Why find joy in death?
The late leader relished controversy when she was alive, and ‘ cared little if people like her’
The passing of Britain’s former prime minister Margaret Thatcher has raised questions about how society has changed its view of dying.
LONDON — Many time- honoured social conventions have been discarded in recent times in our headlong rush to demonstrate how modern and relaxed we have all become, but we still, more or less, stick to the maxim of “not speaking ill of the dead.” At least not in the immediate aftermath of their demise, when their families’ grief is still raw.
Yet news of the passing of the frail 87- year- old Margaret Thatcher, so confused that she had to be reminded almost daily that her husband was dead, was greeted with street parties in many British city areas: Brixton, Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool and Glasgow.
‘ The witch is dead’
In south London, the scene of rioting in 1981 during Thatcher’s first term in office, the letters on the billboard outside a cinema were rearranged by masked vandals to read “Margaret Thatcher dead LOL ( Laugh Out Loud).” In Glasgow’s George Square, revellers drank champagne, wore party hats and sang, “Ding, dong, the witch is dead.” In Leeds, they shared a celebration cake. In Liverpool they gathered for a “death party,” and in Bristol joined forces under the banner, “May she never RIP.”
Cold comfort, then, for her children, neither of them saints, but still human beings trying to absorb the loss of their mother. We all have a mother, so we should all have enough empathy to imagine a little of what they are feeling. But apparently not.
Of course, Margaret Thatcher, as a three- time prime minister whose economic, political and social legacy remains alive and hotly disputed to this day, wasn’t any old mother. And so some, mainly on the political fringes, appear to regard her as such a hated figure that the normal rules of engagement don’t apply.
The most mainstream voice to be heard in this mob was that of Mark Steel, a BBC Radio 4 regular, who tweeted: “what a terrible shame — that it wasn’t 87 years earlier.” In the chorus was Socialist Worker — circulation under 8,000 and admittedly probably not on order at Mark or Carol Thatcher’s newsagents — with a front- page mock- up of her tombstone and the word “Rejoice” in capital letters. ( The editor was too busy Wednesday to take a call asking for an explanation of the image.)
Has a line been crossed?
And there too, inevitably, was George Galloway MP, never one to mince words when he might make headlines, with: “May she burn in the hellfires.” It is, as far as I can remember, the first time a recently deceased figure has been pushed so publicly and unceremoniously into the medieval pit since the death in 2002 of Myra Hindley, known as the “Moors Murderess.”
So has a line been crossed? There is an argument that says that, in life, Thatcher relished controversy, so why should we think she would object in death? As countless retired cabinet ministers, one- time opponents and commentators have remarked, she enjoyed a fight, adopted a presidential style that dispensed with distinctions between herself and her policies, wasn’t above flamboyantly “rubbishing” even close colleagues ( notably Geoffrey Howe, albeit with disastrous consequences), and, in the words of her biographer the late Hugo Young, “cared little if people liked her.” Presumably in death she will care even less.
“The first thing to note,” says the Oxford social anthropologist Kate Fox, author of Watching the English, “is that those celebrating so openly represented a tiny number. ( Police estimates put the total nationwide at around 800.) A lot of people may have been thinking the same when they heard the news. … But there is a
The first thing to note is that those celebrating so openly represented a tiny number. ( Police estimates put the total nationwide at around 800.)
KATE FOX OXFORD SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGIST
difference between thinking it and shouting it on the streets or on social media in such a tasteless way.”
Nothing new
Fox also challenges the notion that the scenes in some of our largest cities on Monday night were anything new. “If we can cast our minds back before the era of 24- hour rolling news, these people were not the first to mark a death like this. I imagine the end of Richard III might well have been greeted by something similar.” In 1822 jeering was reported along the route of the funeral cortège of the deeply unpopular foreign secretary and Leader of the House of Commons Lord Castlereagh, although it is said that this was exaggerated by the radical press, forerunners perhaps of Socialist Worker.
Another curious feature of Monday night’s protesters was their age. Most were too young to have been alive when Thatcher was prime minister. Saul Adamczerwski, who carried a banner in Brixton reading “the bitch is dead,” explained to reporters: “She was so particularly evil and hated by everyone.” But he was two when she left office, so how does he know?