From Dehumanising Word Games to Gosnell

Abortion is not to be spoken of, only done.

By Andrew C. McCarthy

In Philadelphia, at a human abattoir on Lancaster Avenue, is where it ends, not where it starts. It starts with the perversion of language. It starts when the icons of a dissipated culture reduce a baby to a “fetus.” From there, Yeats’s blood-dimmed tide rolls rapidly in. Before long, a baby is not a person but a punishment, as President Barack Obama framed the matter in his familiar off-the-cuff iciness.

 Of course, to describe newborn children in their boundless possibilities and wonder would be to acknowledge, foremost, their humanity. That is why, instead, abortion enthusiasts must grope for words when circumstances force them to speak publicly about their gruesome business.

“That fetus, or child — however way you want to describe it,” Mr. Obama once stammered. This was back when, as a state senator, he was unnerved by the natural resistance of babies to the unnatural insistence of their mothers — of the culture — that they just disappear. If you’ve ever watched a hit man testify, you’ve heard the same stammer: the faint glimmer of a long-forgotten but stubbornly indelible line between right and wrong.

It is the line that makes killing much easier to do than to talk about. It is the line that now impels a self-imposed media embargo against news about the shocking trial of Kermit Gosnell.

Gosnell is a 72-year-old abortionist. The formal charges against him — the murders of a woman and seven babies — are but drops in a sea of carnage. Mounting evidence reveals him to be a mass murderer of epic scale and Mengele methods. It also spotlights the evil — the apparently unspeakable evil — of legalized abortion in all its coarsening gore. Plainly, the vaunted journalists of our debased mainstream have determined that there must be no meaningful coverage. No time in the 24/7 cycle to notice the inexorable path from dehumanizing the vulnerable through word games to mass-murdering them with casual sadism.

Better to shove the evidence into a dark closet. That’s what they did in Chicago. There, despite the best efforts of “physicians” (they of the “do no harm” oath), many “however way you want to describe its” were “not just coming out limp and dead,” as Obama haltingly put it. The abortionists’ answer was to stick the helpless survivors in a utility closet where they could die, out of sight and out of mind. Obama, in the pitiless logic of legalized abortion, labored to preserve this oft-practiced but never discussed form of infanticide against the Illinois legislature’s proposed “Born Alive” ban. (See senate transcript, April 4, 2002, beginning at page 29.)

A decade later in Philadelphia, “it would rain fetuses. Fetuses and blood all over the place.” So said Stephen Massof, one of Kermit Gosnell’s fellow butchers, as he described for the jury the chamber of horrors that was the “Women’s Medical Society” on Lancaster Avenue. There, scores of babies — perhaps hundreds of them — were willfully mutilated after being born alive.

Standard fare was the “snip.”

“Snip” is a terse, antiseptic word. Like “choice,” it is tailored to those rare, discomfiting occasions when the intentional killing of a “however way you want to describe it” must be spoken of rather than silently done. It is an effort, as much mentally as verbally, to evade the monstrousness we abide in the United States, where nearly 60 million children — a population roughly equal to that of France or the United Kingdom — have been aborted since the Supreme Court’s 1973 fatwa in Roe v. Wade.

In a “snip,” the abortionist, sharp scissors in hand, grasps the squirming and sometimes squealing baby he has just delivered. He stabs the child in the back and then, snapping the blades, severs the spinal cord from the brain. Massof described the snip as “literally a beheading. It is separating the brain from the body.”

He was testifying in exchange for a plea bargain that discounts his participation in numerous such “procedures” to a mere two instances of third-degree murder. After all, most of what he did at the “Women’s Medical Society” was perfectly legal.

The euphemistic “snip” calls to mind the Supreme Court’s opinion in Gonzales v. Carhart, another case about “choice.” Like Gosnell, LeRoy Carhart was an abortion “physician.” In the high court, he joined his progressive friends at Planned Parenthood and the City of San Francisco to defend the “choice” known as “partial birth” abortion — a name soothingly rebranded to “late term” abortion once it became clear that “partial birth” conveyed too much information.

In an uncharacteristically de trop outburst, the five justices in the narrow Carhart majority described varying abortion procedures with startling clinical precision. Most common is the first-trimester “suction curettage,” in which the “physician” vacuums the unwanted “embryonic tissue” from the womb. By the time the second trimester is reached, this “tissue” has matured into the unmistakable shape of a child. Thus the “dilation and evacuation” procedure is often called for.

