Defeatist

In foreign policy, Lady Thatcher stood up to the Soviet Union yet, when the time was right, did business with its leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. When the Falklands were seized by the fascist junta that ruled Argentina, she dispatched a naval task force, despite the scepticism of many of her instinctively defeatist colleagues, and the islands were regained. For the first time since the shock of Suez, Britain had acted successfully — no, triumphantly — independently of the U.S.

Of course, there were errors. In 1986, Lady Thatcher signed the Single European Act, which paved the way to monetary union. She allowed herself to be persuaded against her judgment that Britain should join the Exchange Rate Mechanism, which led to the debilitating farce of 'Black Wednesday' nearly two years after she had been betrayed and dumped by mutinous Tories.

Perhaps, too, she gave too much weight to the rights of the individual to pursue his or her destiny, and not enough to the needs of society. The ugly flip side of the economic dynamism that she released are the hedonistic bankers pocketing obscenely large bonuses in the City, a perfect example of the law of unintended consequences.

But she did revive Britain. She scrapped the language of economic decline. She made us believe that success was possible. Without the economic reforms of Thatcherism, there would have been no New Labour, and certainly no Gordon Brown presiding benignly over a golden economic period which, however, he threatens by ever-creeping taxation and rising public expenditure.

Towering

Why don't we honour Lady Thatcher as she deserves? Is there some peculiar meanness in our national spirit? For many of David Cameron's Tories, she has become a kind of embarrassment, certainly not a name to be invoked in public. They would not dare say what I have written, though many of them probably believe it in their hearts.

Perhaps, as long as they live, great leaders are bound to remain divisive. Churchill certainly did, and it was not until some years following his death that he was raised, even by many on the Left, to his present unchallenged eminence. Even so, the eagerness of those who should be her friends to distance themselves from her legacy is discreditable.

One day, I hope and trust, Lady Thatcher's contribution to our national recovery will be widely recognised, and people will marvel that the petty and factional dons of her own university, Oxford, should have voted to deny her an honorary degree, an insult never before (or since) visited on a sitting Prime Minister.

Her legacy is all around us; Tony Blair's is chiefly in Iraq. He may have stayed away last night, as the seven-and-a-half foot statue of Lady Thatcher was unveiled, but one day, if as a plain MP he should ever pass through the Members' Lobby, he will see the statue towering above him.

Here she has been placed in the company of Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George and Clement Attlee — all, in their ways, great men, and all of them, like Margaret Thatcher, prime ministers who left a legacy to be proud of. With such people, at least, she has received her due.