filed for Evening News, 27 November 1990
It was more than eleven years ago. I had for some reason put on a suit and was standing in the bright early morning light with about 20 others outside the Secretary of State’s official residence in Charlotte Square.
The door opened and this small, sharp-nosed, permed and grinning woman advanced purposefully towards two young girls who were proffering a bouquet. It wasn’t until she came close that she realised that the flowers were dead.
Her smile withered and she strode into a big black car. We broke into chants of protest about the building of a nuclear power station at Torness in East Lothian. A friend ran to her car as it was moving off and planted a “Nuclear Power? No Thanks!” sticker on its bonnet.
Across the street an anarchist called Jack had stretched a huge long banner across the railings. “Nuclear power kills Tories too”, it said. At the time it seemed funny.
I don’t remember the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 as a particularly historical event. I and my friends were deeply involved in the Scottish Campaign to Resist the Atomic Menace and had been too concerned with attacking the previous Labour Government.
I saw her again last year when she came to open Torness. She strode around amidst the vast gleaming pipework, poking her nose into corners and asking the obsequious gents who followed her everywhere what she was looking at. The press pack, of which I was part, hovered constantly around her like bluebottles.
Last Thursday, along with millions of others, I celebrated her demise. When I bought champagne at my local off-licence, the man behind the counter smiled. “There’s been a brisk trade in that today”, he said.
She was a formidable, frightening woman, the kind of person you would cross the street to avoid. You would certainly not want to get involved in an argument with her. Or, for that matter, live in a country governed by her.
She was a quintessential Little Englander who made me ashamed to be English and glad to be living in Scotland. She was a warmonger without compassion, a worshipper of money without morality and a wicked witch without a sense of humour.
One of the darkest moments of her reign was the Falklands war. “When you’ve spent half your political life dealing with humdrum issues like the environment, it’s exciting to have a real crisis on your hands”, she said at the time.
A couple of year ago she apparently revised her views on the boredom of environmental issues. She decided instead that there was political mileage to be made in highlighting the ecological threats to our planet. In so doing she unintentionally legitimised the green revolution.
As a result, things are now happening which, not so long ago, it would have been impossible to imagine. Yesterday, for example, the Lothian and Edinburgh Environmental Partnership (LEEP) was launched by Edinburgh District Council with the aim of promoting a sustainable, environmentally-friendly local economy (and of which I shall write more at a later date).
But I do not believe that Mrs Thatcher ever really understood the implications of the environmental crisis. She refused to abandon her faith in two of the most serious environmental evils: what she called the “great car economy” and nuclear power.
She assumed that a little free-market tinkering and a clutch of international agreements could solve the problems of global warming and the ozone layer. It was nothing, she thought, that capitalism couldn’t easily cope with.
On that, she was as wrong as she was on everything else, although I doubt if she will ever admit it. Perhaps her most alarming trait was her absolute inability to admit that she could make mistakes. It was her pride, her arrogance, her hubris, that led to her fall last week.
The suddenness, sourness and justice of her going was sweet. She has presided over most of my adult life and I have hated her more than I can remember hating anyone. I am more thankful than I can say that, when my young child grows up, she will be history.