TV programme ‘was crass’

Press, 17 June 1983, Page 6

TV programme ‘was crass’

NZPA London The British Prime Minister. Mrs Margaret Thatcher, had been still awake at dawn and searching for world news on her transistor radio after winning her second General Election last week, her daughter, Carol, said yesterday. In a new book called "Election Diary,” published only one week after the poll, Miss Thatcher a journalist, said that she had remarked to her mother as the results poured in Britain’s 630 electoral districts: “I think you’ll find you’re it.” Miss Thatcher’s chatty account of her mother s four-week campaign reports that the Prime Minister found herself overshadowed at one point on the trail by another woman at her side, a “Daily Express” columnist, Jean Rook. Ignoring the Prime Minister, crowds of Rook fans who had often seen her on television turned their focus of attention to the “Express” columnist. Miss Thatcher aged 29, a feature writer on London’s “Daily Telegraph,” has harsh words for a BBC “Nationwide” programme which she said had subjected her mother to some unfriendly questioning by

viewers around the country. Mrs Thatcher was obviously riled by one woman, who kept asking her why she had ordered the sinking of the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano in the Falklands war last year. The warship was outside the 200-nautical mile exclusion zone declared by the British task force when it was torpedoed with the loss of 368 lives.

The programme was "an example of the most crass nastiness and discourtesy shown to a Prime Minister on television,” Miss Thatcher writes. Her mother and her father a retired oil executive, have no live-in help, cook or housekeeper at No. 10 Downing Street, but two women who go in each day to clean.

They “live fairly modestly over the shop,” says Miss Thatcher, about her parents, “contrary to the popular image people have of grand living in Number 10, with hot and cold running footmen under the chandeliers.” She reveals that her mother, when shopping in a supermarket, was in a hurry as usual and chose goods that were easiest to reach rather than what was needed at Number 10.