Essential viewing on Thatcher

Portillo on Thatcher: The Lady’s Not for Spurning. Monday, BBC Four, 9pm

According to David Aaronovitch in the Times

One of Margaret Thatcher’s celebrated recent invocations was, at the time, accounted the most disgraceful. It happened in June 2006 when the BBC presenter, Jonathan Ross, asked the new Conservative leader David Cameron whether, as a youth, he had used images of the iron lady as a means of non-ideological stimulation. Many people felt that this was not only a crude impertinence (which it was), but also that Ross was introducing extraneous emotion into an essentially intellectual area.

But, as anyone who watches Michael Portillo’s new BBC Four programme The Lady’s Not for Spurning on Monday, will soon realise, Ross was on to something. For what Portillo reveals is that many Tories, especially male Tories, were indeed deeply in love with Mrs Thatcher, and could not bear what was done to her - or what they had helped do to her - in the autumn of 1990. The Conservative Party itself, says Portillo, became - and may still be - the victim of their feelings of hatred and guilt.

“We thought she was brilliant,” says Portillo, early in the piece. “I entered politics because she had inspired me.” Being near her was “exhilarating,” he goes on, and many like him felt “captivated”.