If you ask me...I’m sorry, but I can no longer hide my admiration for Lady Thatcher

If only there were some opportunity to commemorate the legacy of this great lady - a 'Thatcher Day', for instance - I know exactly how I would celebrate

A statue of the former British Prime Minister, Baroness Margaret Thatcher stands in the Guildhall Art Gallery on April 9, 2013 in London, England. (Getty Images)

Iknow many readers of this newspaper will bristle at this – ding dong!, and so on – and I will never be able to ride the lift with Mark Steel again, which is a shame, as it is his greatest joy. (“I love riding the lift with you,” he once told me.) But I can no longer hide my admiration. Thatcher was an astonishing force, a hurricane of conviction, and, if there were such a day, I, for one, would certainly welcome the opportunity to commemorate her, plus can think of many appropriate ways of doing so.

I might, for example, spend Thatcher Day putting my xenophobia to one side and selling a shitload of arms to Iraq and if that only took up the morning – how long does selling a shitload of arms take? Not long, if you are efficient about it? – I could use the rest of the day to do something else. I could, for instance, get busy furthering my own individual interests and if this means eating a big juicy pie in front of my family while letting them go hungry, so be it. I may even go “ha, ha!” as I’m tucking in, and: “Nice pie!” This is Thatcher Day, after all, and if others are less fortunate than yourself, who do they have to blame? Really?

Obviously, should a large private corporation come to the door in the course of the day, I will drop to my knees – “Happy Thatcher Day! Have a railway!” – and if I put a wash on, I’ll make sure I also hang my soul out to dry. Alas, I do not have both a son and a daughter as I only have a son but, it goes without saying, I will sit him down and make it clear that even if I had a daughter, he would be my favourite, and it just wouldn’t matter how thick he was. However, I will not and will never take that view of society that, in effect, destroys whole communities unless nothing much is on television, in which case I’ll probably give it a go. Has to be better than MasterChef.

So, let’s campaign for a Thatcher Day, and let’s start now, and I say all this knowing that Owen Jones will probably never allow me to sit on his knee again. Shame, especially as he once told me: “I love it when you sit on my knee. It is my greatest joy.”