‘They flee from me, that sometime did me seek.” The predicament of Mrs. Margaret Thatcher is not as great as that of the poet-rebel Thomas Wyatt, who wrote those lines. True, gleeful juxtaposition in the reporting of Oxford’s petulant snubbing did mention that the only other politician to whom the university had refused an honorary degree, Mr. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, had subsequently been hanged. But despite former Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey’s bloodthirsty addiction to the phrase “when the condemned woman mounts the scaffold,” her problem is not quite so immediate.
With unpopularity, even hatred, she must however contend. Oxford has done its predictable thing; Harold Macmillan, the Earl of Stockton, has made his attack upon the Manchester School economics of the prime minister for the second or third time and done it gracefully to camera; a significant, hostile minority exists within the Conservative parliamentary party; the Church of England, last bastion of nothing very much, has if not thundered then drizzled against her; last and least, Mr. Neil Kinnock has made her the subject of a censure motion.
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