Remembering the Iron Lady
In 1984, I was on a school trip when I heard that a bomb had exploded in the hotel where Prime Minster Margaret Thatcher was staying. This was long before mobile phones or the Internet and we were out in the countryside with no TV or radio. All we heard was that it was a big bomb and that the hotel had been destroyed. We all hated Margaret Thatcher, because many of our parents hated Margaret Thatcher, and the idea that she was dead filled us with excitement. We were teenagers, and therefore too stupid to understand that death and bombs are not things to get excited about, but I remember clearly the great enmity toward Margaret Thatcher we learned from popular culture at the time.
This will probably surprise a lot of Poles, for whom Margaret Thatcher is probably the only British political figure they have heard of. It will be even more surprising for Poles who saw coverage of her funeral on Wednesday – it looked like the funeral of a national hero. Glossy black horses pulled the carriage bearing her casket through the streets of central London as soldiers marched and crowds waved flags. Queen Elizabeth II, Britain's prime minister and dozens of dignitaries from around the world, including Lech Wałęsa and Donald Tusk, awaited the procession in St Paul's Cathedral, a venue reserved for the weddings and funerals of Britain's most significant citizens.
Margaret Thatcher was a hero to a large segment of British society, but she was deeply hated by another large segment. I grew out of the childish, fashionable hatred of my teenage years, and now, in common with another large segment of British people, regard her as a leader who made difficult but necessary changes to the way the United Kingdom was run, albeit with little apparent sympathy for the people whose lives were affected by the resulting massive unemployment.
Some people did not lose their hatred with the passing of the years and the slow rusting of the Iron Lady. In the days between her death and funeral, her most passionate detractors organised a Facebook campaign encouraging people to buy the song 'Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead' from the classic 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz. Their aim was to get the song into the weekly listing of top-selling records broadcast by the BBC every Sunday, and they succeeded. Trapped between the opinions of people who thought the entire campaign was unbelievably tasteless and their commitment to free speech, the BBC compromised by playing just a few seconds of the song while a newsreader made an announcement about why it was in the programme.
Margaret Thatcher left office in 1990. The fact that she was still able to cause a national argument almost a quarter of a century later says one thing about her: that she was a politician with strong and clear principles. That’s the thing I remember most about the era when she was active in national life – politicians had very different views and the people who elected them either believed in them or thought they were evil. It reminds me a lot of Poland today.