When Christopher Hitchens realized that Thatcher was right

Christopher Hitchens' has an excerpt of his new book, Hitch 22: A Memoir, in Vanity Fair. Hitchens can be very annoying but is seldom boring. It's the most enjoyable thing I've read all week. Here are some snippets.

On Clive James the Australian novelist and poet:

His authority with the hyperbolic metaphor is, I think, unchallenged. Arnold Schwarzenegger resembled “a brown condom full of walnuts.” Of an encounter with some bore with famous halitosis Clive once announced, “By this time his breath was undoing my tie.” I well remember the day in 1978 when he delivered his review of a biography of Leonid Brezhnev to the New Statesman and Martin read its opening paragraphs out loud: “Here is a book so dull that a whirling dervish could read himself to sleep with it. If you were to recite even a single page in the open air, birds would fall out of the sky and dogs drop dead.” One could hear his twanging marsupial tones in his scorn for this world-class drone and bully.

Most of the excerpt is about Hitchens' friendship with the novelist Martin Amis (and how they both moved from the Left to the Right) but I loved this tidbit about Margaret Thatcher:

[T]he Tories were having a reception in the House of Lords in order to launch a crusty old book by a crusty old peer named Lord Butler, and there was a rumor that the new female leader of the Conservative Party would be among those present for the cocktails. I had written a longish article for The New York Times Magazine, saying in effect that, if Labour could not revolutionize British society, then the task might well fall to the right. I had also written a shorter piece for the New Statesman, reporting from the Conservative Party conference and saying in passing that I thought Mrs. Thatcher was surprisingly sexy. (To this day, I have never had so much anger mail, saying, in effect, “How could you?”) I felt immune to Mrs. Thatcher in most other ways, since for all her glib “free market” advocacy on one front she seemed to be an emotional ally of the authoritarian and protectionist white-settler regime in Rhodesia. And it was this very thing that afforded me the opportunity to grapple with her so early in her career.

At the party was Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, a poised and engaging chap with whom I'd had many debates in Rhodesia itself, both at the celebrated colonial bar of the Meikles hotel and in other, more rugged locations. I'd even taken him to meet Sir Roy Welensky, the tough old right-wing white trade-unionist and former prime minister, who had broken with the treasonous pro-apartheid riffraff around Ian Smith. “It's always seemed perfectly simple to me, Mr. Verse-torn,” this old bulldog growled in the unmistakable accent of the region. “If you don't like blick min, then don't come and live in Ifrica.” Worsthorne had granted the justice of this, as how could he not, and now felt that he owed me a small service in return. “Care to meet the new leader?” Who could refuse? Within moments, Margaret Thatcher and I were face-to-face.

Within moments, too, I had turned away and was showing her my buttocks. I suppose that I must give some sort of explanation for this. Almost as soon as we shook hands on immediate introduction, I felt that she knew my name and had perhaps connected it to the socialist weekly that had recently called her rather sexy. While she struggled adorably with this moment of pretty confusion, I felt obliged to seek controversy and picked a fight with her on a detail of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe policy. She took me up on it. I was (as it happened) right on the small point of fact, and she was wrong. But she maintained her wrongness with such adamantine strength that I eventually conceded the point and even bowed slightly to emphasize my acknowledgment. “No,” she said. “Bow lower!” Smiling agreeably, I bent forward a bit farther. “No, no,” she trilled. “Much lower!” By this time, a little group of interested bystanders was gathering. I again bent forward, this time much more self-consciously. Stepping around behind me, she unmasked her batteries and smote me on the rear with the parliamentary order paper that she had been rolling into a cylinder behind her back. I regained the vertical with some awkwardness. As she walked away, she looked over her shoulder and gave an almost imperceptibly slight roll of the hip while mouthing the words “Naughty boy!”

I had and have eyewitnesses to this. At the time, though, I hardly believed it myself. It is only from a later perspective, looking back on the manner in which she slaughtered and cowed all the former male leadership of her party and replaced them with pliant tools, that I appreciate the premonitory glimpse—of what someone in another context once called “the smack of firm government”—that I had been afforded. Even at the time, as I left that party, I knew I had met someone rather impressive. And the worst of “Thatcherism,” as I was beginning by degrees to discover, was the rodent slowly stirring in my viscera: the uneasy but unbanishable feeling that on some essential matters she might be right.