Reflections of a stormy petrel

What I find unbelievable is that eager conservatives such as Damian Thompson should find the publication of Margaret Thatcher's ministerial papers so inspiring. It is true, of course, that the standard of leadership since has been so abysmal, and the media and establishment consensus so revolting, that one is apt to take any demonstration of character as positive in and of itself; but not all character is necessarily good. What these papers reveal was that "that bloody woman" (as the majority of British voters always referred to her, leaving "the iron lady" and other bootlickery to her fans in the Murdoch media) was really what she looked like; that she was the same from top to bottom, and that the substance she was made of was vile. I, like a good 50% of people in Britain at the time, found her personally offensive; these papers reveal that we were right in feeling so, and that the offensive nature of the woman was personal and ever-present. This is the supposed anti-Communist who, on receiving a petition to let 10,000 victims of Communism into Britain, responded that the signatories should be invited to take one of them each into their houses; pub philosophy of the vilest kind, showing that when she said that there is no such thing as society, she meant exactly what she said, neither more, nor less. She could not conceive of any obligations that can and must be taken on collectively rather than individually, and of no duty towards the weaker. For that matter, she did not even conceive of any individual obligations. She did not see any duty to be consistent with her anti-Communism when real victims of real Communists needed your support. This is not only immoral, it is grossly hypocritical. And to make matters worse, the real reason to reject those wretched victims was racial: they were, you see, yellow-skinned, slit-eyed Vietnamese (or gooks, or however her likes would call such inferior breeds). So they could rot in refugee camps in third world countries, or take their chance with the murderous tyranny that had overtaken their country. No bloody wonder that, after seven years of this kind of enlightened social doctrine, the whole country exploded in the phenomenon of Band-Aid; something that, I am willing to bet, she never even began to understand.

Her management principles were all of a piece. On a series of notes complaining about cuts, she wrote "I do not see why we should not be able to do with 500,000 civil servants what we do with 566.000". This, of course, will give a dry orgasm to all those who hate "the state" for its own sake, but in terms of being in charge of an organization that has to deliver certain results, it is not only nonsense, it is poisonous nonsense. Perhaps you may need more than 566,000. Perhas you do, in fact, need less, even less than 500,000. But you have to know what you want to do and how many people are needed to achieve it. She never even asks. She pulls a number out of thin air and demands that it should be kow-towed to as sacred. This kind of invention, the idea (so to call it!) that three men can always do the work of four, and that the less people you employ the better, is right out of the book of the idiot manager, the pseud with no notion of his (in that case, her) job and no thought in his (her) brain beyond cutting costs. It places management in a position of enmity to their own employees, and makes efficiency a punishment and the beginning to further punishment. It is, in short, the summary of everything that is wrong with current business practices.

There is nothing suprising about the fact that this racist, narrow-minded, destructive near-sociopath, who made selfishness into a principle, was also a social libertine of the worst sort. She never saw an abortion she did not like, and took with glee the support of the pornographer Rupert Murdoch and of his intelligence-destroying, crotch-reaching, monopoly-seeking The Sun - a newspaper whose long-term influence is visible in everything about the desolate and despicable lifestyle of chavs and ladettes who grew up in its shadow. Its editor Larry Lamb had easier access to her than her own ministers; something that makes Tony Blair's respect of the Daily Mail look positively constructive and enlightened by comparison. The very notion that someone like that should be in charge of a party that called itself conservative showed that, in many minds, Toryism had been reduced to merely monetary value, to the brute consideration of everything in terms of what it costs. It was a destructive age, and we have not yet recovered from its bewildering and dazed effect; nor from its brutalization.

How in the name of Hell and of every variety of evil did Norton Antivirus ever become the best-selling commercial protection software? The damned thing is as damaging as the viruses it's supposed to fight. It has just caused me the most elaborate and unmanageable computer crash I have ever seen, which even led to me being physically injured (as I was removing the battery and the power cable, the only way I could see to shut the machine down, it fell over straight on my ankle, where it cut right into the flesh). To misquote the old song, Norton is a moron.