MILLENIAL MAGGIE
IN the wake of a third election victory, Mrs Thatcher's hubris, it seems, knows no bounds. In Monday's Financial Times there appeared an extraordinary interview with the Prime Minster, in which it seemed that her main concern — 'what all of us are trying to think of now' — is how to commemorate the year 2000. One gained the alarming impression that Mrs Thatcher intended to be in a position to perform some prime ministerial tape-cutting exer- cise on the occasion, when she would be a wise eld lady of 74. Mrs Thatcher referred obscurely to the year as 'that psychological time'. Perhaps she meant that, just as the Government meaninglessly declared 1986 to be 'Industry Year', so 2000 would be proclaimed 'Psychology Year'. But the Prime Minister seems more to have in mind a task for Mr Richard Branson, as the well-known rubbish eliminator and con- dom distributor approaches middle age, in her suggestion that the year be marked by 'raising the environment together, not only cleanliness and everything like that, but a kind of beautification'. Of course the year 2000 is not the 2000th anniversary of the supposititious birth date of Christ. That would be the year 2001. But by then perhaps even Mrs Thatcher might — as she so poignantly put it — 'be twanging a harp by that time' or, possibly, as she did not put it, roasting.
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