Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Eulogies to Margaret Thatcher at the Pub (and the Cathedral)
Eulogies to Margaret Thatcher at the Pub (and the Cathedral)
Mar 16, 2025 7:56 PM

The Pavilion End pub with St. Paul’s Cathedral in the background

Last week followingActon’s seminar on morality, virtue, and Catholic social teaching with a group of financiers, bankers, and other business executives in London, I was invited to attend a private eulogy service organized by the Freedom Association for the late Lady Margaret Thatcher.

The eulogy service was organized in “proper British fashion” while sharing memories and more over ales at a pub—The Pavilion End—located right behind St. Paul’s Cathedral where Britain’s conservative elite gathered for formal prayer, hymns, and a sermon given by the Bishop of London at Margaret Thatcher’s elaborate state funeral.

A few hundred in attendance at The Pavilion End pub listen to the impressive speakers

I joined this unique opportunity, of course, to pay my own international respects as an adopted American son of Britain’s great Mother of Liberty. It was during my 1980s Catholic conservative upbringing that I gained immense respect for the Iron Lady, who joined forces with our own President Ronald Reagan and Rome’s John Paul II. In the end, this powerful triumvirate won the Cold War and effectively rolled back the Iron Curtain toinspireunprecedentedeconomic growth and human flourishing in the modern world.

The many prestigious speakers (which included parliamentarians from London and Brussels, academics, activists, and several Ciceronian-trained orators) roundly praised Margaret Thatcher’s legacy of individual moral responsibility, passionate distrust of the Orwellian Big Brother state, wasteful welfare spending, ongoing corruption, and inefficiency of government institutions in the British Isles and throughout continental Europe.

Dan Hannan, the popular Euroskeptic andConservative member of European Parliament, reminisced of Lady Thatcher’s deeply spiritual and practical roots in Methodism and loathing of wasting time watching television. Hannan, however, reminded all of us at the pub of the one show the former Prime Minister did make time for and tuned in to on the BBC just before she passed—“Songs of Praise”, a program dedicated to the kind of traditional religious hymns and choir music she grew up with going to church three times a day on Sundays.

Hannan said he was particularly delighted by the funeral service in which the Anglican Bishop of London and old friend of Lady Thatcher, Richard Chartes, delivered an inspiring sermon (see full text and video). Bishop Chartes, in fact, gave a telling account of personal anecdotes and articulated to the world Margaret Thatcher’s special synthesis of Christian faith and Hayekian economics into her political worldview.

Chartes said her Methodist theology and Austrian economic philosophy influenced profoundly her beliefs on human liberty and dignity, virtue as moral capital, as well as how she saw the political ends of democratic society:

She was very aware that there are prior dispositions which are needed to make market economics and democratic institutions function well: the habits of truth-telling, mutual sympathy, and the capacity to cooperate. These dispositions are incubated and given power by our relationships. In her words, “the basic ties of the family are at the heart of our society and are the very nursery of civic virtue”. Such moral and spiritual capital is accumulated over generations but can be easily eroded. Life is a struggle to make the right choices and to achieve liberation from dependence, whether material or psychological.

This genuine independence is the essential pre-condition for living in an other-centered way, beyond ourselves. The word Margaret Thatcher used at St Lawrence Jewry was “interdependence”. She referred to the Christian doctrine “that we are all members one of another, expressed in the concept of the Church on earth as the Body of Christ. From this we learn our interdependence and the great truth that we do not achieve happiness or salvation in isolation from each other but as members of Society.”Her later remark about there being no such thing as “society” has been misunderstood and refers to some impersonal entity to which we are tempted to surrender our independence.

Because of Thatcher’s classical liberal training in Austrian free market economics and traditional Christian social teachings, Dan Hannanreminded ushow Thatcher rescued her country from “sheer [the] awfulness . . . of price policies, trade union barons, . . . power cuts, . . . shortages” and, in general, economic and moral “calamity” at the end of the 1970s “when Britain was reduced to begging, borrowing, and praying until the North Sea Oil receipts came in”.

Nowadays, Hannan said, there seems to be a “collective amnesia” for the Lady’s legacy of goodness and caring for the well-being of Britain, a once ailing nation she raised to back good health—from “the sick man of Europe” to being one of the world’s most powerful industrial nations in by the close of 1980s.

Matthew Sinclair, CEO of Britain’s influential Tax Payers’ Alliance which lobbies to reduce wasteful public spending in parliament and city councils, agreed that Thatcher’s legacy should not be thrown to the wayside by unappreciative masses discontent with today’s social and financial crises.

Sinclair said that her greatest legacy was teaching Britons that however “grim, corrupt and lost [in] relative decline . . .” they are nowadays, “no one should ever see [it] as inevitable.”

According to Sinclair Thatcher’s other great legacy, was her fundamental fiscal wisdom, namely that “there is no such thing as public money.” He said that this philosophy, like her other controversial statement on social values (i.e., “there is no such a thing as society”) is “really saying the same thing.”

“There is no society that is going to step in and solve our problems. There is no society which is going to turn things around. It’s us. It’s us doing what we can to support ourselves, support our families, support munities, support our nation. And now that is what we have to try and do again. . . as we face disastrous mistakes . . . which have put this country again in a position of decline,” Sinclair said.

One of other speakers, an Oxford University academic named Adrian Hilton, spoke of the Iron Lady’s unbreakable Christian faith. He recalled the liberal British politician, Florence Anderson, saying two yeas ago that Lady Thatcher “was going to hell”.

