The town that made Margaret

[CHIMO]

Sitting in a guest house in Grantham - £29 a night, the loo across the hall - I turn on the TV in the corner and I am visited by the ghost of a ghost. On the news, Margaret Thatcher is trailing behind Prince Charles at the Chelsea Hospital, where her husband Denis's ashes are scattered. An infirmary has been opened in her name. For a moment, I wonder if perhaps the footage is just doomed to run on a loop in Grantham guest houses, and then I realise it all happened this afternoon. I haven't seen Thatch for a while, but I have been reading about her for a few days in preparation for this Lincolnshire pilgrimage and it's a shock to see her in pallid flesh, as if I have somehow conjured her up, in her vivid blue suit.

This anxiety is exaggerated by her appearance. On the ancient telly, in her senescence, she seems weirdly ephemeral, both there and not there. Charles ushers her about as if she is the Queen Mother and she takes a salute from a trio of red-jacketed pensioners before shaking hands in her regal white gloves.

Then she is pictured pulling back a curtain to reveal a portrait of herself in front of Christopher Wren's stately edifice. She is wearing royal purple in the portrait and holding some kind of plan. The living Thatcher gazes up at her likeness as if she is sure she has seen that woman before but cannot quite place her. It is as if she has come face to face with what she used to mean.

She looks deeply puzzled and it is a puzzlement we can all share. It's exactly 30 years since she came to power, nearly 20 since she was unseated and still none of us can rationalise, quite, what we feel about her - either our loathing or our adoration. Even as her era and her "-ism" abruptly ends - in the bail-out and humbling of her market economy, the smashing up of the banks - no one can get to us as a nation quite like she can.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/apr/05/margaret-thatcher-grantham-reappraisal


British politician Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of the UK from 1979 to 1990, circa 1970. Photograph: Terry O'Neill/Getty Images