Employed millions of times in this most civilized country over the last half century, “D&E,” the court explained, involves the “physician’s” use of forceps “to tear apart” the “fetus” by “ripping” it from the cervix and then “evacuating the fetus piece by piece . . . until it has been completely removed” from the mother. Often, the justices observed, the D&E “physician” finds it more congenial to “kill the fetus a day or two before performing the surgical evacuation,” since “medical” experience has shown that, “once dead . . . the fetus’ body will soften,” becoming “easier” to dice and remove. Oh, another helpful tip: “Rotating the fetus as it is being pulled decreases the odds of dismemberment.”

By the time Carhart was decided, Roe v. Wade had been on the books for over a generation — the generation, to be more specific, that is now ruling the roost. It goes without saying — for we wouldn’t want to say it — that, in a nation that has absorbed this generation’s preening “values,” D&E already enjoyed the stamp of judicial approval. The only question before the Carhart Court was whether “partial birth” abortion — “intact D&E” — was beyond the pale.

This “medical procedure” is triggered by an advanced stage of maturation, in which the child’s well-developed head tends to “lodge in the cervix.” Relying on the instruction of Martin Haskell, another experienced abortionist, the justices related:

The right-handed surgeon slides the fingers of the left [hand] along the back of the fetus and “hooks” the shoulders of the fetus with the index and ring fingers (palm down). While maintaining this tension, lifting the cervix and applying traction to the shoulders with the fingers of the left hand, the surgeon takes a pair of blunt curved Metzenbaum scissors in the right hand. He carefully advances the tip, curved down, along the spine and under his middle finger until he feels it contact the base of the skull under the tip of his middle finger.

The surgeon then forces the scissors into the base of the skull. . . . He spreads the scissors to enlarge the opening. . . . The surgeon [then] removes the scissors and introduces a suction catheter into this hole and evacuates the skull contents. With the catheter still in place, he applies traction to the fetus, removing it completely from the patient.

“Evacuates the skull contents” may be more bracing than “snip,” but it doesn’t quite do justice to the process and the frightful insouciance behind it. That was left to a nurse who had watched Haskell perform the “procedure” on a six-month-old “however way you want to describe it.” She recalled that, once all but the head had been delivered,

the baby’s little fingers were clasping and unclasping, and his little feet were kicking. Then the doctor stuck the scissors in the back of his head, and the baby’s arms jerked out, like a startle reaction, like a flinch, like a baby does when he thinks he is going to fall.

The doctor opened up the scissors, stuck a high-powered suction tube into the opening, and sucked the baby’s brains out. Now the baby went completely limp. . . . He cut the umbilical cord and delivered the placenta. He threw the baby in a pan, along with the placenta and the instruments he had just used.

Four justices of the United States Supreme Court would have upheld this barbarism. They would not have described it. It is not to be spoken of, only done. After all, to speak of it would infringe upon “choice.”

Speaking of “choice,” if President Obama has the opportunity to choose one more Supreme Court justice over the next four years, the Carhart dissenters will be the majority. Welcome to Philadelphia.

Stop the Killing. Stop the Crying.

Trang Bang, South Vietnam, 8 June 1972

Robert Stacy McCain

Did I ever mention that I can’t stand to hear children cry? It’s rather odd, considering I’m a father of six, that I can’t stand the sound of a crying child. When my kids were babies, I’d take them for long walks, rocking them in my arms until they fell asleep, rather than hear them cry.

As they got older — and this was especially true with the twin boys, who would beat each other up for fun — my trick for dealing with this problem was to strike a pose of callous indifference to their pain: “Is it bleeding? Are there any broken bones? No? Then shut up or go to your room.”

The thought of my children actually being injured horrifies me, and seeing them suffer the inevitable dings and bruises of childhood — the stumble on the playground, the cut or scrape — was so traumatic that I can’t actually recall any specific incident. Evidently, I’ve blocked these psychic wounds from memory. And the fact that one of my sons is now a 20-year-old Army private in training to become a front-line warrior involves risks I prefer not to think about. 

Ever.

All this is as a preamble to quoting Megan McArdle’s reflection on her admitted role in the media’s Gosnell blackout:

[T]he MSM has barely covered a story that could plausibly be named “The Trial of the Century”. And that demands explanation. So I’ll tell you why I haven’t covered it.
To start, it makes me ill. I haven’t been able to bring myself to read the grand jury inquiry. I am someone who cringes when I hear a description of a sprained ankle.
But I understand why my readers suspect me, and other pro-choice mainstream journalists, of being selective—of not wanting to cover the story because it showcased the ugliest possibilities of abortion rights. The truth is that most of us tend to be less interested in sick-making stories—if the sick-making was done by “our side.”
Of course, I’m not saying that I identify with criminal abortionists who kill infants and grievously wound their patients. But I am pro-choice.
What Gosnell did was not some inevitable result of legal abortion.

