She’s been dead for 10 years but I rarely read the news without thinking of her. More than any other figure of recent history, Margaret Thatcher created modern Britain, in all its dysfunction and despondency. Housing misery, asthmatic public services, crumbling infrastructure, badly privatised industries such as the waterworks, which once belonged to us and now belong to foreign companies that pump sewage into our rivers. Love her or loathe her, we still live in Thatcher’s Britain.
And so, looking over the revamped National Portrait Gallery’s new seven-panel mural to great British women, which takes pride of place in the gallery’s reopening this week, I was a little befuddled. Where is she? Alongside artists, writers and monarchs are women politicians, rendered in a Pop Art style: the first openly lesbian MP, Maureen Colquhoun, first black woman MP, Diane Abbott, and the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst. But no Thatcher. She has been “disappeared”.
