Maggie Thatcher, latter-day Hitler

A good friend of mine once had the misfortune of marrying a raging Leftie, who came packaged with her friends.

I was chatting with one of them at a party, with him asking what growing up in Russia was like. When I gave him an outline, with key words like ‘concentration camps’, ‘mass murder’ and ‘totalitarian despotism’, he felt my pain.

“I know how you feel,” he said. “I lived under a tyranny myself.” That surprised me because he sounded perfectly English. “Where? When?” I asked. “Right here,” he replied. “Under Thatcher.” Since I was clearly talking to a madman, I muttered “Quite” and moved to another corner of the room, lest he bit me or something.

That was some 30 years ago, and now madness is the new normality, as confirmed by the curators of the venerable Victoria and Albert Museum. Its exhibition of Punch and Judy puppets, along with three-dimensional caricatures of famous people, came with a helpful label:    

“Over the years, the evil character in this seaside puppet show has shifted from the Devil to unpopular public figures including Adolf Hitler, Margaret Thatcher and Osama bin Laden to offer contemporary villains.”

As I read that, the ghost of my erstwhile interlocutor came wafting in, and I wondered whether he had since become a V&A curator. That was a silly thought because he didn’t have to be the author of that message. We have no shortage of lunatics running the asylum, aka Great Britain.

Penetrating the putrid recesses of their minds is as difficult as it is superfluous. There is no point – their ideology comes from the viscera and bypasses reason on its way out into the open. So it’s useless telling them that a Whiggish conservative like Margaret Thatcher has nothing in common with Hitler and bin Laden.

You could keep arguing until you’re blue in the face that Maggie didn’t start a world war and never committed genocide like Hitler, and neither did she blow up public transport or fly airliners into tall buildings like bin Laden. They know all that.

And if they were sane, they wouldn’t equate Margaret Thatcher with satanic ghouls. But they aren’t sane because they are committed to an ideology, and ideology – any ideology – makes people mad, disengaging their minds from reality.

As a result, they see the world in strictly binary terms: those who share their ideology and those who don’t. And they are incapable of seeing those who belong to the second group as wrong, misguided or especially as simply people who disagree. They see them as evil enemies.

Thus Margaret Thatcher is evil to them simply because she wasn’t a woke Leftie. While she might have differed from Hitler and bin Laden in some inconsequential details, in principle they are all much of a muchness. (Lenin is usually given a free pass as someone occasionally misguided but certainly not evil.)

When the scandal about the V&A’s label broke, some commentators suggested that the Exchequer stop funding that loony bin. Alas, aesthetically pleasing though such a step would be, it would serve no useful purpose.

For one thing, I suspect that the V&A’s view of Margaret Thatcher is the majority opinion in Parliament. It certainly is that within the ranks of our ‘liberal’ intelligentsia busily cancelling every remotely conservative speaker, writer or academic. Hence any attempt to punish the V&A by withdrawing public funds would merely make it charge admission.

This morning I chatted with a friend about this outrage, and he asked the sacramental English question: “What’s the solution?” Perhaps he was expecting to hear a suggestion of a good ideology that could counterbalance the bad one. But I couldn’t oblige: there is no such thing.

Any ideology, left or right, is a secular cult. And the opposite of a cult isn’t a different cult but genuine faith. Only allowing Christianity to regain its past prominence as a moral, intellectual, aesthetic and social force could cure the world of ideological insanity.

That would be driving evil spirits out of the possessed, similar to the exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac. People would then relearn the real meaning of words like ‘evil’, ‘good’, ‘tyranny’, ‘liberal’, ‘discrimination’ and ‘villainy’. They might continue to hold up tolerance as a prime virtue, but they’d begin to extend it to views contradicting their own. (Being tolerant of those who agree with you is no hardship.)

Putting it differently, the world – I’m thinking specifically of Britain – would become civilised again. But there’s little hope of that. Barring a miracle, similar to the exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac, we’ll continue on our accelerating downward slide into barbarism.

Prince William, our heir to the throne, provided an indirect proof of such gloomy predictions. Speaking to a charity for the homeless yesterday, he kept referring to his audience as “you guys”, which would be cloyingly demotic even in the US. In Britain, it’s prole slang.

Then, speaking of his wife, he said: “She needs to be sat here to hear this.” This is prole illiterate slang. Either the prince really is illiterate or, more likely, he wants to come across as a man of the people, ingratiating himself to those who naturally speak that way.

That too is an ideological stance, the milder version of putting Maggie Thatcher next to Hitler. If such are the standards set by our royalty, what do you expect from the commoners running the V&A and similar institutions? Exactly what we are getting: nothing but insanely rabid ideology.

P.S. On the subject of my yesterday’s article, the end came faster than we thought. Fr Michael James Daley, RIP.