I wrote my George Osborne post before hearing of the death of Mrs Thatcher.
She was, it appears to me, the first modern British prime minister for whom it was not an unexamined belief that she acted on behalf of the whole nation. Previous post-war prime ministers may not actually have represented or understood the interests of all sections of the nation, but they believed they did and took it as a given that they should. She did not. She saw the sheep and the goats.
She was an embattled leader (and those who approve of her legacy tend to refer to her as a leader rather than a prime minister): embattled in her party, embattled in her nation, embattled in the economy, embattled in Europe, embattled on the world stage - and it delivered for her unprecedented electoral success.
After her, the political scene had changed, especially as labour embraced the new environment and Tony Blair finally succeeded in getting most of his party to love Peter Mandelson. Votes are always a great persuader. By an amalgam of circumstance, they did not either see the nation as whole (after all it had to be 'reformed'), but they needed, for post-Thatcher electoral success, and to emulate her three successive victories at the ballot box, to appeal to "the middle ground". The middle ground became, fatally and divisively, the political surrogate for the whole nation - fatally for the well-being of the nation and fatally for the honesty of politics, at a time when the world economic order was enmeshed in dishonesty and corruption.
If previous tory leaders had believed in their own ways that they had an obligation to represent the whole nation it was because they believed in an social order. Fictitious or doomed as it may have been, it informed and restrained their political choices. Mrs Thatcher did not believe in a social order. Though she could display great loyalty and generosity towards individuals, she did not appear have a concept of a cohesive society. She famously said, "There is no such thing as society." Or perhaps she famously almost said it. Typically she tended not to understand fully her own best lines (like "The lady's not for turning") and her clustering acolytes shrank from having to explain them to her. She was, in some sense, an innocent, unaware of the full forces that her ardent personality was unleashing.
She believed in a morally driven aspiration to petty bourgeois, property owning, individual self-sufficiency. Every individual should be encouraged down that route - there lay the national salvation - and she was prepared to offer bribing largesse in the form of houses or privatised company shares dispensed at cut rates from the public purse. The tactic appalled Harold Macmillan. When he protested at the selling of "the family silver" he did have some sense of the value of the family as well as of the silver. Many would say that Mrs Thatcher was equally profligate and irresponsible i her management of the national economy, subordinating national interest to socio-political manipulation.
Mrs Thatcher, and later her new-socialist followers, pressed on. Her "Sid" was the progenitor of George Osborne's deracinated "striver", with the pantomime clothes of the "big society" left strewn on the ground around him. At the higher level of society and the economy Mrs Thatcher, in eager alliance with her trans-Atlantic soul-mate, demolished the restraints on enterprise and finance that lead, a few short decades later and within her own lifetime, to the moral and economic bankruptcy that has captured our society now - something we even shamefully foisted on the vulnerable and long-suffering peoples of the Soviet Union and the "evil empires" we deluded ourselves we were liberating. For them also there was to be "no alternative". (That of course is only one part of the foreign policy charge sheet.)
Perhaps she was no more than the force of our own destiny, but she has left us a bitter inheritance.
