Prime ministers I have known

Unless you’re from the UK (or watched Spitting Image and all sorts of other British comedies on PBS as an impressionable youth in Wisconsin), the observations of Parliamentary sketchwriter Simon Hoggart about the prime ministers he has covered might be too inside baseball, but I couldn’t help sharing this Thatcher anecdote about her unwitting skill with double entendre:

But Thatcher saved the best of all for her victory tour of the Falkland Islands. She was taken to inspect a large field gun, basically a ride-on lawnmower with a barrel several feet long. It was on a bluff, overlooking a plain on which another Argentine invasion might one day materialise. She admired the weapon, and the soldier manning it asked if she would like to fire a round.

“But mightn’t it jerk me off?” she replied. Chris Moncrieff of the Press Association, who was covering the visit, recorded the manful struggle of the soldier to keep his face, indeed his whole body, straight.

Actually, all the Thatcher stories are quite good. (thx, tom)

• Margaret Thatcher
• politics
• Simon Hoggart
• UK