The Spectator

Home With the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, the 2,300 invited to attend Lady Thatcher’s funeral in St Paul’s cathedral included the three surviving former prime ministers, members of her cabinets, the leader of the opposition, F.W. de Klerk, June Whitfield, Joan Collins, Dame Shirley Bassey and Sir Terry Wogan. Mikhail Gorbachev did not attend, because of ill health, Lord Kinnock because of a previous funeral engagement, the Argentine ambassador for an unstated reason and Sally Bercow, the Speaker’s wife, because she didn’t want to. Much time had been spent discussing whether the BBC should play on its singles hit chart programme ‘Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead’, which had been downloaded by those who held the memory of Lady Thatcher in disdain.

The runners who will gather for the London Marathon this weekend will converge on the greatest target in the world. Winston Churchill was the first to see the problem. ‘With our enormous metropolis here… [we are] a kind of tremendous fat cow, a valuable cow tied up to attract the beasts of prey,’ he told the Commons in 1934. But ‘we cannot possibly retreat, we cannot move London.’ New enemies, from the IRA to al-Qa’eda, have come to do their worst — but since the London Underground bombing of 7 July 2005 none has succeeded. The average British urbanite would be forgiven for thinking the threat has subsided. It has not. The atrocity at the Boston Marathon this week is a reminder that such threats never vanish — they just get intercepted.