How Miranda came to love Maggie

For January book club (the group has been together for about 30 years, but I joined in 2000 when I retired), we are reading There is no alternative, why Margaret Thatcher matters (2008).  Thatcher was apparently quite a charmer and flirt with the men, but not that popular with women who decided she really didn’t like women.  The wife of John Hoskyns, one of her advisors, was a liberal when she first met Margaret Thatcher—very left wing, a Marxist chimes in her husband in an interview with Claire Berlinski, the author of the book.  Miranda says in an interview:

“She represented everything having to do with my own parents’ generation.  To do with middle-class values, behaving properly, wearing hats—all the kinds of things that I was longing to throw away.  Because the 60s—although I was already married and having children—in the 60s, I was thrilled with everything being overthrown. . . I wasn’t involved in it very much, but seen from the outside I thought it was a very good thing.  And she represented, as she did to everybody on the Left, the absolute antithesis of that.  She had nothing to do with that world of the 60s.  And I was in a very uncomfortable position, because I was beginning to see that John was right about what he was saying (he was conservative), or or at least my brain told me he was right.  My emotions told me he was all wrong, and he didn’t understand.  He kept saying, ‘How do you  think somebody like me, who’s an entrepreneur, can possibly make his way in the world with taxes and everything like that,’ and I kept arguing back, ‘Well, it’s your choice, you do it because you like doing it, you don’t mind about profits, they don’t matter,’ you know, all that sort of stuff.  I mean—I was pretty silly.”

Whether it was her husband’s sound logic, or Maggie’s charm, she comes around to seeing her as courageous, but with faults (not liking women) and correct in her political views.

Me too.

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