Saturday 1 June 2013

Thatcher

I was just reading David Runciman's review of Charles Moore's biography of Margaret Thatcher (there's a sentence with what feels like too much punctuation for its own good) in the London Review of Books.*

Apparently Thatcher didn't like the Jews very much until she became the MP for Finchley and then she found out she actually rather liked them.

The mild, unthinking anti-semitism of her early letters – she complained to Muriel of the ‘“tatty” tourists: Jews and novo [sic] riche’ she encountered in Madeira on her honeymoon – gave way to a strong admiration for her Jewish constituents, among whom she found many of the values she herself cherished. ‘My, they were good citizens,’ she later remarked, seeing Jews as ‘natural traders’ who managed ‘positively to get on by their own efforts’. 

This is clearly a possible solution for all kinds of prejudice which should be investigated by some kind of government agency. Are the politically correct brigade busy at the moment?

Or at the very least another idea for a documentary to add to the every increasing and teetering pile.

* the actual print version, mind, although it's available to read in full here.