Except that it is, just as legal abortion is the inevitable result of the Contraceptive Culture, which was sanctioned by the “penumbras, formed by emanations” that Justice Douglas miraculously discovered in 1965, and if you are “someone who cringes when [you] hear a description of a sprained ankle,” you really ought to think about why these results are inevitable, including The Law of Large Numbers.

Having spent many years thinking this through, and unwilling to deliver a sermon on the topic, I am content to let others think through it for themselves, if only I could get them to pay attention to what is actually happening — “What ‘Choice’ Really Means” — and trace these horrors back to their philosophical and historical origins.

It’s like the Soviet Union: Socialists had dreamed for decades about the utopia that would be ushered in by the overthrow of industrial capitalism and, when the Bolsheviks seized power, many of these idealists insisted that the brutality and misery that resulted were incidental or accidental or, at any rate, not inherent to the Marxist-Leninist project itself. It took many decades and many millions of lives lost before some in the intelligentsia of the West recognized the hopeless folly of the revolutionary ideal. Strange to say, there are still historians determined to re-write the past in an effort to redeem the totalitarian nightmare.

So also with “choice”: Long before the 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade, there were those who dreamed of a sexual utopia where the risk of pregnancy could be removed as a disincentive to commitment-free promiscuity.

This dream was then conveniently dressed up in the rhetoric of “rights,” so that anyone who criticized promiscuity could be depicted as an opponent of freedom, and even the most ancient of legal and social traditions that stood in the way of the revolution could be trampled down as hindrances to Progress. Sophists who deliberately misinterpreted the American Founding were eager to assist in this effort, so that All Men Are Created Equal and the More Perfect Union could be made to seem as if they mandated the judicial imposition of a new social order the Founders most certainly never envisioned.

Utopian dreams have an ironic way of becoming nightmares, don’t they?

Now we look back over the course of four decades that have seen the sanctioned slaughter of tens of millions of humans, and with the knowledge gained from direct experience — like the refugees who fled the Marxist nightmares of the past — are we not yet capable of saying that the Sexual Revolution was an error based on a false ideology?

Isn’t the trial of Kermit Gosnell a moment like when Kruschev confessed and condemned the crimes of Stalin, which many in the West had denied or minimized? Isn’t the blood-chilling testimony of what went on in Gosnell’s clinic like the scenes of desperate “boat people” fleeing Vietnam after 1975, or the horrors of Cambodia’s “killing fields”?

Megan McArdle is shocked by these tales from Philadelphia. Might she now notice the death of Jennifer Morbelli?

Yet I said I would not preach a sermon, and I’ve written more than 800 words, but again I ask: What does “choice” really mean?

“. . . it was like screeching, making this noise . . .”

Any loving father would rock that crying baby in his arms, because he could not stand to hear his children cry.

And just think what that loving Father might say to anyone who excused as “choice” this ghastly slaughter of His children.

Quadruple Whisky Shots And Maggie's War With 'That Silly Little Man' Major: The Man Who Knew Thatcher Best Reveals The True Depth Of Her Torment- And The Rage At The Folly Of Her 'Stupid' Successor

Cheers: Mrs Thatcher sips champagne at a function in 1982. She never over-indulged while in office

By Robin Harris 

Anyone who can yield great power easily and painlessly is probably ill suited to exercise it. So it was with Margaret Thatcher. Leaving Downing Street in 1990, ousted by her own colleagues, was more than a wrench for her. It was a personal catastrophe.

She had driven herself so hard and excluded so much else from her life that by then all she was made for was to lead. Suddenly she found herself on the political scrap-heap — and irreversibly so.

Some around her thought of a possible return to power. But she never did, and, contrary to whispered allegations, she always discouraged such imaginings. She knew she was out for good.

The transition to private life was stressful for her, and immediately after her departure from No. 10, her mood was black. She was prone to tears, she was difficult and ill-tempered, sometimes she seemed unhinged. She was almost certainly clinically depressed. Perhaps she should have taken some medication, but she did not.

It was a condition not helped by her belief that her successor, John Major, was betraying everything she stood for. She disliked what she perceived as his lack of principle, his pursuit of consensus, his wooing of interest groups and his chippiness. She was tortured by his constant attempts to distance himself from her.

