I never knew Mrs Thatcher, as she was called when Prime Minister, but I knew a fair number of people who did. What they told me matched fairly closely the impression I had formed of her from the media, even from, and despite, those hostile to her.

Photo: REX FEATURES telegraph.co.uk

Yesterday, however, a Left-wing UK blog, Left Foot Forward, listed five ‘progressive’ things she did, of which two are worth comment. One was to defeat the ‘fascist’ General Galtieri, the leader of the Argentine junta, in 1982. But as I wrote at the time, once Galtieri had occupied the British Falkland Islands, he was transformed almost literally overnight, in the eyes of the Left, from a fascist ogre into an injured innocent. (Alongside their ancestral grievances, the Left have short memories when it suits them.) The other was to abolish corporal punishment in schools. Some teachers now spend their entire time trying to keep order in the classroom, and even to protect themselves, so far as the law allows, from physical assaults by both pupils and parents. My guess is that Mrs Thatcher never actually noticed its abolition. Five years after her enforced resignation a London headmaster, trying to defuse a gang vendetta at his school gates, was stabbed to death by a 15-year-old.

Mrs Thatcher’s values were pre-war ones, which the war had vindicated, and which, during the immediate post-war decades, had co-existed readily enough with wartime socialism and its development into the Welfare State, an institution and an idea notably less popular on the European continent, particularly in the Federal Republic of Germany, than in Britain, which had escaped Nazi occupation. (For most of its citizens, Nazi Germany had been a genuine Welfare State.)

I first became aware of so-called ‘Thatcherite’ – which is to say, broadly Hayekian – ideas in the late 1960s and early 1970s, before I, or anyone, had even heard of Margaret Thatcher. The so-called ‘post-war settlement’ in Britain, whereby both major parties, Labour and Conservative, subscribed to broadly similar collectivist or corporatist programmes in industrial, economic and social policy, was visibly breaking down. What socialists (following Lenin) called ‘the commanding heights of the economy’ – coal, steel, heavy industry, shipbuilding, the utilities, road haulage, the railways, the airlines, telecommunications, education and health – were all either in government hands or so heavily subsidized as effectively to be so. When Mrs Thatcher came to power in 1979, two-fifths of the population lived in municipal housing at subsidized rents, up from a quarter 20 years earlier. (The proportion is now only one eighth.) Hugely uneconomic industries were kept barely afloat at ever-increasing public cost; trades unions controlled access to employment (‘the closed shop’), enjoyed extensive legal immunities, and exercised near-absolute power over their members. Domestic policy was decided jointly by the unions, the employers’ federations, and the government itself. The unions’ constant wage demands came to be financed largely by inflation, and understandably became even more exorbitant as the ‘money illusion’ crumbled. The European ‘economic miracle’ had passed Britain by, and Britain’s once-proud standing in the world had sunk into near-contempibility. The Keynesian consensus was dead, killed by the allegedly impossible but all too real coincidence of stagnation, disguised unemployment and inflation (‘stagflation’). Public sector strikes had left the dead unburied and garbage rotting in the streets, uncollected.

It was obvious even to Mr Callaghan’s Labour government that this desperate state of affairs could not continue, except to disaster. Simply for that reason, Mrs Thatcher’s election victory in 1979 was greeted with general relief, though few foresaw what would follow. Because, until recently, the legacy of the Thatcher years has been so beneficial, people have largely forgotten their turbulence. Most of what Mrs Thatcher did, at least in economic and employment policy, would sooner or later have had to be done by any government, most obviously the curbing of union power, the squeezing of inflation out of the system, and the closure or privatization of subsidized industries. These measures, which have since been imitated across the world, were not effected without political cost, but she still won, handsomely, three general elections in a row, and was finally ditched by her own ungrateful party, in part, it seems, because of the unpopularity of the so-called ‘poll tax’ (a universal, flat-rate charge for local government services), but also because of her increasing Euro-scepticism, which has belatedly, after a quarter-century, turned out to be well justified.

But these mere facts about her career are well known, and have been widely rehearsed since her death, so I need not detail them further. What sticks in the memory is her courage and her conviction. It is said that she ‘empowered’ the female sex, but she was not the first female political leader on the global stage; there had already been Mrs Bandaranaike, Mrs Gandhi, and Mrs Meir. What does seem likely is that few men – a sex of which, generally, she held no very high opinion – would either have pursued the course she chose, or done so with such unflinching resolution. She was the very reverse of defeatist. On the other hand, neither was she rash. She liked a fight, but was much more cautious and pragmatic than is generally supposed, making sure as far as she could that it was on ground of her choosing. She was highly intelligent, with an instant and detailed grasp of complex arguments, and much more undogmatic and open to persuasion, according to her advisers, than is usually supposed. Perhaps it was her intelligence that prevented her from being an intellectual; ideas were important, she thought, but only as an adjunct to practicalities, and a means of addressing them. Where theories and facts conflicted, facts trumped theory. An exception, perhaps, was the poll tax, her only fatal misjudgment. There would have been nothing intrinsically unfair about the idea, had one been devising a society, Locke-fashion, from scratch; but it was a vain hope suddenly to present citizens who had never paid a penny in domestic rates with an annual bill for £500 and expect them to see it as reasonable, even if it was.

This was a curious mistake on her part, and made many feel that she was, at last, losing touch with the ‘ordinary people’ for whom she spoke and to whom she had so often, and so successfully, appealed. She was accused of snobbery by both Left and Right, but the charge was absurd, and in fact it was they who were the snobs. She was widely despised on both sides for her lower-middle-class origins. Yet it was she who, almost single-handed, got the working class off their knees, freed them from their traditional shackles to both their quasi-feudal Tory ‘superiors’ and their largely self-appointed class leadership and gave them en masse, almost for the first time, a real stake in society and a chance to rise in the world, as so many did. It may be that she did not do enough for those who remained where they were, nor for those whom her policies had put out of work, and whose local communities had consequently been blighted. These things have left a legacy of understandable bitterness among some who suffered; but they cannot account for the wholly fantastic, vicious, pathological outbursts of hatred and resentment in the past week, very often from people too young to have had any memory of her governments, and too ignorant to have much idea even of who their imaginary target was.

Emotions so grossly inflamed rarely have their ultimate origin in the external world. All I can suggest is that they issue from an acute, unacknowledged self-hatred, provoked by the spectacle of those who grasped the novel opportunities which the Thatcher revolution offered to all, and of one’s own failure to follow suit. This self-hatred is subsequently turned outwards against such people, against the remarkable woman who liberated them, and against the country she transformed, so that it could once more take its place in the world. Those who, by their success, even by their very existence, continuously torment one with the reminders of one’s own inferiority can only be kept at a mental distance by ritual cursing. I would suppose Thatcher-hatred of this extreme kind to be really a classic case of envy and resentment, and as such resistant to any kind of rational medication. The very hatred she (surprisingly) continues to excite is a measure of her success, and of the admiration she deserves.

She was naturally combative, and would have thought the same. At the personal level, however, she was famous for her kindness and solicitude, something her detractors, because it must disturb their simple picture of her heartlessness, will find especially hard to forgive. Like her or not, she was totally honest with the electorate, and disdained the arts of ‘spin’. It goes without saying, therefore, that she was no mere politician, like her successors, but a true stateswoman. Accordingly, her reputation was perhaps greatest abroad. We shall be lucky to find another like her inside a century.