Margaret Thatcher seems likely to receive a state funeral and her place in Westminster Abbey (Report, 22 December). There are objections to this. Churchill and Gladstone, similarly honoured, readily put aside past conflicts, however intense. Mrs Thatcher, seeing not opponents but enemies, did reliable personal bitterness all round. She told Neil Kinnock in the Commons, that he was "a Marxist, a fellow traveller". Working people she divided into "the enemy within" and "the staunch".
Irrational animus extended to foreigners, especially Germans, and her own party. Remember the crazy Chequers seminar discussing the German national character and the insulting treatment of Chancellor Kohl – at an Anglo-German friendship gathering. The Major government, achieving the only things that matter – stable prices, rising employment and bouyant inward investment – would have been recognised as a success but for the running internal revolt that she busily inflamed.
As for Thatcher as success, that should be seen in the light of her chief objective, containing inflation. The index, around 10% in 1979, went down for a while, but on her departure, stood at 10%. The miners' strikes had been destructive and Arthur Scargill foolish, but mounted police clubbing strikers expressed a class hatred which every previous Tory leader since Churchill had rejected. The application in 1981 of furious deflationary measures crippled manufacturing and thus exports. A Thatcher loyalist, John Bruce-Gardyne MP, defined manufacturing as "the tie-clip making sector".
Error was not confined to office. Failure to survive in the ERM derived from her earlier insistance that the pound should only enter with a high valuation. From mistaken fear of new inflation, she equipped us with an overvalued currency, assured of hostile speculation. Margaret Thatcher was a vivid personality and dedicated worker, but wrong so often and, to paraphrase that pseudo-St Francis text, the bringer of division and bitterness.
Edward Pearce
York