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Meryl Streep remarked that she had tried, in the film The Iron Lady, to capture what it was about Margaret Thatcher that aroused such “venom”. Venom is the right word. Recently, when I wrote an article that might have been interpreted as sympathetic to Lady Thatcher, my inbox filled with hate mail. Some of it was obscenely misogynistic, some based on simple errors (surprising how many people think that she privatised the railways) and some just mad. One man insisted she was a coward because she had refused to debate with him; it did not seem to occur to him that there might have been simpler reasons why she, or her advisers, thought that his invitation to debate deserved to go in the bin.