The Last Time I Saw Maggie Thatcher

I got thrown out of the San Diego Convention Center

When I last saw the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, I got thrown out of San Diego’s Convention Center. It was 1998 and I was a freelancer covering an event called the “Insights World Conference.” The gathering was the clever invention of some Washington lobbyist. For $200 to $400 a ticket, software millionaires and techies from Silicon Valley would come to sunny San Diego and hear a mix of futurists and stars from the Political Right, all the while being glad-handed by Republican fund raisers. Besides Thatcher and John “Megatrends” Naisbitt, James Baker and Newt Gingrich were among the featured speakers.

Unfortunately, my friend Tom Wilson was recently unemployed and insisted on going as well. Usually that would be okay, but I could not forget that brouhaha two years earlier when I had an assignment from an in-flight magazine and he had attached himself to a press junket to Cabo San Lucas. So, it was against my better judgement that, when I put in for press credentials for the Conference, I added that I would be bringing a “photographer.”

So, as part of his masquerade, I reasonably expected Wilson would bring his SLR camera all tricked out with a zoom lens. “I forgot,” he admitted when he swung by to pick me up, “but not to worry.” After a quick…