A grace note

Given the hagiography and vitriol, it seems almost like Margaret Thatcher just took a holiday from public life, and then, by dying, jumped back into it. I lived in the UK during the last year of the Callaghan government, the election, and the first year of Mrs. Thatcher, and a fascinating spectacle it all was.

Sometimes,when one is deluged by obits (Charlie Rose had a bizarre panel about her the other day that included Tina Brown, Harry Evans, Martin Amis and Henry Kissinger), its the little telling moments that round out the headlines, as Harry Brighouse notes at Crooked Timber:

I presume it is a bit silly to point to any obituaries. So, instead, a heartwarming story. A few weeks before he died Eric Heffer, in one of his last interviews, Eric Heffer told a story against Neil Kinnock. (If you are too young to remember Heffer, well, here’s wikipedia). He, Heffer, was dying, and one evening, walking down a corridor in the Commons, he got to the point that he couldn’t walk any further. He thought he was alone but Mrs Thatcher was several feet behind him. Seeing his distress she made him put his arm round her, and walked him to a nearby office, made him a cup of tea, and sat with him while they waited for a nurse. His observation, about Neil Kinnock, was that he would have walked straight by.

It turns out that Heffer and Thatcher were friends of sorts; similarly Thatcher and Allan Adams. (See Frank Field on Thatcher’s liking for socialist company). The first 6 years of my political life was devoted to opposing nearly everything Thatcher did (including the Falklands War, about which I have changed my mind; the exception: sale of council houses), and that only ended because I moved somewhere that I could oppose what Reagan was doing instead. But there’s plenty of space on the internet for people who want to speak ill of the dead—I just thought I would tell a story I heard about 22 years ago and is not, as far as I can find, recorded elsewhere.