Abstract
Margaret Thatcher was literally a legend in her own lifetime. Her death in April 2013, however, affords us with a fantastic opportunity to map and perhaps qualify the common wisdom about her and her governments. This article analyses the leading articles and obituaries published on her death in Britain’s national newspapers. How does the picture painted in them of Thatcher and her governments match what most academics would see as the reality? What do they over- and under-emphasize, or even miss out altogether? And what chance is there that more rounded and realistic accounts will eventually triumph?
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Notes
For a window onto the world’s coverage, see Philipson et al (2014).
The Independent’s obituary noted (and was not alone in noting) that ‘there was no hot running water or inside lavatory in the family flat’, although not before mentioning too that her father, who became Mayor of Grantham, ‘owned two shops and employed five assistants’.
The pollster IpsosMori has been conducting these trust surveys for many years. In the latest, published in 2011, Professors had a net trust rating of +61 while journalists were on −61 and politicians on −66, www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/15/Trust-in-Professions.aspx?view=wide.
References
Philipson, A. and Hough, A., Foreign Staff (2014) Margaret Thatcher: how the papers covered her death, Telegraph Online 9 April, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/margaret-thatcher/9980529/Margaret-Thatcher-how-the-papers-covered-her-death.html.
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Bale, T. In life as in death? Margaret Thatcher (mis)remembered. Br Polit 10, 99–112 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/bp.2014.26
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/bp.2014.26