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

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.”