Did Margaret Thatcher Actually Say That Any Man Riding the Bus After the Age of Twenty-Five Was a Failure?

The remark that "If a man finds himself a passenger on a bus having attained the age of twenty-six, he can count himself a failure in life" has been widely attributed to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher--and at the same time the attribution widely contested.

Considering the resulting debate it seems worth saying that those skeptical Thatcher ever made that remark point out that the quotation has been worded differently in various reports, that documentation of any one of those statements has been elusive, and that a very similar remark has been attributed to other figures long before Thatcher was Prime Minister, among them "socialite" Loelia Ponsonby ("Anyone seen in a bus over the age of thirty has been a failure in life"), who is herself suggested by some to have merely repeated someone else's words (with poet Brian Howard identified as that person by one investigator).

However, it is also worth pointing out that the various forms of the quotation do not disprove that there was an original form of that statement; the absence of documentation does not mean that she did not say it, only that no one has yet found a possible form of the statement on the record; and that others had said it before does not mean that she did not repeat it herself, either exactly or in some form.

The result is that one can regard the claim as "unproven," rather than "debunked," but many rush to the latter conclusion. (Thus did a writer for the Guardian, in a piece all about said writer's softening attitude toward Thatcher, hasten to declare it a "bogus story.") Indeed, considering this attribution that is awkward for Thatcher's sympathizers--like her very well-documented utterance that "There is no such thing as society," which all too obviously means what it seems to no matter how they deny it--I am struck by the burden of proof laid on those who would claim that Thatcher actually made the remark about bus riders being failures. It is a rather selective exercise in historical sticklerism that, as such selectivity demonstrates (compare it with how you can make up any cynical remark, put the words in the mouth of a Communist leader, and never be questioned), demonstrate of the force of the political biases in favor not just of Thatcher but the political philosophy, the program, the economic and social model, the societal vision she championed, and from which her political legacy has since been inextricable, rather than a principled insistence on getting the facts rights.