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Margaret Thatcher was consciously, happily, infuriatingly, the odd woman out. The result was that though people cursed her for it, she tended to prevail. Get rid of incomes policy, put up taxes in a recession in order to get the deficit down, install US nuclear missiles on your soil, take on the National Union of Mineworkers, control the money supply, sell off the nationalised industries. At the critical moment, people rarely liked such policies. But few, in hindsight, would want them reversed. It was by intuiting this that Tony Blair won so big in 1997. With cold calculation, he made Thatcher and all her works seem nasty – but accepted 90 per cent of what she had achieved.

Today, Mr Cameron finds himself the heir both to Blair and to Thatcher