Not the kind of politics I have the slightest bit of respect for. But yeah, for a lot of people, it is. In Thatcher's particular case, she stood up for/defended monsters and monstrous regimes she had no need to stand up for, even as a realpolitik (sp?) move. Loathsome human being.
Agreed on the Russell Brand piece. He tends to be good when writing seriously.
@Tea - Agreed about the number of people who don't realise what her policies have done to the things they value. As much of a shit as Thatcher was, she couldn't have done anything without the often blind support of millions. She would have been out had the Falklands War not happened, as her opinion poll ratings were through the floor for the first couple of years of her term - it's a sad testament to moronic nationalism that this declaration of war (in support of islands for which she had been steadily running down British economic support for a number of years prior to 82) changed everything.
Blair is equally loathsome though. New Labour are/were c8nts, perhaps even more so than Thatcher for their pretence of being even vaguely 'Left'. At least she had the decency not to hide what she was (well, in certain respects).
But - The kind of democratic politics that we have in Britain seems to entail that most PMs will effectively be sociopaths (either that or sad, dead, broken husks in the case of Major and Brown, and maybe, god help us, Miliband), as a normal human being would never want to take up the post or be allowed to by a media dealing almost solely in irrelevant bullshit rather than policies.