true blue

I will always remember where I was when I learned that Mrs. Thatcher was dead. I was at the Ashridge Business School near Berkhamsted, on an awayday with work, and a member of the Senior Management Team had just sat down next to me and said, in his drily camp way: 'So: Margaret Thatcher, milk snatcher.'

I was bewildered: was this some kind of test? What did Margaret Thatcher have to do with anything? I suppose I said something like: 'Uh?', and then it was explained to me. Next day, she was still dead, and her condition has remained stable throughout the week. Not so the country - half are celebrating her death with street parties and the other half are expressing their outrage on the Jeremy Vine show. One listener said of the partygoers: 'These dinosaurs are acting like low-lifes.' But if dinosaurs can't act like low-lifes, then I'd like to know who can.

Meanwhile the Daily Mail is serialising the memoirs of one of her aides - memoirs it describes as 'intimate yet explosive.' Which doesn't sound like a very auspicious combination.

Some are even questioning whether Mrs. Thatcher was a woman. I would go further - I don't think she was a real person. She was a performance. If she had really been as formidable as her legend dictates, then wouldn't she have made more of a nuisance of herself after she stopped being PM? Instead, she crumbled. She had been given a role to play, and she played it enthusiastically enough, and when it was taken away from her she didn't know what to do with herself. She was no Meryl Streep.

But back to the Ashridge Business School. No agenda had been circulated for this, which filled me with dread. Last time we went to a meeting with no agenda we were blindfolded and forced to feel oddly-shaped pieces of plastic as a test of our communication skills - a test we failed with flying colours. This time round I was anticipating a 'short sharp shock'. We'd be sleeping in a dormitory and made to stand by our beds while a man shouted at us: 'Call yourselves a Comms team? I've had better Comms teams crawling out of my arse!' And so on. Then we would be forced to do an assault course dressed as pantomime horses.

I was wrong. No wine with dinner was the worst of it. There were a few fun and games presided over by a guy called Larry, but nothing too serious. I drew an owl. We were encouraged to relate our character traits to a four colour quadrant, to find out which colour predominated – I was blue ('cautious, formal, questioning') but with streaks of yellow and green. I have to say, I was initially inclined to dismiss this as bullshit, but as we were leaving I was surprised to hear people freely discussing their colleagues in these terms - 'I don't think she's yellow.' 'He's blue but he thinks he's green.' It was like a bizarre outbreak of psychedelic racism. But everyone noted Larry's peculiarly intense stare – maybe we'd all been hypnotised. Just as well he hadn't described our traits in terms of farm animals or we'd have been mooing and clucking all the way home.