Two Tory prime ministers saved their country from the edge of ruin in the Twentieth Century. One was Winston Churchill, who saw off the threat of hideous Nazi fanaticism, and the other was Margaret Thatcher.

She inherited a nation with an appallingly high strike rate and an appallingly low growth rate, a country at the mercy of bully-boy trade union leaders and with state industries and services that failed to deliver an acceptable quality despite their enormous costs.

She left a country prosperous and self-confident once more, one that had regained its place among the world’s leaders. She was accused of gutting the coal industry, yet Labour’s Harold Wilson closed more pits than she did. She was accused of hollowing out UK manufacturing, yet it rose during her term. It decreased as a proportion of total output only because the service sector boomed as never before, bringing the UK away from subsidized outdated industries into modern ones that could make their way in a competitive world.

She didn’t take power away from the unions. Harold Wilson and Edward Heath had both been defeated in the attempt to do that. Instead she redistributed union power downwards from the leaders to the members, giving them the right to elect leaders by secret ballot and to vote before taking part in strike action.

She turned the loss-making state industries into successful private businesses that paid taxes instead of consuming them. She gave parents choices in education and allowed state schools to opt for independence from local authority controls.

With her US colleague Ronald Reagan, she toughened up the UK’s response to Soviet expansionism, and ultimately saw its downfall as it collapsed with its subject peoples yearning for the freedom and prosperity enjoyed by the West.

October 13th was her birthday in 1925, and next year will mark her centenary. Happy 99th birthday, Maggie. You restored the nation’s belief in itself, a belief it may someday recover. Your legacy of achievements will be remembered long after the leftist wokerati lie forgotten in the dustbin of history.