Wednesday 27 November 2013

Stranger Days

"Now, like these Soviet tanks, the Iron Lady was unceremoniously decommissioned."

That is a good line.

Although not as good a line as the little girl's, "Mrs Thatcher, in the event of a nuclear war, where will you be?" Or Thatcher's own, to some pop star or what have you who had arrived at Number 10 wearing a T-shirt about Pershing, "We have no Pershing here, dear. They are all Cruise here, dear." She was her own tribute act, was that Thatcher. She was a very good one, too.

And Dominic Sandbrook's Strange Days: Cold War Britain has been a good series, which concluded with the observation that the Cold War had been won with consumerism and credit. That turbo-capitalism, the term used by Sandbrook, had been supposed to bring use everlasting prosperity. But they did not, and we ought to have used our victory more wisely.

Sandbrook's Daily Mail colleague, Andrew Alexander, is getting on a bit now. But it as only last year that he published America and the Imperialism of Ignorance, a devastating critique of the Cold War and its aftermath from an utterly uncompromising right-wing perspective. A series based on that is long overdue.

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