Weekend links.
Over in the press, Jeanette Winterson celebrates the new poet laureate being both a woman and gay, and she's also pretty good at verse as well which helps, Matthew Parris, bored of kicking Gordon Brown personally puts the blame equally on the cabinet, Janice Turner asks who to vote for now (answer: either the Lib Dems or any of the groupings further left), there's another call for an inquiry into 7/7 on CiF, Polly Toynbee oscillates as she regularly does from one extreme to another, declaring once again that Labour is finished, Deborah Orr thinks we have to educate parents as well as children if they're going to get the education they deserve, and Robert Hardman watches the Tamil man starving himself to death in parliament square.
As for worst tabloid comment piece, we have the usual execrable contenders from both Lorraine Kelly and Amanda Platell, but the winner by a country mile is the usually rather good Peter Oborne, with his paean to Margaret Thatcher. Quite how he can write such ahistorical paragraphs as this, for instance, is beyond me:
AS A consequence, Britain has enjoyed an unparalleled period of prosperity and influence on the world stage for three decades. For that, we have Maggie Thatcher to thank.
And then there is just complete delusion:
Of course, the BBC, the Left-wing intelligentsia, the dispossessed Tory grandees and the professional defeatists among the political elites have never forgiven her.
They opposed what she tried to achieve at the time, and have bitterly resented her success ever since. They hate her beyond rational computation, and even today they continue to use their massive influence to denigrate her memory.
But they will never succeed because the people who count - the ordinary people of Britain - know exactly what Maggie Thatcher achieved and will cherish her memory for ever.
Perhaps Oborne ought to try asking the ordinary people of Britain north of Birmingham what Margaret Thatcher means to them and about what she achieved. One suspects he might get an answer he doesn't like very much.
Labels: weekend, weekend links, weekend round-up
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