Margaret Thatcher: This is a state funeral, and that’s a mistake

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Margaret Thatcher obituary

The official line from Buckingham Palace and Downing Street is that Margaret Thatcher is not being granted a state funeral. And it is true that the Baroness will not lie in state at Westminster Hall, as Sir Winston Churchill did almost 50 years ago.

In almost every other respect, however, this is the real thing. Next Wednesday, her body will be taken by gun carriage from St Clement Danes in the Strand, down Fleet Street and into St Paul’s Cathedral.

There will be a gun salute at the Tower of London. And the cost of the event will be borne in large part by the taxpayer. Most important of all, the Queen is to attend.

If something looks, smells and tastes like a state funeral, then it is reasonable to conclude that it is one. The truth is that Lady Thatcher is getting very similar treatment to Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997 or the Queen Mother in 2002.

Many decent people will feel there is little question that Lady Thatcher was a great prime minister, and therefore that nothing could be more natural and fitting than next week’s splendid send-off. But the issue is not nearly as simple as that. The decision to advise the Queen to award Lady Thatcher what is officially being called a “ceremonial” funeral will create very serious problems. This is because the advice marks a betrayal of one of the most essential principles of the British state: the division between the executive and ceremonial functions.

Our constitution is defined by a rigorous separation between the head of state (the monarch) and the head of government (the prime minister). This marks us out from other countries, such as the United States of America, where the head of state and chief executive are merged in one person. As Anthony Sampson wrote in the Anatomy of Britain, the advantage of the British system is that “the head of state could represent the nation with all its traditional pomp and splendour, while the head of government appeared in a more workaday role”.

The monarchy’s symbolic position at the apex of the British state is much more than just a quaint survival. It is based on deep wisdom, as even a socialist such as George Orwell realised. “It is at any rate possible,” wrote Orwell in 1944, “that while this division of functions exists, a Hitler or a Stalin cannot come to power.” Orwell discerned the ease with which an unscrupulous populist leader would exploit the pomp of the state to project his or her personal power.

The decision to give Lady Thatcher what amounts to a state funeral will not lead to fascism. But it nevertheless badly damages the British system of representative democracy, and as such will lead to a series of debilitating practical problems. The most serious of them concerns damage to the reputation of the monarch for scrupulous impartiality. During her long reign, the Queen has avoided attending the funerals of all her prime ministers, apart from that of Churchill, who had led the national government of a united Britain in the great common struggle against Nazi Germany. This is why he was the sole exception to the rule that former prime ministers do not get state funerals.

So the question arises: what’s so special about Maggie Thatcher? Defenders of next week’s funeral arrangements say that she was a “transformational” prime minister. This is true. But so was Clement Attlee, who introduced the welfare system and the National Health Service, thus fundamentally changing the connection between state and individual. Yet the Queen did not attend Mr Attlee’s funeral, a quiet affair in Temple Church near Westminster. According to a 1967 report in Time magazine, “all the trappings of power were absent last week at the funeral of Earl Attlee … there were no honour guards or artillery caissons, no press or television, no crush of spectators. Only 150 friends and relatives gathered for a brief Anglican ceremony in honour of the man who had shaped the political destiny of post-war Britain.”

The decision to acknowledge Lady Thatcher, but not Attlee, makes the Queen appear partisan and is totally out of kilter with the traditional impartiality of the modern British monarchy.

The insensitive handling of the arrangements has made matters worse. When preparations for the funeral started five years ago, the operation was codenamed “Iron Bridge” (a play on the Queen Mother’s funeral plans, which were called “Tay Bridge”). The codename was later changed to “True Blue”, thus giving the event an unbalanced feel.

State occasions can only work if they bring the British people together as a nation. Most Conservatives will feel comfortable with Lady Thatcher’s funeral arrangements. But what about the many people who suffered terribly during the Thatcher years? Welsh miners or workers from the shattered manufacturing centres of northern England are every bit as British.

The dockers dipped the cranes when Churchill’s coffin came up the Thames in 1965. Would they have dipped their cranes for Margaret Thatcher? Yesterday the Daily Mirror, not a paper with which I usually sympathise, posed the question: “Why is Britain’s most divisive Prime Minister getting a ceremonial funeral fit for a Queen?” It was a very fair question to ask.

I am afraid that the decision to turn Lady Thatcher’s funeral into a state occasion was a constitutional innovation and, like almost all such innovations, both foolish and wrong. Since it is too late to change minds, all one can do now is hope that next week’s funeral is not allowed to turn into a triumphalist Tory occasion that inflicts permanent damage on the monarchy and also our system of government.