Suddenly deprived of staff, she had to make her own phone calls, and it emerged that she had no idea how to use a push-button telephone. She had to get advice from her police minders to do so.

After leaving Downing Street Lady Thatcher underwent major dental work including surgery, and undertook to lose the weight she perceived she had gained 

More difficulties arose with finding somewhere suitable to live. The new house she had bought in Dulwich, South-East London, was too far out of town, and so the Thatchers borrowed a flat in Eaton Square, Belgravia.

It was suitably grand and central but dark, and her husband Denis in particular disliked its gloom. Mrs Thatcher, sitting beneath a painting of Queen Isabella of Spain, hosted sometimes lachrymose and slightly mad lunches there, while her friends and advisers around the table lamented bitterly the turn of events.

It is to this time in her life that can be traced another problem — her drinking. Contrary to legend, Mrs Thatcher never drank heavily in office.

She enjoyed relaxing with a whisky and soda (no ice), her favourite drink because it was less fattening than gin and tonic. But she was never tempted to over-indulge because she always had a low threshold for alcohol, and even the mildest inebriation would have dulled her mind during the long hours she worked on her papers.

 

What saved Margaret Thatcher’s sanity after her ejection from Downing Street was hard work 

 

 

But, out of office, the demands on her were far less — and, like many unhappy people, she hoped a drink would make life bearable.

She was also now reliant on Denis (or ‘DT’, as she called him) to pour the drinks, and he filled her glass as he did his, with quadruple shots. Naturally, people began to notice that Margaret was often plainly intoxicated.

Nor did she take drink well. She quickly became loud, argumentative and unpleasant to those who crossed her, or who she merely thought had crossed her.

Other factors meant that some supposed she was a secret drinker, even perhaps a full-blown alcoholic, neither of which was true.

A year or so after leaving Downing Street, she discovered, or at least persuaded herself, that she had put on weight, and she determined to lose it. This meant she cut down heavily on lunch. So she would be up at six, have her hair done, hold meetings or read and dictate all morning, and would then restrict herself to soup and fruit, with or without a large drink poured by Denis.

The lack of food meant that when he poured her next drink — and in DT’s view the sun passed ‘over the yard arm’, as he put it, as early as a quarter past five in the afternoon — it went straight to her head.

Margaret Thatcher's disenchantment with Major was an open wound, she was too free with her opinions about his failings, and he, for his part, felt hurt and betrayed by her public interventions

Worse still, she was also suffering the after-effects of radical dentistry. Her teeth were the one aspect of her appearance she felt let her down, and she had always had trouble with her gums.

A dentist in North London offered her free treatment, and she and Denis — who was not going to pay if he could help it — spent hours in traffic going back and forth for largely unnecessary work.

She then concluded that something more drastic was required and opted for major surgery elsewhere. It was not a success. She began to mangle her words, slur and sometimes hiss.

She did this when stone-cold sober, but many drew the conclusion that she was continually drunk. And because the dental work hurt her, she felt even less inclined to eat and so the drink had even more effect.

Leaving Downing Street in 1990, ousted by her own colleagues, was more than a wrench for her. It was a personal catastrophe

What saved Margaret Thatcher’s sanity after her ejection from Downing Street was hard work. It was also a necessity. She was poorer than many imagined — scandalously so by the international standards of former heads of government.

At No. 10, she had scrupulously paid all her private entertainment and dining expenses. She had also refused to take successive salary increases as Prime Minister, and that reduced her pension, a situation that in later years prompted her to complain ceaselessly and disagreeably about how much she had forgone.

At the age of 65, she needed to earn a good salary during the rest of her active life if she was to retire in comfort. DT could not afford to keep them both, and such a course was never envisaged.

She always had a low threshold for alcohol and did not take drink well

 

 

On top of all that, she could expect to subsidise her two children, neither of whom seemed capable of earning a reliable, trouble-free income. So she set herself a prodigious amount of work, writing speeches, articles and several books.

Tory grandee Alistair McAlpine was the central figure in creating an infrastructure for her new life and providing a house in Westminster for an office. For the income she so badly needed, the speech-making circuit beckoned, particularly in the U.S., where conservative audiences — much larger and richer than in Britain — offered her not just cash, but love and veneration.

Over there, she spoke about the shared values and history of Britain and the U.S. and was intrigued by the concept of an ‘Anglosphere’ of English-speaking nations and an enhanced special relationship. In private, her enthusiasm went further and she admitted that she would welcome Britain becoming the 51st State of the Union.

She continued to use her appearance to get her way, and she was still a remarkably good-looking woman in her late 70s. She had fine legs, and knew it, hitching her dress up a little as she folded them. Her concern to look attractive explained her impractical and much discouraged attachment to high heels.

Alistair McAlpine was the central figure in creating an infrastructure for her new life and providing a house in Westminster for an office

Many exaggerated accounts of her ‘increasing frailty’ resulted from her tottering shakily up or down a staircase, but this was the result of vanity, not decrepitude — though she did in her 80s suddenly become less sure-footed and more uncertain on stairs.

For their home, the Thatchers eventually bought a Georgian house in Chester Square in Belgravia. There was a small formal dining room in which to entertain, though she and DT generally ate in the kitchen. There were no live-in staff, so she was compelled to do more cooking, not something at which she excelled.

Denis in general ate little, but was extremely demanding about his breakfast. He required five kinds of toast. He also liked boiled eggs, but since she rose early and he late, she usually over-boiled them.

On one memorable occasion, however, she forgot to boil them at all — and Denis’s reaction as he sliced off the top of his raw egg was unprintable.

Margaret Thatcher with husband Denis, who she became increasingly reliant on in later life to pour the drinks, and he filled her glass as he did his, with quadruple shots

The house had a strong room in the basement for her security in case of terrorist attack, but it was not ideal in other respects. There were too many stairs for Denis, now nearing his 80s, though almost to the last he struggled up them to his sitting room on the third floor.

Planning restrictions prevented the installation of a lift, and also of air conditioning, which was a problem because the house became very hot in the summer months.

But the Thatchers’ stinginess also precluded the purchase of portable air-cooling units. She preferred to swelter, even though she hated the heat, and would endure sleepless nights that interfered with her ability to work.

In addition to providing her with an office, Alistair McAlpine also conceived the idea of a Foundation, to promote her vision and perpetuate her legacy — and, in his private view, to provide a basis from which she might return to office, if events moved in that direction. From the start, the project was dogged by problems.

Dennis liked boiled eggs, but since she rose early and he late, she usually over-boiled them. Once she forgot to boil Denis’s egg and served it raw

 

 

The purposes of the Foundation were established without sufficient regard to whether it would be able to gain charitable status, which was essential if it was to attract sizeable tax-beneficial donations.

Above all, it was not understood how much political bias would enter into the Charity Commission’s final decision. In truth, no Foundation bearing Mrs Thatcher’s name was ever going to be granted charitable status, because it was a red rag to too many Leftish bulls. But the rejection was a blow all the same.

Eventually, a halfway house was found by which money for specific purposes that counted as ‘charitable’ was funnelled through the Charities Aid Foundation.

But the donations in Britain were disappointing — foreign contributions were much more significant. One reason why domestic donations dried up lay in the behaviour of Mark Thatcher.

His swaggering and shifty manner, his demands that businessmen ‘pay up’ for gains that business had made during his mother’s premiership, and his wrongly presumed presence on the Foundation’s board, or at least influence behind the scenes, did irremediable damage.

Only in February 1991, when Julian Seymour (a business colleague of PR guru Tim Bell) was recruited to run the Foundation, was the shadow of Mark’s presence lifted and the Foundation became a modest success.

One reason why domestic donations to the Foundation dried up lay in the behaviour of Mark Thatcher and his demands that businessmen 'pay up' for gains that business had made during his mother's premiership

Meanwhile, Margaret Thatcher’s disenchantment with Major was an open wound. He was the man she had favoured to replace her, but she deplored his government’s drift towards Europe and relaxation of control over public expenditure, which she correctly predicted would lead to economic and political trouble.

She was too free with her opinions about his failings, and he, for his part, felt hurt and betrayed by her public interventions, to the point of obsession. But at least she was upfront about this, unlike the poisonous briefing against her that flowed regularly out of Downing Street.

Major, it seems, hated her, though she did not hate him. She never used foul language about him, or cried, ‘I want her isolated! I want her destroyed!’, as Major apparently did.

Her words were ones of exasperation — ‘How stupid!’, ‘How petty!’, ‘What a silly little man!’, or (screwing up her face, and using a stage Scottish accent) ‘Puir wee bairn!’ She did not even really dislike him, though unfairly she disliked his wife (she rarely saw the best in spouses). The worst she ever felt was a mild contempt, and even that was tinged with a sort of affection, which came from the knowledge that she, after all, had chosen him (something she claimed she did not regret).

