I can’t help drawing comparisons with that embarrassing farce, Mintoff’s funeral
Can you imagine the Conservative Party wresting temporary possession of Thatcher’s coffin and dragging it from Conservative pillar to Conservative post throughout the morning, while hysterical hordes in ski-pants and Lycra, bearing her photograph, shout her name and pretend to weep for the cameras?
Can you imagine Geri Halliwell (former Spice Girl and massive Thatcher fan) singing Girl Power over the coffin parked at some site of Conservative significance? (It’s hard to think of the equivalent of the Birgu monument.)
Can you imagine David Cameron ham-acting grief in the street and dramatically kissing (the wrong end of) the coffin?
And please don’t tell me that it’s because Thatcher’s supporters were not working-class. Aside from the fact that she had massive working-class support, contrary to the popular myth, that’s not the real reason.
Also, unlike Mintoff, she had the good sense to lay down that she did not wish her corpse to lie in state, so she was spared the collossal indignity of having her dead body gawped at by queues of thousands of curious people with nothing better to do, which I think is an utterly abysmal and distasteful practice.
Oh and another thing, because this really GETS ME at every Maltese state funeral, where a post WWII gun carriage is used and pulled by an army Landrover, like something out of North Korea. And the flag is never big enough to be draped properly over the entire coffin.
It’s supposed to be a horse-drawn antique gun carriage – otherwise why bother? Anything else lacks grace and looks totally communist. If you’re going to bother doing something, do it well, and properly.
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No Chihuahas in Britain either, weather too nippy for the little things.
They’ve got John Bercow, though.
http://www.independent.com.mt/articles/2013-04-17/news/franco-mercieca-granted-private-practice-waiver-1409843200/
If he’s the only specialist in his field, then why doesn’t he give up politics?
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20130417/local/mepa-environment-protection-officer-offers-resignation.465861
She’s not one for turning either.
Pomp and circumstance and the observation of protocol down to the last detail. Such an uplifting experience.
Rest in peace, Mrs. Thatcher.
Have a look at this. http://siehbi.wordpress.com/
Hey Sieħbi, I love it. Well done if it’s your work.
Something else you might want to talk about – how the Maltese can’t laugh at themselves – something along the lines of “How dare a foreigner criticise us!”
If you don’t know what I mean, just wait till your blog becomes popular.
I don’t think the Geri Halliwell comparison is appropriate at all. She is still fit to elicit hearty phwooarhs. Her Maltese counterpart, on the other hand, looks like a waxwork that’s been left next to the radiator.
Can you imagine Daphne attending the funeral? She is light years apart … Baroness Thatcher was a firm believer whilst Daphne passionately hates organised religion.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/erasmus/2013/04/religion-and-politics
[Daphne – I do not ‘passionately hate’ organised religion. I just have no wish to be part of it. This does not mean that I wish to see organised religion eradicated. Each to his own, and all that – and I actually think organised religion adds to life when one is free to accept or reject it and when it is not imposed. You don’t have to be a believer to go to a church funeral, just as you don’t have to be a believer to go to a church wedding. In any case, Margaret Thatcher’s was clearly not a Catholic ceremony, so with your reasoning, what was Leo Brincat doing there. More to the point, what were all those non-Christian ambassadors doing there, one of them even with his head covered in a Christian church.]
My admiration for Daphne has just gone off the scale.
That gun carriage.
And it took a “cookery writer” to notice it.
Yes, it looks horrible, and it is unspeakably perverse when the honour is accorded to leaders who built their political fortune on anti-militarism. Even then, a gun carriage should never be towed by a vehicle. It looks naff, and it breaks all rules of protocol.
Some funerals famously featured a coffin and a military vehicle, with no horses. De Gaulle’s comes to mind. But the coffin was placed ON the vehicle, which was an APC. No gun carriage in sight. And De Gaulle was a military man, so it all fitted in.
I don’t know who the senior NCO in the AFM is, but I’d like to see him face RSM Lauderdale.