Mrs. Thatch Wasn't a Complete Nutter After All!

As anyone who knows me will testify, I believe Mrs.T to be the Devil Incarnate - guilty of many varied crimes against humanity. The most serious being leading us into a War that could have been prevented by letting the Argies know we were actually intereseted in the Falklands after all. This was at a time in 1982 when her economic policies were not working and her Government was actually quite unpopular so she needed something to distract the general public and make everyone feel good about her. Yes, I know Tony Blair also led us into a pointless and unnecessary war - I haven't a clue why, but he did it with the knowledge that it may well make him very unpopular - and it did!

On a more motoringy front, Mrs.T was pivotal in the demise of British Leyland deciding to sell it off at a bargain price to her chum Roland Smith, or, more precisely, BAe, the Company he led. There were certain "protections" and "guarantees" in place such as BAe had to be committed to BL for at least five years and, sure enough, as soon as five years had passed, BAe disposed of it to BMW for a very nice profit thank you very much. BMW were not geared up to deal with a then mass-market car manufacturer and subsequently had to dispose of it themselves and the rest is history.

All of this made me very worried by Saint Jeremy Clarkson's column in the latest issue of Top Gear Magazine. I'll not reproduce what he wrote because it's not my place and I'd probably get sued by someone anyway but the gist of what interested me is that Mrs.T was a seemingly lone voice at the start of her tenure in speaking up for lean-burn engines rather than catalytic converters as a way of cleaning up exhaust gases. This would have dramatically reduced the amount of carbon dioxide emitted but nobody apart from Chemistry Grad Mrs.T was too worried about CO2 then. I must admit that I do remember Ford and a few other companies dropped/postponed development of lean-burn around that time because World Governments were not interested.

I have an awful lot of time for Jeremy's views, despite him being further to the right than Tory Central, he does put over his views in an intelligent and amusing way so if he's right on this one, and I've no reason to doubt it, then Mrs.T did actually speak some sense once and nobody was prepared to listen.

Maybe because she came over as a complete nutter.