Who among us can honestly say that our children have never done anything a little bit naughty? Going into next door’s garden to get their ball back without asking; funding military coups in Third World countries with an eye to making an illegal fortune. No child is perfect and they grow out of these things; he’s only 51, for goodness sake.
Sir Mark Thatcher was arrested on August 25 in his pyjamas at his home outside Cape Town and, if found guilty of involvement in the conspiracy, could face a lengthy jail sentence. Lefties in the 1980s sought inspiration from prisoners in South Africa, so look out for British Conservatives sporting T-shirts saying ”Free Sir Mark Thatcher!”
Still, this African adventure does leave the rest of us wondering if we lead rather mundane lives. None of my old school friends has ever asked me to lend a helicopter to assist former British special forces mercenaries stage a coup with a view to making millions out of oil reserves. I was invited to a bring-and-buy sale to raise funds for the new rubber matting under the school swings, but somehow it didn’t have quite the same glamour.
Thatcher (who owes his knighthood to his mother’s inspired idea of bringing back hereditary honours) has never been very far from controversy. Despite the thousands spent on his education, he left school with hardly any qualifications and then failed his accountancy finals three times. Apparently, examiners were not impressed when he answered every problem with: ”Just get mummy to have a word with them.”
Yet he has since accumulated a fortune of about £60-million with no one being sure where any of it comes from. Perhaps he just cuts a lot of money-off coupons out of magazines. Heaven forbid that he might have used his family connections to secure any dodgy business deals. The allegation that he was in Oman in 1981 to act as an intermediary for a £300-million deal secured by his mother is completely without foundation. No, he just happened to be in the Middle East.
Neither is there any truth in the allegations that he made £12-million in commissions on the al-Yamamah arms deal with Saudi Arabia, signed by his mother. Of course, by the time Margaret Thatcher was thrown out of office, the United States also had a leader with a stupid son who seemed to make a curiously large amount of money out of some rather shady deals, so I suppose we should just be grateful that Thatcher Jnr hasn’t followed in his mother’s footsteps.
In fact, episodes like this remind us of the type of morality that prevailed during the greedy Thatcher years. Thank heavens things have moved on. Can you imagine Prime Minister Tony Blair being associated with the sort of people who’d embark on some ill-thought-out military adventure because they hoped to install a regime that would allow them to get their hands on the country’s oil reserves? It’s completely unthinkable. — Â