"So, Thatcher is dead, the victim of a rotten egg . . ."

I hate it when you a good image at your fingertips, but you don't have a plausible excuse to use it. It's my dilemma with the pic above, which I stumbled across amongst a *cough* pile of books in a dusty library stack. (That's me coughing 'cos of the paper dust, not because I'm shameless enough to misquote Harper Lee).

I guess I could remind readers of this excellent post from *cough* - that bastard paper dust, again - two days ago, but that would to be to err too far on the side of shameless self-promotion. (A typically Thatcherite characteristic.) So I'll save the day by providing a link to this excellent article from the vaults of the Socialist Standard:

Why The Left Needs A Thatcher

Published in the May 1989 Socialist Standard on the tenth anniversary of Margaret Thatcher becoming Prime Minister, it was a knockabout piece that stuck the boot into Thatcher, the Labour Party and the left, and thus ties in nicely with the doctored pic above. In fact, perhaps I should have opted for the alternative title of Margaret Thatcher - Militant Class Warrior, which is a paraphrased quote from the article, rather than using the article's opening line instead.

Mentioning in jest that Thatcher is dead in the title of a blog post in the modern times of RSS readers and keyword internet search engines is how blog whispers get started, and the circulating rumours of the death of one dictator from the eighties is enough for one week, thank you very much.

UPDATE

A kind reader has sent me the following link. Christ, does this mean that there may be a sub-culture out there that has elevated Thatcher to the status of counter-culture icon or is it just nightwear for the balding middle-aged Monday Club members, who like to wear Mrs T's image close to their man-boobs whilst they dream about their halcyon days alongside Harry Phibbs and 'Guido' in the Federation of Conservative Students during the eighties?

The more that I think about it, I'm actually dreading the day when Thatcher joins Keith Joseph in the right-wing think tank in the sky; there will be such an outpouring of crocodile tears that I'll have to wear waders and an inflatable life jacket for the two weeks after her death.