“That’s the problem with socialists,” Hilton said. “They are not content with ordering our lives in the local town hall. They [further] presume to play God and tell where peoples’ souls are going to end up!”

Hilton, whose research is educational reform and school choice policy, said the late prime minister was an mitted Christian and was not afraid to put her neck on the line when running against the tide of secular socialistideology that had inculturated her country.

“She was a non-conformist revolutionary because Jesus was a non-conformist revolutionary. She spoke up for the ordinary individual and against the privileged elites because her Savior did precisely that.”

Regarding Thatcher’s controversial statement “there is no such a thing as society”, Hilton said her words were not that of a godless anarchists, but were inspired by a deepsense of personal and responsible love forher neighbors mitment to the classical Christian social teaching of subsidiarity.

“Society is made up of individuals who are individually accountable before God for their actions. These individuals make up families. Those families make munities. That is the society [Lady Thatcher] believed in.”

What a wonderful wayto say goodbye. God be with ye, m’Lady!

Watch the full eulogies below delivered by Dan Hannan, Matthew Sinclair and Adrian Hilton.

Dan Hannan

Matthew Sinclair

Adrian Hilton

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
The Right’s Racial Suicide
Did conservatives betray their ideals? Or were they never ideal to begin with? Read More… “To be conservative,” wrote Michael Oakeshott, “is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery.” His definition of conservatism, not as a set of policy aspirations but as a deeper sensibility, explains the conservative respect for tradition and view of history as a source of norms—that’s the positive side. The negative side is that there are...
Are We Free to Think About Free Will?
Are we predestined to debate the free will vs. determinism question forever? Or can we shed light on the nature of the human person such that this vexing question of why we do what we can finally be answered? Read More… Does God exist, or are we the mere by-products of evolution, simple accidents of the Big Bang? Do we have free will, or is everything predetermined, robbing us of true moral agency? A recent book by philosopher Paul Herrick,...
Laudate Deum: Or, Is the Catholic Church Just Another NGO?
Is there a way to balance economic growth and sound environmental stewardship? If only Pope Francis would take his own advice. Read More… If there is anything we have learned about Pope mentaries on issues ranging from economics to the environment, it is that they invariably add up to a by-now predictable mixture. Parts of this mélange consist of often profound insights and wisdom. But it also reflects straw man arguments, the random assembling of pieces of data plucked out...
Sr. Mary Kenneth Keller: Computer Programming Innovator
Early in puting revolution, a Roman Catholic nun trudged away to make information retrieval available to all, proving that one hidden life can have many extraordinary public effects. Read More… Emerging from the vibrant and innovative postwar years, the nascent discipline puter science in America was attracting top talent in mathematics, engineering, putational linguistics. Several schools were creating puter science” programs by the 1950s and early ’60s. In fact, the first ever doctoral degrees in this emerging discipline were awarded...
Questioning Science after Darwin
David Berlinski has been provoking debate on a variety of subjects for decades. His new book is a sampler of his challenges to Darwinism, materialism, and the hubris of scientism. Read More… I can find no better way to summarize David Berlinski’s book Science After Babel than to say that it is classic Berlinski. The man himself defies a simple summary. He is a polymath and raconteur, as even his bio at the panying website explains. His Ph.D. in philosophy...
The Wheel of Time: A Postmodern LOTR?
The highly successful series of fantasy novels is slowly being adapted into TV entertainment. Is it heroic fantasy intended to instill moral courage in the face of evil, or merely more streaming content? Read More… The Wheel of Time is a series of 14 novels by Robert Jordan, which debuted in 1990. You may never have heard of them, but they’ve sold 100 million copies and add up to more than 4 million words. (The Bible is well short of...
The Constitution of the Fifth Republic at 65
Have the tensions between individual freedom of conscience and the principle of laïcité finally reached the breaking point? Read More… Nearly 20 people were killed in Paris during and immediately following the Islamist attack on satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January 2015. Then, in November of that same year, terrorists killed 130 and injured hundreds more in a series of coordinated attacks across Paris that included suicide bombers detonating explosives outside the Stade de France, indiscriminate shootings at crowded restaurants,...
No, Chicago, We Don’t Need Government-Run Grocery Stores
After Walmart shuttered locations due to rising crime, the mayor of Chicago decided the answer was to … open their own grocery stores. What could go wrong? Read More… The city of Chicago is plagued by waves of violence, looting, and plunder dating back to 2020, which was deemed “the summer of looting” by the Chicago Tribune, spurred by the murder of George Floyd while in police custody amid COVID lockdowns. That summer, the Chicago police superintendent called for longer...
Pushing Back Against the New Deal in Real Time
A new anthology of economists mentators pushing back against the New Deal in the 1930s sheds fresh light not only on what was going wrong then but what’s still wrong with our economic policy now. Read More… The American Institute of Economic Research has published an anthology of critics of the New Deal, New Deal plete with more than 50 mentaries and excerpts. The book is edited by contemporary economic historian Amity Shlaes, herself a prominent New Deal critic, whose...
Are the Liberal Arts Elitist?
If our liberal arts colleges are to survive, they should try to instill an appreciation for rather than attempt the destruction of our cultural heritage. Read More… We have interesting classifications of our institutions of higher learning. The Carnegie classification of major research universities distinguishes between R1 and R2 schools. The well-known U.S. News & World Report Rankings separate national universities from regional ones, and also from national liberal arts colleges. Alongside the state university system, the Selective Liberal Arts...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved