Reassuring Continuity

Apparently it is news that Margaret Thatcher wanted to destroy the NHS. Her cabinet discussed a proposal by the Central Policy Review Staff in 1982, which also included compulsory charges for schooling. Despite the old bag's having personally trounced the Argies a mere matter of weeks beforehand, there followed what George Osborne's father-in-sebacity Nigel Lawson called "the nearest thing to a cabinet riot in the history of the Thatcher administration". So assertive was the whimpering that Thatcher's then chum, Geoffrey Howe, continued to defend the proposals; whereupon one of the damper participants leaked them to the press, prompting the old bag to give her notorious comedy turn at the 1982 conference, proclaiming that the NHS is "safe with us". In her memoirs she claimed that the CPRS proposals were never seriously considered, either by herself or any of her eunuchs; and in the event the dismantling of the NHS, the public education system and social security were consigned to a more gradual process of attrition under her godson, the Reverend Blair, and his altar-boy Daveybloke. Indeed, and most reassuringly, Daveybloke's very own adviser on police privatisation, Gordon Wassermann, was a member of the CPRS at the time, and cheerfully proposed cutting the country's teaching staff by a demented twenty-five per cent. But that was just one of those peculiar coincidences that often happen in politics and, at least in this country, are almost never a sign of corruption.