Opinion by Mail columnist Ian Midgley.
IT WAS as predictable as night following day.
Months, years even, before Maggie Thatcher died I could have written you a list of those who would be gutted by the loss of a towering politician and those who' would be dancing on her grave with gleeful schadenfreude.
And sure enough, when the day came on Monday within minutes there was an explosion of frenzied tweeting, over-effusive toadying and distinctly nasty hooting about the death of an old lady. Well done everyone for conforming to your stereotypes.
Me? I didn't feel particularly strongly either way.
As part of the upwardly mobile working class with increasingly middle class pretensions, my family did all right out of the 1980s. My dad worked in the payroll department of a catalogue company – a white collar son of blue collar parents – so we were never touched by the hardship of the miners' strikes or any other attacks on the dominant unions of the era. I never ran short of milk, so I'm probably not in the best place to judge when others claim Maggie was the devil incarnate.
But I will say this, as a woman who worked her way up from being a grocer's daughter to being Britain's first female Prime Minister, you've got to have some respect for her achievements.
Love her or loathe her, I'd say her work ethic and aspiration is something I'd rather my kids looked up to, rather than being a get-rich-quick X Factor contestant or a benefits scrounger. Even the hardcore lefties can't argue with that one.
