You have no enemies, you say?
Alas! my friend, the boast is poor;
He who has mingled in the fray
Of duty, that the brave endure,
Must have made foes! If you have none,
Small is the work that you have done.
You’ve hit no traitor on the hip,
You’ve dashed no cup from perjured lip,
You’ve never turned the wrong to right,
You’ve been a coward in the fight.

*****

I’m no fan of the excessive and unproductive trickle-down economics of Margaret Thatcher, other than to say that I’m also no fan of the excessive and unproductive Union bureaucracy that she came to fight. (That just means I’m a centrist, and centrists often have a hard time in Two-party First-past-the-post electoral systems. FPTP encourages dividing the country into Us and Them, and making everything a fight. I think Proportional Representation allows for more constructive government relationships.)

As reported in The Independent, in the docudrama ‘The Crown’, Margaret Thatcher fires half of her cabinet because of their “lack of grit as a consequence of their privilege and entitlement”. In response, Queen Elizabeth tells Thatcher that she’s playing a “dangerous game” making so many enemies, to which the prime minister replies that she is “comfortable” with having enemies, and she then recites Scottish poet Charles Mackay’s ‘No Enemies’. Mackay was a 19th century poet and journalist, now best remembered for his ‘Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds‘.

In real life, Thatcher was very fond of the poem, with a 2019 BBC documentary revealing that she kept it on her desk.

“Food fight.” by Free the Image is licensed under CC BY 2.0.