Indeed, her verbal onslaughts against him had been rather more ferocious when they worked together as colleagues — notably during his time at the Treasury, when he was simply out of his depth.

On reading one passage for a speech supplied by his department, she had exploded: ‘Useless! No Prime Minister was ever so badly served by her ministers!’ What was on offer, she had shouted at Major, ‘wouldn’t knock the skin off a rice pudding’.

The trouble was that she had political principles, and in retirement she stuck by them. Had she confined herself to money-making and self-promotion, her reputation would now undoubtedly be more favourable than it is.

Ex-leaders are expected to employ their celebrity status to replenish — or swell — their bank balances and permitted to offer their wise (or not so wise) thoughts about the world while doing so.

But if they interfere with the running of their former domain, if they challenge the interests of the generation that thinks it has come into its own, then they run into trouble. This convention she now brutally breached, and the response was equally brutal.

Ex-leaders are expected to employ their celebrity status to replenish - or swell - their bank balances, but on Europe, in particular, she could not keep quiet

On Europe, in particular, she could not keep quiet. When in office, she had, for most of the time, preferred to see the Euro-federalist project as silly rather than dangerous. She had, after all, signed up to the Single European Act and, reluctantly, the European Exchange Rate Mechanism.

Now, as moves to even more integration gathered pace, she was guilt-ridden by her own slowness of perception and felt she had to alert the country before Britain was drawn into a United States of Europe. The key battle was over the Maastricht Treaty of 1992. John Major has suggested that Mrs Thatcher was at the heart of the rebellion against it, but this is false.

She certainly hoped to see the treaty defeated, but she did not engage in the systematic lobbying of MPs that Major suggests. She did, however, see a few waverers (telling one: ‘Your spine doesn’t reach your brain!’) and used speeches to make the anti-Maastricht case.

She scrutinised every word of the treaty and its explicitly stated aim to create a new ‘union’, with its own ‘citizenship’ and ultimately a single currency and a common defence policy. It was simply unacceptable to her and, she believed, a substantial section of the Conservative Party.

Major argued back that he had negotiated ‘opt-outs’ on social regulations and on the single currency — the Euro — that guaranteed Britain’s freedom of action.

 

Her staff privately hoped that she would be persuaded by Major’s arguments, because the consequences of her opposition were bound to be damaging, not least for her. But she would not be moved.

The day after Major announced the results of his negotiations, he and his wife attended the Thatchers’ 40th wedding anniversary party at Claridge’s. Outside afterwards, in a flush of gratitude and when questioned by the Press, Mrs Thatcher inadvertently said Major had done ‘brilliantly’, which was taken as signalling her acceptance of the Maastricht deal.

When she read the following morning’s newspapers at home, she was appalled. Overriding all pleas for reflection, she insisted that a clarification to the Press be issued, as it duly was. Now the row was public, and people began to take sides. Her outspoken persistence in making her case infuriated Major.

He and his colleagues refused her demand for a referendum on the issue, not least, he later admitted, because she was the one asking for it — an indicator of the pettiness that characterised his Cabinet.

The Conservative Party was divided and its reputation damaged.

She believed ever after that the Tories could still have won the 1997 General Election if Major had vetoed Maastricht. Her reasoning was that the country was hostile to Europe, and so were most Conservative MPs.

As it was, one revealing image of that election — apart from Tony Blair’s unstoppable drive to power — was of Major and Thatcher on the campaign trail together.

Normally they were kept well apart — and for good reason — but at Stockton on Teesside they were scheduled to tour the constituency together. He was late arriving from London, and she had to wait for an hour-and-a-half for him at the airport, in a fury at what she saw as his unprofessional behaviour — ‘an insult to the people of the North’, she called it.

When he eventually got there, they drove through the streets, the current and former prime ministers side by side on the campaign bus. ‘Voters to the left — wave!’ she called out to him sternly. ‘Voters to the right — wave!’

He stared ahead, taking absolutely no notice, as the Tories ploughed on to what would be a shattering defeat.

Afterwards, Mrs Thatcher’s former Cabinet colleagues sought to pin the blame on her. They had ditched her as prime minister back in 1990 because she threatened their continued enjoyment of office.

Now they were unforgiving. But it had been their own mistakes and misconduct that led to the worst Conservative defeat in the party’s history.

Extracted from Not For Turning: The Life Of Margaret Thatcher by Robin Harris, to be published by Bantam Press on April 25 at £20. © 2013 Robin Harris. To order a copy for £15  (inc. p&p) call 0844 472 4157