Not Giving Up The Ghost: Why I'm Holding A Seance For Thatcher

Written by: Nathaniel Tapley
Published: Monday 7th April 2014

'Bile merchant' Nathaniel Tapley on why he's going to spend the anniversary of Margaret Thatcher's death trying to raise her from the grave...

I quite like the idea of being a bile merchant. It beats being a bile monger any day. I can source and meet local artisanal bile producers and try to introduce them to a wider audience, who are only acquainted with bland, processed, supermarket bile.

"This is just plain sick", "bile merchant", and "I'm going to dance on your mother's grave", are just a few of the comments I've received about the Thatcher Séance (8th and 9th April 2014 at the Leicester Square Theatre).

To which I say: good. I'm glad it's making people angry.

The point was to make people angry, as well as to make them laugh. The coverage of Mrs Thatcher's death last year was almost entirely hagiographic; it sought to rewrite her history, only daring, in some instances, to call her "divisive".

That's "divisive". Not "evil".

And the thing about a word like "divisive" is it makes it looks like you've acknowledged criticisms of something, without actually having to explain what those criticisms were.

If you only knew her from the news media, you would have never known much more about Margaret Thatcher than that she regularly drove tanks around, people with grubby faces didn't like her, and she invented huge mobile phones.

So I thought the anniversary of her death was a good time to make people angry. Because I think it's worth remembering that:

- She personally approved using the SAS to train the Mujahideen, including one Mr O. bin Laden.

- She consistently defended and supported the Apartheid regime in South Africa, going so far as to say: "I do not accept that apartheid is the root of violence."

- She supported Pinochet, a dictator who overthrew a democratically elected President, rounded political enemies up into football stadiums to have them shot, and regularly had journalists disembowelled before dangling them from helicopters by the intestines.

- She openly supported Pol Pot in the United Nations, and again used the SAS to train the Khmer Rouge, who killed a third of the population of their country.

- She instituted Section 28, the first anti-homosexual legislation in Britain for more than a century.

- She deliberately kept the pound overstrong, in order to weaken the export market for Britain's manufacturing base, which she saw as a haven for unions.

So, I'm not concerned that my séance will anger a few right-wingers. It's good to feel angry sometimes. Now they know how the rest of us felt last year.

None of this will appear in the show, however, which is a delightfully light-hearted look at her legacy through the prism of spooky comedy and mind-reading.

Because we all feel the impact of her ideas and the way in which she lives on, that's what I decided to look at. In the most literal way possible, showing my usual subtle and oblique approach to a subject.

And yes, it is a crassly commercial attempt to make money at the expense of a weak and vulnerable old lady. I like to think it's what she would have wanted.

Nathaniel Tapley's 'Melmoth Darkleigh: The Thatcher Seance' is on at The Leicester Square Theatre in London on 8th and 9th April 2014. Details & Tickets

Nathaniel Tapley is a left-wing comedy writer and performer. His website is nathanieltapley.com