I walk past The Ritz Hotel twice a day and work five minutes away. It’s a unique part of London: home to the gentlemen’s clubs; near Mayfair where the hedge fund managers live (with their armies of wives, servants, bodyguards, au pairs, armoured Range Rovers and braying, jodhpur-clad daughters); surrounded by multinational corporate headquarters and the most expensive restaurants, shops and private hotels in the capital. A few yards South are the royal palaces: the pinnacle of the British class system, home to the great national symbols of Victorian and Edwardian empire and military pride.
St James’s is arguably the centre of British capitalism, the place where money and class meet in glass, stone and concrete.
The death of a powerful politician is always choreographed. It’s just so right that Margaret Thatcher died at The Ritz. It’s perfect. From Grantham grocer’s shop to St James’s Piccadilly. What an extraordinary woman!
But Thatcher was no patriot. Don’t let her supporters get away with that claim. Margaret Thatcher destroyed the Conservative Party — the party of Winston Churchill — as national political force. She was so hated by the Scots that even now they return just one, repeat one, Conservative MP. They may soon vote for independence.
It was Margaret who experimented on the Scots a year early, in 1989, with the Poll Tax. They’ve never forgiven her. David Cameron, unable to deliver a Conservative majority in Parliament, is reaping the whirlwind.
That’s not the legacy of a patriot. The job of a successful national politician is to unite a nation. Margaret Thatcher was a destructive force within the very DNA of the British nation state. She was a genuine enemy within.
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