
Protests are planned to coincide Wednesday with salute to Iron Lady
LONDON — As in life, Margaret Thatcher continues to deeply divide Britain along ideological lines since her death last Monday.
Although fears of violence between supporters of the former British prime minister and about 1,000 students, anarchists and miners who despised her came to nothing in the rain at Trafalgar Square on Saturday, 4,000 police officers will be on guard during Thatcher’s funeral on Wednesday.
Ructions have been promised by some of the thousands of people who have signed on with a Facebook site, which has announced a “Maggie’s Good Riddance Party” will take place outside St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, while the Queen and dignitaries such as Prime Minister Stephen Harper and a who’s who of the British establishment remember the Iron Lady.
A foretaste of the bad taste that may be on display on Wednesday came during a soccer match Saturday where the crowd chanted “Let’s all do the conga, Thatcher is a gonna.” Small wonder that Britain’s soccer authorities chose not to have a minute’s silence at weekend matches to remember Thatcher’s passing.
“We are not there to uphold respect. We are there to uphold the law,” is how the police officer in charge of security at the funeral put it over the weekend, adding that it was important to balance the right to protest with the issue of public safety.
Inevitably, given how raw feelings are over Thatcher’s legacy, those remarks were ferociously denounced by some of those who had been closest to the Iron Lady during her three terms as prime minister.
The wife of the speaker of the House of Commons has declared that she will not accept her invitation to be among the 2,300 mourners at the funeral service because, according to the Sunday Times, she felt that Thatcher created “a very greedy and selfish society.”
There has also been a row over a campaign by activists to try and get the song Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead from the Wizard of Oz to the top of the British pop charts. On Friday, the BBC directed that clips of the song be limited to five seconds. Radio 1 prepared a news story to explain the flap to an audience mostly made up of young people who were born after Thatcher was no longer prime minister.
Details of the funeral, which has been attacked for its cost and almost regal pomp, were revealed over the weekend. It is to begin with Thatcher’s flag-draped coffin being carried in a hearse from a chapel in the Houses of Parliament to St. Clement Danes, the Royal Air Force Church in the Strand. From there it will be transferred to a horse-drawn funeral cortège organized by the King’s Troop, Royal Horse Artillery, for the final journey along Fleet Street to the cathedral.
“We are not there to uphold respect. We are there to uphold the law.”
OFFICER IN CHARGE OF FUNERAL SECURITY
Thatcher’s connection with the Falkland Islands, where she sent a naval task force to expel Argentine forces in 1982, will be front and centre. Artillery guns used during the war in the South Atlantic will be part of a salute, with 19 single shots being fired from Tower Bridge to mark every minute of the cortège’s procession to St. Paul’s.
Baroness Thatcher planned her funeral right down to the prayer readings, hymns, music and flower arrangements. Given her close involvement it is somewhat curious that there are to be no political eulogies on Wednesday.
Predictably, the music will mostly be the work of British composers such as Elgar. There will also be readings of poetry written by William Wordsworth and T.S. Eliot. Even this has proven controversial with a critic in the left-leaning Observer writing that he was “dismayed at the meagre and predictable insularity” of what she had chosen to be read at her funeral.
Raised as a Methodist, Thatcher had asked that her service include a reading from the Book of Ephesians which ends, “Put on the armour of God, that ye may be able to stand up against the wiles of the Devil” and the hymn I Vow to Thee, My Country, which she once said that she loved because “it begins with a triumphant assertion of what might be described as secular patriotism.”
Among those invited to St. Paul’s from a list that Thatcher began to draw up eight years ago was the actor Michael Caine, the filmmaker Sir David Attenborough and Julia McKenzie, best known for playing the role of Miss Marple.
In a perhaps not so ironic touch, the singer Elaine Paige, who was the first to sing Don’t Cry for Me Argentina, as well as Evita’s creators, Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, are to attend the service. So is 96-year old Dame Vera Lynn, the iconic singer who wowed Allied troops during the Second World War with her rendition of We’ll Meet Again, and Hillary Clinton, whom some Americans have likened to Thatcher in her resolve to push ahead despite the odds.
In a perhaps surprising show of magnanimity, Thatcher has invited every man and woman who served in her cabinet. Among them are several whom she regarded as Judases for turning on her and forcing her from office in 1990.
Other invitees include Brian Mulroney, whose career as prime minister roughly overlapped with hers, billionaire Li-Kai Sheng, whose family has many business interests in Canada, and a rogue’s gallery of British politicians who were later convicted of various crimes.
Led by the Royal Marines Band playing sombre funeral marches, nearly 900 troops, including many from regiments which served in the Falklands, are to be part of the public procession, with another 2,000 men and women in uniform lining the route. Several veterans of the South Atlantic war who remain on active service will form part of Thatcher’s Honour Guard or will be pallbearers.