Phoney-baloney

First of all there's the phoney respect: Margaret Thatcher dies and the entire TV front-of-camera workforce is kitted out in black. Quite something to see, especially since even families don't go in for that kind of thing any more. And it takes the London-based TV companies all day to realise the rest of the country may not be okay with the heroine worship.

Then there's the phoney deference. You know the kind: 'you may not have liked what she did but you have to admit she was a great prime minister.' No, I didn't and no, I don't. It's particularly galling that Tony Blair is one of the people urging us to be respectful. She was the worst kind of PM. Imagine working for her. Alexei Sayle got it right when he said she was an example of the 'psychopath boss': always right, prepared to hear no argument but her own, happy to dump people from her cabinet if they weren't ' one of us' - that is, agreed with her - stuck in her own little path which in the end led to her downfall and created the Tory party we have now.

And there's the glossing over of history: her adventure in the Falklands solved nothing. We still have the same situation there 40 years later. She may have been the first female PM but she was certainly not a supporter of other women. She even managed to persuade British entrepreneurs she was one of them, rather than a lab rat who married an entrepreneur. In her time, there were two recessions and her government handled them badly. Two and a half million people lost their jobs, a situation said at the time by one of her ministers to be 'a price worth paying.' Who by, I wonder. And a huge swathe of the UK's industrial base - which might have helped us in the current recession - was dismantled. And if we want to see when and where casino banking took hold, we need look no further.

So you'll excuse me if I decide not to watch the funeral next week. I'll be doing aomething else - anything else.