This morning, I went to the Turn Your Back protest at the wildly overpriced Thatcher funeral procession. The protest crowd was easily the biggest grouping I stood with all morning – you’ll get an idea of size from the video I took below.

The loudest protest cry was “Waste of Money.” A truer phrase has rarely been spoken. We paid some £10m (and the rest) for this – bad buy of the century. Cameron overplayed his hand. The turnout was poor – there was a crowd where I was standing for the protest and a lot of cameras in that area, but people were still easily able to walk to and from Blackfriars station and once you moved away from that corner, it was just normal foot-traffic behind the barriers. I got to the Royal Courts and Holborn easily. As another indication of the lack of crowd pressure – just before the funeral procession came past, the police realised that the barriers had been set out the wrong way round. They asked people to stand back so that they could turn them the right way around and were able to do that without a problem. I’ve seen bigger crowds on tube platforms. The protest was heartening, though. I went partly to protest at Thatcherism, but also to exercise my right to be there and register that protest.

Interesting that we still have this sort of unreal (literally) stuff from Nick Robinson and the BBC:

1224: Nick Robinson Political editor Again and again the crowd cheered, as if they wanted to say, “after all this contention and debate, we’re here to cheer you on your last journey”.

1223: Nick Robinson Political editor To see the Chancellor [George Osborne] wipe away a tear from his cheek at one point – we all know if we have lost a loved one, we can’t be sure if that tear was for Lady Thatcher or some personal memory anyone of us can have in a service of that sort – but it was striking that it happened.

Hyperbole that smacks of desperation there. A lot of money was spent today for not very much at all. I know too many people who are finding life too difficult at the moment to find that remotely acceptable.

Anyway – here people are, turning their backs as the procession passes:

And a bit more. The “crowds” had pretty much gone by 11.30am on the way back to Holborn as you can see below. I’m loving the Mail line re: 250,000 turning out to cheer and applaud. RUBBISH. B O L L O C K S. A few thousand people bunched around Blackfriars and St Paul’s does not a massive turnout make, especially if a lot of those people are tourists, members of the press (there were plenty of cameras blocking the paths) and everyday pedestrians slowed down on footpaths narrowed by barriers. You can see from the video below how quickly those supposed hundreds and thousands of cheerleaders dispersed. By the time I got to Holborn – a mere half-hour after the cortege had passed – it was business as usual on the street, as though nothing had ever happened.

Lot of horseshit though. You can see that too.