What was your reaction to Margaret Thatcher's death?

In my singular defence of Thatcher, she was resolute in what she was doing because she believed in what she was doing. But she created men like Tony Blair, like David Cameron, like Nick Clegg. Three men who rose in power to lead political parties. Three men who, effectively lead and have led political parties at the time they are, and were, in government. And not one of the three believe in even trying to do the right thing. They're the Thatcher Youth all grown up.

She created an environment where someone like Boris Johnson can thrive. Politics should not be the business of the detestable and deplorable faux idiots in it for themselves and damn everyone else who isn't from the old boy's club. Politics is the business of people like Nye Bevan, the son of a coalminer, an entire profession scuttled by Thatcher. Had he been born later, his opportunity to make a difference may too have blown away with the last of the coal dust. His dreaded and ugly socialism, detested by Thatcher, was still rife in the late 1940s and allowed him to battle not just the right but the established experts of the British Medical Association and push through what he called the "pure Socialism" of the National Health Service, a dreadful, dreadful reminder of the ills of left wing thought, yet reknowned throughout the world as a gleaming vision of fairness and equality and what one country should be rightfully proud of. It seems inane today to think of politicians as people who can make appreciable difference. But Bevan did. So did Thatcher. There the similarity ends.

To answer the question, finally, how did I feel? There was some relief that I get to live in a world without her. But it didn't last long. Everything she did and everything she was, the knife that twisted into the guts of this country's majority is now a million splintered shards that pervade everything. It was easy to pull out that blade (which Geoffrey Howe did by transferring it neatly into her back in the closing lines of his resignation speech). But it is now near-impossible to avoid the dragon's teeth that sprang up.

Her death is not a victory. It is not to be cherished. It is not an end to pain or damage. It is another bitter reminder of what she did and what can never be undone. I do not hate her. Hate is an immediate burning frenzy of intensity and passion. What I feel is much deeper and much sadder. If my city was destroyed by a nuclear weapon and never rebuilt. If, in many years, I came back to visit and saw all the places I loved, all those memories still flattened and lost amid the rubble, a reminder of a long-held grief and a past crushed forever by an unfeeling weapon.... if I saw all that then the way I would feel would not be too dissimilar to how I feel now. You don't feel hate for the bomb. Hate is much too small a word, too narrow an emotion, too little of the tale.