Raphael Samuel on Margaret Thatcher

“She reached out...to the provincial England of her childhood, constructing an alternative national epic in which there was a merchant-adventurer in every counting-house, a village Hampden in every store. As many commentators have pointed out, she spoke in the accents not of church but of chapel, and in her radical contempt for paternalism it is not difficult to find echoes of her Northamptonshire shoemaker forbears. Her version of Victorian values was of a piece with this, invoking the plebeian virtues of self-reliance and self-help rather than the more patrician ones of chivalry and noblesse oblige.”

“Attacking by turns the Church of England, the higher civil service, the universities, the BBC and the bar, she did as much as the cultural revolution of the 1960s to destabilise the establishment and degentrify public life.”

“Mrs Thatcher was the only philosophically interesting prime minister of my adult lifetime. As much by accident as by design she stumbled on issue after issue of high principle, where there were genuinely incompatible moral choices to be made... Attacking socialism as an evil, and casting doubt on the very idea of public service, she forced us to reaffirm – but also to rethink – the place of the collectivist idea in British life and politics and of the social services in civil society. Her ideas, though aligned to right-wing politics, have disturbing affinities to the radical individualism recently in vogue on the left.”