A Few Sharp Quotes about Thatcher and the Tories

I also found a couple of sharp quotations about the Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the same issue of Focus, which had a comment from Martial. Martial said that man loved malice, but only against the fortunate and proud, not the unfortunate. It’s completely the opposite case with the Tories, who are only too full of malice towards the unfortunate. Here are the quotes printed in the magazines against Maggie.

She sounded like the Book of Revelations read out over a railway public address system by a headmistress of a certain age wearing calico knickers.

Clive James.

She only went to Venice because someone told her she could walk down the middle of the street.

Neil Kinnock.

A semi-house trained polecat

Michael Foot on Norman Tebbit.

And on Ronald Reagan:

A masterpiece of the embalmer’s art.

Gore Vidal.

And there are many others about the Tories. I think it might have been Roy Hattersley, who said that there wasn’t a British tradition Thatcher hadn’t struck with her handbag, and described her as a ‘bargain-basement Boadicea. And it was also him, or someone else from the Labour party who described being attacked in parliament by Douglas Hurd as like being savaged by a dead sheep.

And a friend of mine, who used to be a member of the Tory party, was fond of the quote, ‘The Tory party is an organized hypocrisy’.

Roman Poet Martial on Malice, and the Tories’ Violation of Good Taste

I found this quotation on malice from the Roman poet and epigrammist, Martial, in an old copy of Focus magazine dating from the ’90s. The great Roman wit said

Man loves malice, but not against one-eyed men, nor the unfortunate, but against the fortunate and proud.

Well, that’s how things should be, amongst people of taste. Unfortunately, many people really aren’t that well-brought up. And this extends to the entire Tory party, who are full of hatred and malice against the unfortunate. Not just the poor and the unemployed, but also the disabled, including men with one eye. You can see that from their entire welfare policy of depriving benefits to those, who desperately need it, and the way it has forced people into misery, debt, starvation and death. And this is despite all their hypocritical crocodile tears about the poor and cant about ‘caring conservatism’. Heidi Allen, who ostentatiously wept about the suffering of one poor soul on benefit, has voted against reforming the Universal Credit that has caused so much of it. And David Cameron and his mate Iain Duncan Smith had a good cackle together in parliament when a Labour MP read out a piece from one of their constituents describing the depths of suffering she had been reduced to due to their wretched reforms.

The Tory cabinet is stuffed full of public school toffs, who like, Boris Johnson, have received a Classical education. Clearly they were asleep or skiving that day when they covered that epigram of Martial’s.