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    The Shrine of Mother Margaret
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    REPUBLICANS FLOCK TO SEE THATCHER IN
HOPES OF SECURING THE PRESIDENCY
    By TOBY HARNDEN
    Daily Telegraph
    July 27, 2007
    WASHINGTON—Republican presidential candidates are flocking to see Britain’s icon of conservatism, Margaret Thatcher, in the hope that her blessing could help to secure them the presidency.
    Rudy Giuliani, the Republican front runner, will become the latest 2008 candidate to kiss the former prime minister’s hand when he travels to London in September to deliver the inaugural Margaret Thatcher memorial lecture to the Atlantic Bridge think tank. He follows in the footsteps of Fred Thompson, poised to announce his presidential run and already running second in the polls, and Mitt Romney, ahead in the crucial early states of Iowa and New Hampshire.
    Mr. Thompson, a former senator and Hollywood actor, dropped in on her in London last month, saying he wanted
“to remind her of America’s affection for her and pay our respects.” Mr. Romney took the opportunity to burnish his conservative credentials with a Lady Thatcher audience last fall. It is Mr. Giuliani, however, who is perhaps best placed to capitalize on nostalgia in America for Lady Thatcher and her close friendship with Ronald Reagan, who is still lauded for winning the Cold War and restoring hope and confidence in the country.

    Several weeks before the article above was published, I too was in London, chatting with Sir Bernard Ingham about his memories of Margaret Thatcher. Sir Bernard spent the years from 1979 to 1990—almost all of her time in power—as her chief press secretary at 10 Downing Street. He saw everything.
    I joined him for coffee at the Institute of Directors on Pall Mall, a street of elite gentlemen’s clubs in the heart of London. Most of these clubs now admit women, but this is a recent development. Nearby, the archly Tory Carlton Club maintains its traditional gentlemen-only policy. Its members were in an awkward position when Margaret Thatcher was elected, for London’s preeminent Conservative club could hardly exclude a Conservative prime minister, but conservatives—in the technical sense of the word—couldn’t rush about changing things with every passing fad. At last they settled upon a solution. They declared her an honorary gentleman.
    The Institute of Directors is a grand, flag-waving London landmark. Its marmoreal Doric and Corinthian columns sprout arris-beads of laurel leaves; gas-flambeaux lamps line up like solemn soldiers along its stone balustrades. These days, the members of the club are, as its name suggests, captains of industry, but the Institute was once the United Services Club, and its membership, according to Dickens’s Dictionary of London , was restricted to “officers not under the rank of commander in the navy, or major in the army.” Inside, the marble busts of long-forgotten noblemen commune
quietly with oil portraits of their long-forgotten friends, reminiscing about the Crimean War, appalled by the sight of businessmen scuttling about the club with their ghastly cell phones, looking as if they’d have no idea which end of the rifle to shoot from .
    Sir Bernard and I are sitting in the Morning Room, where we chat for a while about Britain before Thatcher (“ totally shabby”) and the privatization of British industries (“ astonishingly successful”). He is a bluff, meat-featured man who becomes passionately exercised at the thought of the British Left—“a nasty, scheming lot, crawling out of their holes in the grrrrrrround! ”—and when he says this his voice booms and his brandy jowls shake and his Rs rrrrrrroll in the manner of a Yorkshire clergyman on the pulpit. He was and is Thatcher’s devoutly loyal friend. But he hardly strives to conceal the degree of her current infirmity.
    Bernard Ingham: Her memory is so unreliable now—
    [ Waiter