The Sex Starved Boa Constrictor

I was privileged enough to be in the House of Commons in the late 1980s when Tony Banks accused Margaret Thatcher of having the 'sensitivity of sex starved boa constrictor'. I was an A Level politics student and this was my first of many visits to the House as I continued my politics and economics degree and later worked for a Parliamentary Under Secretary of State.

It was a funny, perhaps even an apt comment and everyone laughed. But as an insecure female teenager, I wondered how any woman could cope with such a personal insult. She didn't flinch. She was witty and acidic in her response. She was so intensely single minded that the comparison didn't even seem to register with her. I was completely inspired.

On the other hand, I had grown up in 1970s council estate Britain. I lived amongst the unionised workers and welfare scroungers which she so passionately opposed. My dad was made redundant in the early 1980s; he was in his mid-50s and had been a manual worker in manufacturing. He was one of the 3 million unemployed: an unprecedented number on the dole since the depression. The night he came home with his redundancy notice was the only time I saw him cry until my mum died.

I was a Thatcher child in every sense of the word. I grasped every opportunity that I could possibly get my hands upon. I worked hard and was 'rewarded'. But my dad had worked hard too.

My mixed feelings about her are writ large today in all of the commentary on her passing. My Liverpudlian neighbour opened a bottle of champagne singing 'Ding, Dong the Witch is Dead'. My husband's work colleague declared her the last great British Statesman. Either way, she is history...