The Margaret Thatcher Foundation website has just put up a fascinating page which tells how Mrs Thatcher came to use the words of St Francis of Assisi on the steps of Number Ten.
This is a PDF of her original notes. Watch a video of her remarks HERE. Ronnie Millar is credited with encouraging Mrs T to use these words, but Alistair Cooke, in this month's Total Politics, has a slightly different account. This is his recollection from the funeral of Airey Neave...The small church at Longworth in the Oxfordshire countryside was packed to overflowing with former war-time comrades and Members of Parliament. We sang with all the vigour we could muster the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Mrs Thatcher spoke so very movingly of "Airey the quiet, Airey the soft-spoken", describing the man who had made her Leader of the Party four years earlier as "the most unassuming man I have ever met". As I was standing in the church porch after the service, she stopped for a moment and grasped my hand. "We will win, and win well - for Airey". Then she rushed off to comfort Diana and the family. I noted at the time: "No one knows how to comfort people in distress as well as Mrs T." I thought again about the great political partnership, destroyed by Irish terrorism at a pivotal moment in the Party's history, when exactly four weeks late, Mrs T stood on the steps of No 10 and quoted St Francis of Assisi's famous prayer. As I was leaving Airey Neave's dingy little office in the Commons on that terrible day, Friday 30 March 1979, he said: "Don't close the door. I am just going to take St Francis's prayer round to Margaret's office. She might find it useful."
11 comments:
What a contrast to the people that have so wrecked out Nation's character these last terrible and painful years. The Left are just so horrible as to defy logic.
Very moving. Thank you.
Thank you Margaret for all you did for this country and it was immense..I just so wish we had you back....
Where there is a Tory Victory - there is a Yellow Liberal Democrat Taxi!
When Nick Clegg is defeated in Sheffield Hallam there will be Cheers!
Where there is a Yellow Taxi - there is a Tory MP in Eastleigh!
Where LD MP's are wipt out local election by-elections will be cited as showing the LD's will regain the seat.
Where this false hope is raised by merchants of Gold Coins - Tories will laugh their heads off!!!
LD LD LD - Out Out Out!
There is NO evidence St. Francis had any thing to do with this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prayer_of_St_Francis
The prayer itself is fine, but was besmirched by Mrs. Thatcher's actions in office.
Just taken from Tom Harris' blog " The Myth of Margaret Thatcher"
They still bemoan her loss, don’t they, these unreconstructed Thatcherites? You can almost hear them today, claiming that she could have gone on to win a fourth successive victory for her party. This is a lie. I wish she had stayed as Prime Minister: I vividly recall seeing her enforced departure from Number 10 as a very bad sign indeed for my own party’s electoral prospects. The only reason the Conservatives won in 1992 was that they had had the very good sense to ditch a terminally unpopular leader who had lost her political instinct.
We all have our terminally unpopular leaders who have lost their political instinct, Tom. You obviously think that the Tories showed good sense in 92. Will the PLP show good sense in 09? And has Mr Harris' political instinct temporarily deserted him?
I watched "Shameful Secrets of the Seventies" on SKY 3 last night ( such are the nighttime behaviours of a confessed sodomite) and it claimed that Mrs. Thatcher was known to the press at the time as "Ho Chi Min". Is that true?
Thatcher is just what the country needed at that time. Someone with the guts to call the bluff of the big union bosses acting as proxies for the USSR in trying to wreck the whole place.
Would that today's Conservative party had someone of equal guts to stand up for Britain against the leftist tripe and the creeping dictatorship of the EU.
A musical setting of the Prayer of St Francis was a regular feature of our school morning assembly - which thus acquired a faintly surreal political aura from May 1979.
The really amazing thing is that died in the wool Thatcherites like Iain Dale still think she actually meant this rather than the completely hypocritical humbug it actually was.
It was highly entertaining watching the 1979 election on BBC Parliament today, not least for the astonishing lack of foresight everyone had about Lady Finchley - who would have thought she would turn out to want to destroy all of the best of British industry for example? Or base the UK economy on spivs and barrow boys?
Anyone for union with Iceland?
Oh my , you lot make me laugh.
Labour has been in power for 12 years , Major was in power for what 5 years before that but one Woman caused all the problems.
The only thing that the abour party has achieved in the last 12 years is to drag us back 30 years to the point where Maggie was needed to sort out your messes.
You have one problem though , you have been seen through , when you get wiped out at the next election there will be no Labour party , the Liberal Democrats will be the party of opposition , and you won't be able to blame Maggie for that now will you ? Ooops , I forgot , Mandy will find a way to spin that for you won't he ? Or has he given up the ghost too ?
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