From Princess Di to the man who invented mini-roundabouts ...fifty people who have wrecked Britain
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... itain.html
5 Diana The 'People's Princess' was a liability, a souffle of false ideas, a supermodel with all that that entails. She was the glamorous tool of cleverer men, a plaything for the powerful, a delusion worshipped only by the impressionable.
The Princess may have been a loving mother. She may also have been photogenic and able to convey an easy charm. But the sorry truth is that this adored concept, this packaged, airbrushed Diana, weakened our society. She made us more neurotic.
After Diana, it became so easy to emote it was hard to tell if people meant their tears or if they were simply trying them on. Diana robbed us of the stoicism and understatement which had served Britain well.
Thanks largely to Diana we have become a country in which the words 'crisis' and 'disaster' are devalued from overuse, a country of emotional incontinence where adults will weep if they fail to win a talent competition yet where no one bothers to welcome home soldiers from a war zone.
Diana was a danger to the stability of our kingdom. She mixed in circles that were disreputable and, in some cases, neurotically anti-British. Her death was shocking, horrible and a waste of beauty.
But Diana was a naive menace, an odd mixture of simpering shyness and galloping egomania. God rest her soul, she was a mirage, a false harbinger of egalitarianism, and we were foolish ever to think otherwise.
17 Margaret Thatcher Many of Margaret Thatcher's political decisions improved our country. She revived the acumen of our business tycoons. She prevented the Falkland Islands falling into the hands of a murderous junta and reminded us it was worth being British.
She took a painful, but wise, decision to weaken the Unionists' grip on Northern Ireland. She allowed taxpayers to keep more of their earnings and enabled council tenants to buy their homes.
But it was in the pursuit of the trade unions - specifically, Arthur Scargill's National Union of Mineworkers - that Mrs Thatcher did lasting damage to our country.
The miners were industrial has-beens led by a politically suicidal maniac who could not be allowed to succeed. True.
Yet there was something hungry in the way she persecuted the war. Her radicalism had an ugly, vengeful side. Think how much more skilful her friend Ronald Reagan or the media-savvy Tony Blair would have been handling such a strike.
The miners themselves should not have been a target for her ire. They were a remarkable body of men who did unspeakably tough jobs with great stoicism and humour. They supported their families and had a strong sense of community and patriotism. They had the sort of values which Mrs Thatcher herself could and should have recognised.
She failed to project any such understanding. She underestimated and undercherished her opponents. The subsequent closure of nearly all of Britain's coal mines makes it hard to deny that the Government intended, all along, to wreck the country's coal industry.
Scargill lost, but not before he had convinced a large part of the North of the United Kingdom that he was the victim of a southern Tory Government plot.
The North-South electoral divide slammed into place like a prison door.
To see how emotive a subject the miners' strike remains, you have only to visit the musical Billy Elliot in London's West End: artful propaganda feeding on perceived victimhood.
I'm sorry to say that Mrs Thatcher created that sense of pique - and unless Cameron's Tories get down and grovel, it will last for many more years.
Has he gone
mad?
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
