October 6, 2008

"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."

Who says? Bizarrely, Quentin Letts of the Daily Mail (of all places) in his new book, Fifty People Who Buggered Up Britain.