In the Guardian, a Labour MP shares a memory of her time in the House of Commons:
“Very early on, I brought in one of the babies to the Commons and I saw her [Mrs. Thatcher] at the other end of the corridor. She was bearing down on me with two adoring parliamentary private secretaries trotting at her side, and she looked as if she was going to come and admire the baby. I had this terrible feeling of thinking, ‘I don’t want her to look at the baby’, almost like one of those cartoons where the witch looks at the baby and the baby shrivels. I didn’t want my perfect baby to have Thatcher’s eyes upon him.” Did she hide her baby from Thatcher? “No, I just shot off down a side corridor. It was very visceral, very heartfelt.”
And who is this nut?
Oh, just Harriet Harman, the acting leader of Britain’s Labour Party. The fact that she clearly saw nothing wrong with coming out with this weird almost superstitious bile says a great deal about the state of the British left.
As it happens, Harman tends towards a ‘soft’, ‘progressive’ authoritarianism, rather than the harder, more old-fashioned variety favored by Jeremy Corbyn, the Chavez fan now looking ever more likely to be Labour’s new leader, but people like her have helped created the intellectual and political space in which Corbyn could hang on and, in the end, quite possibly prevail.