And it's worth mentioning that Maggie was, in her heart, an inveterate snob, and that, crucially, informed her policies and demeanour. And this wasn't the in-bred down-the-noseness of the cartoon upper classes. That's still ugly, but more understandable in respect of background and life-experience. Ignorance underwriting a different kind of 'bliss' you might say.

Maggie was the grocer's daughter that, did, to her credit, manage to transcend her background with respect to the mores of the time. But, with that, she also seemed to see anything that might be perceived as 'less', or that didn't match the upwardly mobile but still narrow aspirations of her dad (Mum not so beloved, apparently. Sez a lot), as being somehow inhabiting the realms of contemptible.

Her snobbery (and intrinsic, even subconcious contempt) was the fuel that drove the machine. Her policies, NO, policy! - regarding anything north of Watford was almost a laughable, grotesque realisation of her snobbery. There's a cartoon hideousness about it all that is almost in the realms of gallows humour had not the reality and actuality of it all been so devastatingly appalling, wantonly destructive and despicable.

She was a monumental snob, and Britain suffered for it.