Think I want to be around these people?
"More than 2,000 invited to Thatcher funeral" April 12, 2013
LONDON — Invitations to Margaret Thatcher’s funeral are going out to more than 2,000 celebrities, dignitaries, colleagues, and friends of the late British leader — from former US presidents to “Dynasty” star Joan Collins and composer Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Invitations were being printed Thursday and will be mailed out on Friday.
Thatcher, who died Monday at 87, will be given a funeral with military honors at St. Paul’s Cathedral on Wednesday.
Though not officially a state funeral, it is the grandest such service seen in Britain since the death in 2002 of the Queen Mother Elizabeth.
Queen Elizabeth II will be among the mourners — the first time the monarch has attended a prime minister’s funeral since the death of Winston Churchill in 1965.
The invitation list includes all surviving US presidents, British politicians past and present, former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso.
Okay, I wouldn't mind sitting with Jimmy Carter. He is going, right?
Prime Minister David Cameron’s office said the list — drawn up by Thatcher’s family, her Conservative Party, and the government — includes representatives of 200 states and organizations with whom Britain has diplomatic relations.
Some most closely associated with her 1979-1990 tenure have said they will not attend. Nancy Reagan will send a representative, and former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said poor health prevents him from coming to London.
Entertainment figures include Collins, Lloyd Webber and his sometime lyricist Tim Rice, novelist Frederick Forsyth, singer Shirley Bassey, “Top Gear” television host Jeremy Clarkson, and fashion designer Anya Hindmarch, who made some of Thatcher’s famous handbags.
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I found her to be a rather hurtful woman.
"Thatcher protest puts BBC in bind" by Raphael Satter | Associated Press, April 13, 2013
LONDON — Opponents of the late Margaret Thatcher are taking a kind of musical revenge on the former prime minister, pushing the song ‘‘Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead’’ up the British charts in a posthumous protest over her polarizing policies.
By Friday the online campaign had propelled the ‘‘Wizard of Oz’’ song to number one on British iTunes and into the top five of the music chart used by the BBC to compile its weekly radio countdown.
David Karpf, who studies online campaigns, said the chart battle was an example of a new kind of protest enabled by social media — ‘‘A way for people to signal protest en masse without shouting from the rooftops.’’
The campaign has caused a headache for the BBC.
This after the phone-hacking and Savile sex scandals.
With the ditty near the top of the charts, the broadcaster faced the prospect of airing the words ‘‘The Wicked Witch is Dead!’’ on its Sunday countdown show, just days before Thatcher’s funeral, scheduled for Wednesday.
Some lawmakers from Thatcher’s Conservative Party had called for the publicly funded broadcaster to drop the song, while others warned that such a move would mean censoring a form of dissent.
The BBC said it would broadcast only part of the tune — along with a news item explaining why it was there.
BBC director general Tony Hall said that while the broadcaster found the campaign ‘‘distasteful and inappropriate,’’ he and other executives had decided the song should not be banned — but should not be broadcast in full, either.
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