Maggie Mist

So there’s this unattributed sentence, a draft of common sense, that flashed up somewhere on the internet, the likes of which I hadn’t heard since … since ... since longer than I care to remember.

“The European single currency is bound to fail, economically, politically and indeed socially, though the timing, occasion and full consequences are all necessarily still unclear.”

A lightning bolt: “yes Yes YES” I wanted to shout. Which of today’s movers and shakers had said it? And said it with belief to act on it?

Cameron believes in the pleasures of premiership and little else. Clegg and Miliband Junior joust on marshland to be, among other useless things, Europe’s, and presumably the euro’s, prime paramour.

The only mouth of our current crop of ‘leaders’ from which such a sentence could have fallen is that of William Hague. But so mired in coalition compromise has he become, the words would have choked him.

Going back, Gordon Brown was, I think, anti-euro though passionless, forever speaking sideways to encompass his party’s starry-eyed collectivism. The slop of Tony Blair’s third way meant he rarely said anything substantial or understandable. John Major – remember him? I don’t, let alone his sayings.

Surely, it must have been … HER, her for who I still mourn, whose ascension I cheered in 1979 and whose nemesis in 1990, when announced on my car radio, caused me to pull up lest the mist in my eyes caused an accident.

I googled. Yes! The quote was Maggie’s. Margaret Thatcher said it, rather wrote it, in her book ‘Statecraft’. Google also led me to a thoughtful person’s compendium of its fifty key saws and instances.

Scrutinising them, I marvelled at her wisdom, astonished that she could be so reviled for articulating such obvious unadorned truths.

Dissenters are requested to offer a single utterance, let alone fifty, by Cameron, Clegg, Miliband Junior or Senior, Brown, Blair, Major, anyone that - if applied - would better improve our collective lot.

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