Friends, family and followers pay respects to former 'lady member' for Finchley in simple service at chapel
Margaret Thatcher arrived at the Palace of Westminster for the last time two minutes early on Tuesday. The hearse carrying her coffin, draped in white flowers and the union flag, glided past the regular knot of protesters on Parliament Square, past the silent sightseers outside the abbey and into the Peers' entrance at 2.58pm. The Methodist disciplinarian, never quite erased from her character, would have approved.
Just before the cortege turned up, three ministers – Vince Cable, David Willetts and Matt Hancock – dashed through the crowd into the building. Overwhelmed with grief? Not exactly. They were voting to fend off a backbench Tory revolt against the coalition's relaxation of home extension planning laws, a recipe for suburban anarchy which might have tested her party loyalty.
Though modest, Tuesday's was a showier appearance than Thatcher's debut here, made after winning Finchley in the Tory election landslide of October 1959. But not by much. Even then the former Miss Roberts, a wannabe MP since her teens, had shown a talent for publicity and a capacity to impress despite the handicap of her gender – one of just 25 "lady members" that year, 12 of them Tories.
"Tories Choose Beauty," the Evening Standard had said when the tax barrister mother-of-twins had beaten the chaps to a safe London seat, despite her husband being away on business. Finchley Tories "have armed themselves with a new weapon – a clever woman," said the more perceptive Finchley Press.
Within weeks of becoming an MP pundits were predicting "a brilliant future". "A star is born," said the Express. The future PM's Labour pair called her "exceptionally able, also a very nice woman". One patronising Tory MP called her "over-bright and shiny", another said that she reminded him of one of his constituency activists "but writ hideously large".
How things change. In 1959 Thatcher's evolving Thatcherite views were distinctly unfashionable in Harold Macmillan's Keynesian Britain and she was smart enough to keep them in her handbag. As for some of the rightwing Tories – not all – who turned out for Tuesday's short, simple service in the ancient Chapel of St Mary Undercroft, they would have been among her most vocal ("should be at home with her children") critics in the blokeish Smoking Room.
Few visitors seemed to be aware of the quiet drama in the chapel off Westminster Hall where Charles I was tried for his life in 1649. As for the teenage school parties, how many of them had tweeted last week "who is Margaret Thatcher?" A Roundhead in the Cavalier's party is one answer. Celebrations of her life have attracted low TV audiences on all channels, a watching TV reporter confided.
Eileen Wright, 82 and a parliamentary secretary since 1946 – yes 1946 – was not in the crowd by chance. In the early years she used to fill in during Thatcher's own secretary's holidays. "She was lovely. One Monday I said 'I can't stay late tonight, I have my floral art class.' The next Monday she said 'it's your floral art class.' I said 'no, it's only once a month.'" Frugal Thatcher also paid Mrs Wright in porcelain pieces, not money – "taxes were so high".
At the head of the queue outside the chapel ("why are there so many police and officials here, don't they have work to do?" Lady T might have murmured) was Tory eager-beaver Mark Pritchard, unborn when his heroine got her first ministerial job in 1961.
He was soon joined by Ann and Cecil Parkinson – a derailed Thatcher protege, now the last survivor of the Falklands war cabinet. Then came Julian Lewis, one of the day's planning rebels, and ex-MP-now-lord, Patrick Cormack.
"She was a great prime minister, though I voted against her many times," Cormack admitted. Charles Powell, her loyal foreign policy adviser, and John Wakeham, her Mr Fix-It, were not far behind. Speaker Bercow was later.
The Thatcher family arrived last, Carol with what social gossips said is her "on-off boyfriend of 20 years," a tanned and curly-haired Swiss ski instructor, Sir Mark, an on-off many things, with his second wife and children.
They too were part of Thatcherism's collateral damage.
Margaret Thatcher never voted against a Tory government until – in the Lords – she rebelled in 1992 over a referendum on the EU's Maastricht Treaty, the euro-worm in the bud that still gnaws David Cameron. The PM was not present ; he will read a lesson at the public funeral at St Paul's. "This was a much more intimate service, very emotional," explained John Whittingdale, another Thatcher intimate from the No 10 years. Prayers, a reading from Psalm 139, verses from St John ("I am the way, the truth and the light"). Nicholas Soames, grandson of the last British politician to get such a sendoff, was among those listening.
"Watching them is like being in Madame Tussaud's" quipped a reporter. Yet Labour and the Lib Dems, represented on this Tory tribal occasion by their chief whips, suspect the Conservatives have mismanaged the death of what the death certificate called their "retired stateswoman". "Cameron tries to suggest what she did was all right for everyone, but it wasn't," said one veteran MP.
Emerging from the chapel (completed in 1365, heavily restored Thatcher-style in 1860) the rightwing Tory, Bernard Jenkin, put it more generously: "I have gone out of my way to be nice about people who criticise her. Some scars will never heal. Others condemn themselves out of their own mouth." Nearby tourists respectfully inspected the brass plaque in the floor marking where Charles I fought for his throne and lost. Parliament executed him after a public trial and due process. With her own cabinet in 1990 Margaret Thatcher was not so lucky.
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Ed Pilkington, Adam Gabbatt, Dan Roberts, Matt Williams 17 Apr, 2013
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/apr/16/westminster-goodbye-margaret-thatcher
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