I do like it when I find an interesting discarded section of a newspaper that I haven’t read: the Friday film and music supplement or the Saturday review from the Guardian for example. I didn’t notice it at the time, but last Saturday The Guardian printed a review by Douglas Hurd of a book about Margaret Thatcher written by Simon Jenkins. I suppose it could have been a review by George Galloway of a book about Tony Benn written by Madeleine Bunting.
To my dismay I found myself agreeing with some of the claims made by Hurd and/or Jenkins in the first quarter of the article. Then their patrician drawl of unsupportable assertion began to fill my mind’s ear and my breathing resumed.
(The same section of the paper also carried an ad for the latest Ruth Rendell:
A TRAGIC DEATH HIDES A WEB OF FAMILY DECEIT IN THE WATER’S LOVELY
Ruth Rendell writes about “a tragic death” revealing “a web of family deceit”? Whodathunkit?)
Bet you missed my tremendously good follow-up letter about Hurd’s review in this week’s Guardian Saturday Review Section’s unread (except by those as writes them) letters page as well, eh?…
I did, I’m afraid. Could you link to it or paste it into the comments here?
In his review of Simon Jenkins’s new book (“The sofa ascendancy”, October 7), Douglas Hurd endorses the case it makes for “the transfer of power to a revived local government”. Perhaps he’s forgotten that Thatcher, the book’s subject, took power away from local government because she couldn’t trust it to use it wisely. How would Hurd or Jenkins devolve real decision-making power while avoiding that favourite Tory cliché, the “postcode lottery”?
Sorry can’t remember the href etc stuff!
http://books.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,,1921965,00.html
‘Tory cliché, the “postcode lottery”‘: don’t I remember it as a Labour cliché, particularly in the Major years?
The Tories steal all Labour’s best lines and turn them into clichés!