Meeeting Margaret Thatcher

I have a picture of Baroness Thatcher listening to me. We met at a small cocktail party at the RAF Club in Piccadilly about ten years ago. She was very cordial and, of course, quite intense. We didn’t talk politics, but rather about the Eagle Squadron, the Yanks who flew in the RAF during the Battle of Britain. I had a good friend who was one of the Eagles and was the only American at El Alamein, a decisive battle in the desert in August 1942, “the end of the beginning” in Churchill’s famous phrase. I told her that my daughter wrote for The Guardian (oops, a Lefty newspaper). She asked what her name was, and when I answered “Alison Powell”, she said approvingly, “a most English name”. She also spoke of Ronald Reagan, saying quite sadly, “the last time I saw Ronnie he didn’t recognize me”. And now we have Meryl Streep in “The Iron Lady” as the aging Thatcher in her twilight years also in late stage dementia. Of course, in flashbacks she is still vital, attractive, Britain’s first female Prime Minister, ten years in office and every inch the leader. I lived in London during the blackouts,, the garbage piled high on every street and it was chaos. She was the leader they needed. I found myself agreeing with everything she said in the film: Don’t let the mindless mob of miners destroy society, teach the tinpot Argentine fascists not to trifle with the English Lion, keep Britain out of the disastrous Euro zone. “Grocer’s daughter”, one of her “spineless pygmys” mumbles under his breath while orchestrating her ouster. Well, I was a grocer’s son myself, spending my earliest years behind my father’s grocery store. I found myself in agreement with her, which is saying a lot from a citizen of The People’s Republic of Berkeley. History has already placed her in the pantheon of great leaders. I do, too.