Pressure grows to strip Thatcher title

[emad]

Antony Barnett and Martin Bright
Sunday January 16, 2005
The Observer

Sir Mark Thatcher, the disgraced son of former Prime Minister Baroness Thatcher, should be stripped of his hereditary title, according to an influential cross-party group of MPs.

Tony Wright, Labour chairman of the Commons Public Administration Committee, which has investigated the honours system, said: 'If we give honours for honours, we should remove them for dishonours.' Thatcher's title was passed to him when his father, Sir Denis, died in June 2003.

Last week Thatcher received a four-year suspended jail sentence and a £265,000 fine in South Africa after a plea-bargaining deal in which he admitted playing a role in an attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea. It was revealed he had funded the £150,000 purchase of a helicopter to be used by a team of mercenaries.

Thatcher always claimed he had no knowledge of the plans to use the aircraft to depose the president of the oil-rich West African state. The fine was paid by his mother, who also put up bail of £165,000 after his arrest in Cape Town last August. Thatcher, whose link to the coup plotters was revealed by The Observer, was asked to fund the helicopter deal by Simon Mann, the Old Etonian former SAS officer who is in jail in Zimbabwe after being convicted of being one of the masterminds of the coup plot.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/politics/story/0,6903,1391565,00.html

START by stripping the matriarch.....

[emad]

1. Thatcher told 'no favours' over visa: Telegraph

Telegraph
By Jacqui Goddard
(Filed: 16/01/2005)

Sir Mark Thatcher can expect no special favours in his attempt to renew his American visa and visit his wife and children in Texas, American immigration authorities warned last night. He would not be admitted automatically if he tried to enter as a tourist without a visa.

The 51-year-old son of the former prime minister, Baroness Thatcher, will not be able to rely on his mother's influence as he seeks to overcome American restrictions on the admission of convicted criminals, they say.

Officials at US Customs and Border Protection, which deals with immigration, rejected suggestions that he might be given special treatment because of his mother's political connections in Washington. "Not in this country he won't," said a spokeswoman.

Sir Mark risks a potential lifetime exclusion from America because of his conviction in South Africa last week for unwittingly bankrolling a failed coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea, unless he can convince officials at the US Department of Homeland Security that his crime was a minor one.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/01/16/wthat16.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/01/16/ixworld.html

[lenidog]

2. I wonder how many

in the House of Lords or in England at large had ancestors who won their titles by doing the exact same thing or very similiar in the heyday of the empire.

[McKenzie]

3. ahem...for "England" read "Britain"

sorry if that sounds a tad petty. I see loads of references to England when the country being discussed is actually Britain.