Sarah Palin, the once obscure governor from Alaska who is shaking up right-wing politics across the US, is promising to honour the woman she calls the Iron Lady by visiting Britain to see Margaret Thatcher.
Today Palin told her 1 630 386 Facebook friends that she was in discussions about meeting the baroness. In typically convoluted Palin language, she said she had received an invitation for a visit to London that “included the offer of arranging a meeting” with Thatcher.
The post came a day after the Mail on Sunday reported that Palin herself had made the approach, with her people contacting Thatcher’s office to ask for an audience. The Mail said Thatcher had agreed to see her, though no date has been specified.
At face value there is little in common between the two women. Thatcher, at 84, was a grocer’s daughter from Grantham in Lincolnshire; Palin (46) was born to a science teacher and school secretary in Sandpoint, Idaho.
Thatcher cultivated a reputation for steely determination; Palin is better known for her hockey-mom ways and winning smile. Thatcher did not suffer fools gladly; Palin has struggled not to play the fool.
But they share a love of tax cutting and hostility towards organised labour, and Palin in her Facebook message called Thatcher “one of my political heroines” and role models. She said the elder woman had created a blueprint for “overcoming the odds and challenges of the status quo”.
She also highlighted Thatcher’s close friendship with Ronald Reagan, whose mantle Palin has sought to inherit in her ongoing bid to win over right-wing Republican support perhaps for a putative run on the White House in 2012 and certainly for lavish financial gain.
In a recent speech in Washington she praised Thatcher, who she said had “never set out to be a woman prime minister, just a prime minister and one of the greatest ever to have served perhaps because she was a woman of action”.
An eventual visit to London would have the added advantage of giving Palin extra foreign experience — an area of weakness that cost her dear in her 2008 vice-presidential campaign. – guardian.co.uk