Bagehot: The ghost of Mrs T

摘要

Glancing out of his office window on April 8th, the day Margaret Thatcher died, Bagehot noted the union flag at half-mast over the Palace of Westminster. On his way home, he passed a herd of paparazzi jostling for the first coffin shot outside the Ritz hotel, where she suffered her fatal stroke. Arriving in Brix-ton, centre of the 1981 race riots that were one of the defining images of her premiership, he skirted a crowd drinking fizzy wine and chanting offensive slogans about a politician who had left power almost a quarter of a century ago (before a few of the revellers were even born). All London, a city transformed in that intervening time, seemed fixated on her death.