I met Margaret Thatcher only once, at a small party in 1998, where she kicked off her shoes so that she could address the gathering from atop an unopened box of Famous Grouse.
I was then an MP’s bag carrier and afterwards my boss introduced me. “James is a good shot,” he said, to break the ice. “Paper targets”, I explained. “Oh”, she said, fixing me with that famous, penetrating look. “I could think of a few people you could shoot.”
Who did she mean? The obvious candidates were Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson. But Charles Moore quotes Richard Wilson, a senior civil servant, saying that although she often sniped at her former chancellors after her fall, “her main focus was on the younger men who owed everything to her and had deserted her.”
