Given that the former UK PM Margaret Thatcher is up for
auction next month, will it sell better than 1980s era Thatcherism?
By: Ringo Bones
By December 2015, the late former UK Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher’s wardrobe – about 150 lots in all – will all be up for auction at
Christie’s. And given that Thatcherism was an easy sell – both politically and
economically – back in the 1980s when the capitalist West was still toe-to-toe
with the Warsaw-Pac countries at that stage of the Cold War, will “Thatcherism
Memorabilia” in the form of his iconic wardrobes worn at the time, be an easy
sell?
Proceeds of the auction next moth will primarily benefit the
former UK PM’s immediate family after the Victoria and Albert Museum declined
to display the items for public viewing but inexplicably, it managed to
generate overwhelming interest to everyone old enough to both remember and actually
lived through Thatcherism. One of the items to be auctioned off was Baroness
Thatcher’s iconic handbag which during her stint as the UK’s Prime Minister got
her detractors accusing her of “hand-bagging” her political opponents. Another
iconic item on the block was Thatcher’s pale beige raincoat by Aquascutum which
was made famous as the “tank dress” that she wore when at the helm of a British
Challenger tank during a NATO training maneuvers in the then West Germany as
part of her campaign to gain global support for the Falklands War back in 1982 is
estimated to go as high as 20,000 UK£. Given that the auction is a perfect
example of Thatcherism par excellence – is there any change that it would be as
“popular” as Katharine Hamnett’s “58 % DON’T WANT PERSHING” T-shirts of 1983?
Since she passed away two and a half years ago, Margaret
Thatcher did manage to generate interest to both of her critics and fans alike.
Even the UK’s Official Secrets Act had to bare Thatcher’s “hair secrets” back
in 2014 in order to allay the public’s “unanswered questions” with regards to
Britain’s “Iron Lady”.
