I was on a London Bridge station platform waiting for the Peckham train. Announced dryly over the tannoy, most passengers cheered and broke into broad smiles. It was 34 years ago this Friday, 22 November 1990.
Where were you when Margaret Thatcher quit?
I was on a London Bridge station platform waiting for the Peckham train. Announced dryly over the tannoy, most passengers cheered and broke into broad smiles. It was 34 years ago this Friday, 22 November 1990, yet the memory remains fresh for those alive at the time.
Because Thatcher was a terrible PM: mean, hateful and spiteful. Unemployment and inequality soared. State assets, the family silver, were sold cheaply at knock-off prices to spivs and speculators. The roots of council house shortages and privatised water, gas and electricity rip-offs were planted back then by her.
She hammered coal, steel, shipbuilding, print and dock workers and their trade unions while enriching City wide boys. Communities in former coalfield and deindustrialised areas never fully recovered, drug and social scars still disfiguring villages and towns that Thatcher robbed of hope.
Even what’s billed by true believers as her greatest triumph was in reality a bloody national disaster, diplomatic and military errors losing the Falklands to Argentina’s military junta before 255 members of the British armed forces died recovering them.
Thatcher was a consequential PM for the damage inflicted over a long reign of terror lasting 11-and-a-half inglorious years. Tory MPs throwing their Iron Lady on the scrapheap over the loony tune poll tax was a satisfying mo if motivated by desperation to save their own skins in a successful ploy.
She finally jumped before she was pushed, advised by Cabinet colleagues to formally step down to avoid an even more humiliating toppling. Dejected Thatcher departed Downing Street in tears six days later on 28 November, crying for herself, as John Major moved into No 10 and the swap helped the Cons with the 1992 General Election.
But 22 November was and is the day the Iron Lady rusted. Many of us around back then recall precisely where we were the way others do hearing the assassination of JFK, John Lennon’s murder or the death of the Queen.
So where were you? Remember it fondly. Never forget, never forgive Thatcher for what she did.
