Palin and Thatcher: Reaction of the "Intellectual Class"

A comparison between Sara Palin and Margaret Thatcher can be taken a bit too far. They are in many respects very different people. But the reaction to each by the intellectual "new class" in their societies is remarkably similar. I've been reading Hugo Young's 1989 biography of Thatcher and came across this:

"One of the most readily discernible issues between these two worlds was a matter of social snobbery, laced, on the part of the dissenting intellectuals, with a special tang of indignation deriving from the fact that their antagonist was a woman...

."...the baroness had once seen Mrs Thatcher on television choosing clothes at Marks & Spencer, and there was, she found, something quite 'obscene' about it. The clothes showed a woman 'packaged together in a way that's not exactly vulgar, just low.' Lady Warnock confessed to 'a kind of rage' whenever she thought about her.

"Scarcely less remarkable than such sentiments, which sounded as though they sprang from something deeper than the well of pure reason, was the willingness of these intellectuals to express them. It was as though the passions of the age had lifted all restraint from the canons of public conversation. Nothing, it appeared, was unmentionable, no depth of condescension need be left unplumbed..."

The Young biography is a bit old, and I've been thinking about picking up the Claire Berliniski biography. Is anyone familiar with it?

Tim Wright