Parisian councillor calls for ‘Rue Margaret Thatcher’

Margaret Thatcher with former French President François Mitterrand in 1984 (AFP)

A Conservative councillor in Paris has proposed that the French capital name one of its streets after Margaret Thatcher.

Councillor Jérôme Debus, of the UMP party, will begin his bid for a Rue Margaret Thatcher at the next council meeting last this month.

However, the plan to honour the late British Prime Minister, who divides opinion on both sides of the Channel, has already been opposed by left-wing council members.

Ian Brossat, president of the council’s Communist Party, has instead proposed that the city name a street after Bobby Sands, the IRA prisoner who died in prison on a hunger strike in 1981.

“Lacking any personality and a leader, the UMP is looking for its good fairy in the past, and across the Channel,” Brossat wrote in a short statement.

Meanwhile in London, defence minister Philip Hammond and former Tory minister Lord Tebbit have proposed that a statue of Thatcher be erected in Trafalgar Square, with the Mayor of London Boris Johnson agreeing that the Iron Lady deserves a statue in central London, without specifying Trafalgar Square. Tory MPs have also backed calls to rename Port Stanley, the capital of the Falkland Islands, Port Margaret, after the woman that many islanders regard as their liberator in 1982.