I was Attila the Hen's Yorkshire Rasputin

I can feel another Thatcher-fest coming on - this time in triplicate. This week the Prime Minister unveiled his portrait of Margaret Thatcher as a collector's item hit our screens: an apparently sympathetic, if inventively whisky-soaked, BBC2 portrayal of the last days in power of our first female prime minister. And in March, judging by its calls on my time, the BBC in all its ramifications is marking the 25th anniversary of the start of the year-long miners' strike.

I doubt whether I shall sit through Margaret. There is no fun in seeing history you lived through invariably mangled. Indeed, I seem to have caught Thatcher's disease over these reconstructions of the past in which I am forewarned of being portrayed. In No 10, she seemed unable to bear to watch herself on television. Whenever her face appeared on the screen, she told me to turn it off. This was rather inconvenient, as I was supposed to keep up with what was happening on the box as well as in the press.

In my old age the shine has gone off TV. I watch very little these days apart from soccer and rugby, some concerts and what passes for news, littered with its excruciating "emotional interviews" and, sadly, unbearably harrowing accounts of the sufferings of some unfortunate child at the hands of psychopathic adults. The one person who might tip the scales over Margaret is Lindsay Duncan, playing my former boss. I don't see why a luvvie lefty can't make someone she is programmed to hate a human being. After all, she is an actress. Actresses, like press secretaries and barristers, are there to present a view and not necessarily believe every word of their case.

The best Thatcher festival I ever attended was at an obscure university in the middle of Long Island, New York. It was so well endowed that it had a hydraulic orchestra pit, out of which the band rose for the presentation of her honorary degree. At the preceding seminar, the university assembled a fine bunch of academic weirdos with the most imaginatively prejudiced ideas about the old girl, as well as what seemed to be half her former cabinet. They were their usual helpful selves. In fact, I was heckled by John Nott, the former defence secretary. When I later encountered him in the gents, I told him (as Cecil Parkinson is my witness) that it was about time he smartened up his ideas. Contrary to his apparent assertion for a decade, it was his own damned MoD and not me that had been too quick off the mark informing the media about the attack on Goose Green in the Falklands.

Why is it that Tories always beat Labour MPs to the memorable phrase about me? John Biffen said I was a "rough-spoken Yorkshire Rasputin". He also said I was the "sewer but not the sewerage". And Edward Heath said I was "a menace to the constitution". To which I replied: "Well, he should know." Let no one believe that Thatcher governments or their technically supportive parliamentary party were harmonious congregations.

The other fest I mentioned - the miners' strike - has now been celebrated so often that I know what is coming. The interviewers will find it incredible that Thatcher did not want the confrontation. But with unemployment soaring to the three million we are told it will soon reach again, and the government struggling to modernise the economy, the last thing she wanted was the trauma and waste of a strike by the National Union of Mineworkers. The problem was that, with Arthur Scargill at the helm, she knew it was coming. So she got Nigel Lawson at my old department, Energy, to gear up the country for survival.

I shall also be asked whether I feel any shame for my (walk-on) part in destroying an industry and miners' lives. I do not think it is in the least shameful to have been on the side of parliamentary democracy against Scargill's Kremlinesque approach to ballots and organised thuggery.

No doubt most greens would die before recognising Attila the Hen (as Clement Freud described her) as their patron saint. But I am reminded by the publication of James Lovelock's latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, that this year is the 21st anniversary of her speech to the Royal Society, alerting us to the threat posed by greenhouse gases. She did not know what she was starting - a start that was overlooked by TV producers, who amazingly failed to turn up at Fishmongers' Hall even though they had had the full text of the speech for several hours. Since then the world has become besotted with carbon footprints and every conceivable means of obliterating them except the one that works: nuclear power. I would like to see Tony Benn writing up his diary by smoke-blackened storm lamp when we discover, too late, that a combination of wind, waves, tides, currents, sun, geothermal, biomass and energy conservation does not work and renders the planet even muckier.

Sir Bernard Ingham was chief press secretary to the prime minister (1979-90)

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