I see that, once again, an article published by Transit magazine makes reference to Mrs Thatcher’s alleged remarks about the man who uses a bus after the age of 26 being a failure.
It’s a quite a good joke, if a little worn. I have heard several ministers in the current Government use it (as if their record of providing high-quality public transport was anything to shout about). Except that, as numerous people, including WikiQuote and David Mackie of The Guardian have pointed out, she did not actually say it.
It is an attributed quotation, but pre-dates her election to Parliament, much less her entry into the portals of No 10 Downing Street.
The attribution is to Loelia Ponsonby (1902-1993), a noted society snob and one of several wives of Bendor, 2nd Duke of Westminster (1930-1947). The authority was no less a journalist than Alistair Cooke, who wrote to The Daily Telegraph on 3 November 2006 to point this out.
According to a follow-up letter the following day from the historian Hugo Vickers, Leolia said it was not original to her, but came from Brian Howard, a noted 1920s aesthete (who was the model for the character of Anthony Blanche in Evelyn Waugh’s celebrated novel of the period, Brideshead Revisited).
In fact, as Sir Christopher Foster’s book British Government in Crisis reminded us in 2004, Mrs Thatcher was very careful about the interests of bus passengers, and took quite a bit of persuasion before she agreed to Nicholas Ridley’s radical shake-up of the industry proposed in the 1984 White Paper Buses and enacted in the 1985 Transport Act.
You can disagree with the thrust or the details of those reforms - and even 20 years on, their effects are still hotly disputed. But it is a gross calumny to claim that the reforms were introduced deliberately to disadvantage bus passengers out of some misplaced snobbery – especially as many bus passengers come from the socio-economic groups whose votes put her into power. In any case, that was not how Mrs T worked: after all, even she and Ridley baulked at rail privatisation.
By all means continue to argue about the effects of bus deregulation, and about how the industry should be reformed going forward – but do so on the basis of the truth, and not slanted and inaccurate quotations designed to distort the truth.