The nation wanted to be monstered. It wanted to be smacked by Matron. it wanted to be held down, whipped and made to weep for its sins.

A nation whose real power structure depended on people who had been raised in a system of boarding schools, nurses, toffee superiority, concepts of duty, naiceness, horses, retrievers and ordering the servants around. Whose members discovered after Pater died that he kept all the receipts for those weekends on the Continent with a French woman with a horsewhip.

The rest of them had been taught to obey people like that. Who felt satisfied and protected in that structure. Who knew it gave them a certain superiority over other people further down the dung heap.

Obviously there is a lot more to it than that, but these are genuine, dark underbelly forces that manifested in the Iron Lady.

The sex of the candidate had absolutely nothing to do with it

I would have thought that was precisely Jason’s point…

You’ll find this loud-mouthed adolescent male rubbish all over America – and in some ex-service groups, such as in parts of the R&SL, and in both the ALP and the Liberals here in Australia too. Presumably, this comes from “guys” who are short-changed in their wedding-tackle and who are too timid to find out what makes women tick.

It’s this attitude to women that makes fundamentalist terrorists the true soul-mates of right-wing extremists.

Margeret Thatcher only came to power – and stayed there – through massive marketing and through the incredible stupidity of the Labour Party at the time. The sex of the candidate had absolutely nothing to do with it; Britain voted for a woman because anything at all was better than Labour’s duds. If Pol Pot had been a candidate, he would have beaten Thatcher hands down. She was good at tub-thumping speeches but she wrecked the British economy instead of reforming it; she was awful as a prime minister..

Most conservative men welcomed Margaret Thatcher with open arms

Freud really has a lot to answer for, the misogynistic mountebank.

Most conservative men welcomed Margaret Thatcher with open arms. And I suspect many in the US would be happy to see Condoleeza Rice as President.