The PM who was never quite real

The nation turns against a sponger who'd milked the system ... Leverhulme farewells Thatcher, a revolutionary, not a Tory ... Brought down by a "howling intellectual error" ... London Calling 

At home with the Philpotts. Mick was called a "scrounger"

NO person in this country likes another of the same class, or below, getting a privilege they don't have themselves.

A chap called Michael Philpott, from a council house in Derby, has been fascinating and upsetting the nation for weeks.

He's now in the slammer after being convicted of the manslaughter of six of his 17 kids in a fire.

Apparently, Mick hadn't bathed for three months; he'd been enjoying alternate nightly trysts with lasses called Mairead and Lisa; and he and Mairead and another chap in a botched attempt to frame Lisa started the fire while the children slept.

This was bad enough. But what really enraged middle England was that Mick was bringing in benefits and other perks equivalent to £100,000 a year. 

Philpott's come-uppance coincided with Chancellor George Osborne's introduction of radical changes to the benefit system. 

One is called the Bedroom Tax. If you're receiving a housing benefit and you have a spare room, you will be penalised 14 percent.

There are all sorts of weird rules and one is certain that an army of professional snoopers will be employed to enforce them.

For example, two kids of the same gender under 16 must share a bedroom and if someone in the house dies you won't be penalised for 12 months.

Maybe it's to make some room for the expected deluge of Romanians.

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A FEW days after all this, the woman who allowed hundreds of thousands of Britons to buy their council house, moved on.

The death and funeral of the Blessed Margaret or "Ding Dong" the Witch, depending on your view, caused a flood of essays, reminiscences and passionate opinions.

People here have always tiptoed into conversations about her. 

Well-heeled Guardian readers chortled into their lattés. The descendants of the steel-workers and miners who lost their jobs when the State stopped subsidising heavy industry held hollow parties.

Curiously, a bunch of 22-year-olds who weren't even born when Maggie resigned gave us their insight and wisdom on telly.

But in back of the five cabs I took in London and Newcastle last week, I heard nothing but unsolicited and extensive praise for her, and vitriol about the current crop.

*   *   *

Steady on, old boy

THE press has been saving-up the coverage and it has been terrific.

For me, Thatcher never seemed quite real so the personal snippets are the best.

Channel 4's Jon Snow, a pinko cleric's son, produced a funny piece called Maggie Thatcher and Me. He'd followed her around the world for years and said the score was Thatcher 20; Snow nil.

He appeared terrified of her.

"She was always Prime Minister and always a woman. You never quite lost sight of either."

Snow interviewed Matthew Parris, who'd worked in her office.

"You very quickly got to know there was no point in trying to make her laugh."

Cynthia Crawford, her personal assistant, said she never went to bed during the three months of the Falklands War.

"She said Crawfie dear (you got the look) you can't drink gin and tonic in the middle of the night. You've got to have a whisky and soda. It will give you energy."

Her driver Denis Oliver never saw her panic. He was the first into her room after the Brighton Bombing and she said:

"I don't know why this has never happened before."

She asked for Marks and Spencer to be opened so people could change clothes and announced, "The conference will go on as usual". 

Parris admired her because he could sense that, "underneath she was just as scared as anyone else would be, but she wasn't letting it show." 

In The Times, Ferdinand Mount told us jauntily her best lines were written by "that genial old playwright, Ronnie Millar". 

In Mount's view, she was lucky in her enemies: Galtieri, Foot and Scargill.

Her fatal mistake, he wrote, was the poll tax - "a howling intellectual error". 

*   *   *

Thatcher: campaigning in Dartford, 1950

A SUPERB documentary by Martin Durkin on Channel 4 was called Death of a Revolutionary. 

His thesis was that Mrs T. was not a Tory, but a radical liberal or, as Bernard Ingham, put it:

"She was in the business of liberation."

The programme tracked her life as an outsider.

She first stood for the Tories in the safe Labour seat of Dartford in 1950 and campaigned among the working class, raising the vote by 7,000 - but the toffs didn't give her a proper chance again until 1959 when she won Finchley.

Former minister Kenneth Baker chose perfect understatement:

"The aristocratic establishment never quite took to Margaret."

They couldn't bring themselves to argue with a woman in public. Not only was she a woman, but worse, her father had been a grocer and his father, a cobbler.

Only two of her original Cabinet voted for her, so she got to work on them.

When Christopher Soames was sacked, he felt like he'd been dismissed by his parlour maid.

The Tories and Labour had created the post-war consensus of State control.

Soames: felt he'd been dismissed by his parlour maid

It owned most of the economy from shipyards to air travel; coal and gas to television and even took over a few pubs and Thomas Cook the travel agency. Just like Russia.

One had to be a member of the union to have a job and someone had only to sneeze for there to be a massive strike. People remember the uncollected rubbish and the bitterly cold three day blackouts.

By the 1970s a third of Britain was in state housing and large industries were over-manned, losing money and subsidised heavily.

Thatcher and her government sold off the failing industries. Harold Macmillan was appalled.

"First the Georgian silver goes ... then the Canalettos."

Individual shareholders increased to nine million. Journalist Janet Daley said people were thinking, "I want something better from out of my life than my parents had". 

It was too much for the privileged and the so-called intelligentsia like Stephen Fry who described Thatcher as a "shameful, putrid scab". 

Twenty-nine million working days were lost to strikes in 1979. When she left office it was below two million.

The change was often ugly and scenes on Aussie televisions of Brits fighting each other on the streets were very uncomfortable.

*   *   *

TOWARDS the end, Margaret, "we are a grandmother", got a bit carried away and started dressing like Elizabethan royalty.

The hubris was not surprising because for years no-one had the nuts to say, as they did at public school, "Steady on, old boy". 

Heseltine finally came forward, but committed the huge British faux pas of doing the dirty work in the open.

The Cabinet knifed Attila the Hen in the dark, and it was done in a brutal and cowardly way. She was, as Kelvin McKenzie put it, "thrown out by her own toffs".  

*   *   *

MARGARET Thatcher was 34 when she was elected to parliament. She'd already worked for 10 years as a scientist then a taxation barrister. She didn't start as pimply-faced graduate in a minister's office.

She was 53 when she became Prime Minister. Since that day it has no longer been thought impossible that a woman can reach the highest office.

History may find that Margaret Thatcher was right about the establishment; the subsidised industries; the power of the unions; the Falklands; the IRA; the fall of Communism; European bureaucracy and the single currency. 

She was wrong about the poll tax and the confrontational, uncaring way she handled thousands of people who lost their jobs and their sense of community.

She could be annoying, patronising and humourless, but she was feminine, plain-speaking, personally kind and courageous.

Bernard Ingham thought her the most tactless person he'd ever met and that's some call for a man from Hebden Bridge. 

Margaret Thatcher rose to the top in a country that traditionally had not given people of her gender and class a leg-up or even a second look.

*   *   *

IN death, we should let Maggie have the last word, if anything because she always had it in life.

Tim Bell looked after her advertising account from the 70s with Saatchi & Saatchi, and recalled his first interview.

She said three things:

"First, politicians have very large toes and very large fingers and it is very easy to tread on them. But, I have neither. You will always tell me the truth.

"Second, if you've got some trick that will get me elected, please don't use it, because if the people don't want me it won't work."

"Third, you will get a lot of abuse for working for me. I hope you're a big boy."