Thread by @PowerSayeed

This is a story about Sadiq Khan's renaming of London Overground and about Margaret Thatcher - and why the culture war mob have got her wrong (sort of).

I love that SK has named the bit of the London Overground that I live near after the incredible Mildmay Hospital, which has done pathbreaking work caring for people with HIV.

He's got a lot of flack from some horrible people about the renaming, which has honoured (among others) the Suffragettes, the Windrush generation & the weavers - a nod to many generations of textiles workers who lived in our city, many of them migrants. Apparently this is "woke".

Personally, I wouldn't care if the new name for this bit of the overground was "woke". But SK's culture war critics might be surprised to know that one of the Mildmay Hospital's biggest fans was also one of their heroes. It's ...

... Margaret Thatcher.

So, here's a little thread about Mrs T & the Mildmay, with a nice little historical discovery (not mine!) at the end.

In August 1989, the PM's Office organised for her to visit the Mildmay Hospital. Here's some records from the relevant file from her personal archive, which is held by the amazing @ChuArchives in Cambridge. Archivist @AndrewRiley_ kindly shared these with me.

A previous - and rather illustrious - reader of these archives had noticed something in there that's very interesting - and quite surprising. More on that later.

So! The archive.

In the files, there’s a letter drafted for the PM by her staff. An illustrious Tory medic, Ian McColl, had invited her to visit the Mildmay, and the draft reply to him says she probably can't come any time soon.

But on top of the printed draft of the letter, you can see the PM’s handwritten edits. I love being so close to history. You can almost hear that steely voice correcting her overprotective aides: she “will try [to] find the time to visit it”.

And she did. In the late 80s the AIDS crisis was at one of its scariest points. The Mildmay was doing incredible work - not saving lives (they couldn't at this time) but giving people care in their final months and days, when often they had been abandoned by their families.

But this was a politician's visit. I've helped organise many Labour Party Shadow Cabinet visits. As you can imagine, they're quite political! And, fair enough, Mrs T's visits were too.

She planned to create an internal market in the NHS, and that meant making different hospitals, etc., more independent. The Mildmay was a self-governing hospital, and it was a shining example of what a hospital could do with that kind of independence.

And yeah, a decentralised healthcare system definitely doesn't have to be a marketised one. People can have freedom without always having to compete! But the point is: she had firm ideological reasons for this visit...

Thatcher hated public ownership. Look at how she sold off our social housing. (That's why, today, no one can get a council flat.) And look at how she privatised energy. (That's why we have been so vulnerable to Putin's energy price shock.)

But back to the hospital visit. Thatcher was increasingly unpopular (she deserved that, IMO). And her team would have been very aware of the impact some nice pics of Mrs T at the hospital might have had. As a recovering press officer myself, I can see their logic.

So, the day of the visit arrives.

There's plenty of material in the file about what happened. It’s not clear if she actually did any press. (Good for her.) And she has a nice chat with a nurse who gave her a lavender bag.

Plenty of notes are taken.

And she meets a young man who was expected to be able to go back to work, and another whose illness had resulted in brain damage.

But the next week, she is informed that both of them have died.

This really brings it home to me, what this is all about.

It’s so moving that this young man’s grandmother was still caring for him, precisely because so many people who had HIV were abandoned by their families. It’s so poignant that the other man was about to go back to work because so many people with HIV were sacked.

The terror of that time. The awful grief that the people who survived have to live with, still. A generation of gay men, almost wiped out. Those memories, those brilliant people, all gone.

And then here is one more thing. This is the bit that the culture warriors happily ignore. @CharlesHMoore spotted it when he was researching Thatcher's authorised biography, and was going through her papers at the Churchill Archive.

After the visit, Mrs Thatcher made a £1,000 donation to the hospital. In secret.

Thatcher's record on HIV/ AIDS isn't great. Her government moved slowly to act on the epidemic. And it's hard not to see that as part of a pattern, reflecting the disgusting homophobia of Section 28, for instance.

My point isn't that she was a good PM, or a nice person. It's that she was a complex historical figure. Thatcher's husband Denis was wealthy, but I understand they kept their finances separate. So £1,000 was a really large amount, even for her.

It would have been roughly a week-and-a-half’s salary for a PM in 89, I think.

Compare her £1,000 secret donation with the tawdry £1,000 bet that Rishi Sunak was forced to make with Piers Morgan recently, about whether his Rwanda plan would work.

https://x.com/Independent/status/1754497606611316795?s=20

Like I say, Thatcher was a complex historical figure. She clearly thought very highly of what the Mildmay was doing. And the Mildmay’s history is complex too, in its own way. That’s why we should dismiss the right wing trolls who complain about Sadiq Khan honouring it.

I doubt that Thatcher would have liked Sadiq. Our mayor has been calling for rent controls for years, and he's a constant ally to LGBT+ communities. He's protected and expanded London's publicly owned transport system in the face of cuts by the Coalition and the Conservatives...

... So, yeah, the far right culture warriors on Twitter can scream at him for naming a trainline after a pioneering HIV hospital. But I look at Mrs Thatcher's secret £1,000 donation to the Mildmay - and I think the culture warriors' hero might have approved of Sadiq's choice.