Hague, like nearly all politicians, prattles on about the need for diversity. Diversity sounds good but what we want is uniformity – schools that achieve uniformly high standards for all children, and not just for a lucky minority.Peter Wilby is editor of the ‘New Statesman’. There was a time when swapping stories about what you were doing when Margaret Thatcher resigned as prime minister was as irresistible as recalling the moment (assuming you were alive in 1963) when you heard that President Kennedy had been assassinated. I happened to be on a train, just outside Reading, when the guard announced the next stop and added: “For those of you who haven’t already heard, Mrs Thatcher has resigned”. A cheer went round the carriage and complete strangers started talking to each other in voices brimming with excitement. Few politicians, in my lifetime, have been so heartily loathed; seeing the back of her was like unexpectedly being given parole half-way through a long prison sentence.

People even threw impromptu parties that evening, celebrating her downfall. There was a time when swapping stories about what you were doing when Margaret Thatcher resigned as prime minister was as irresistible as recalling the moment (assuming you were alive in 1963) when you heard that President Kennedy had been assassinated. I happened to be on a train, just outside Reading, when the guard announced the next stop and added: “For those of you who haven’t already heard, Mrs Thatcher has resigned”. A cheer went round the carriage and complete strangers started talking to each other in voices brimming with excitement. Few politicians, in my lifetime, have been so heartily loathed; seeing the back of her was like unexpectedly being given parole half-way through a long prison sentence.

People even threw impromptu parties that evening, celebrating her downfall.
Apart from a few die-hard Thatcherites, the populace appeared to be relieved, for a while at least, to have someone as dull as John Major in Downing Street. The loadsamoney culture of the Eighties was over, ushering in a less strident decade whose patron saint was not the Iron Lady but the Caring Princess. Even among Tories, it was widely believed that Mrs Thatcher went bonkers during her third term and had to be removed for her own good, as well as that of the party. In the aftermath of her resignation, Thatcher was a forlorn figure, seeming to adjust with difficulty to her new role and confirming, as we had always suspected, that she had little life beyond politics. She eventually became something of an embarrassment to the Tories, displaying the worst possible judgement when she rallied to the cause of that hideous old dictator, General Pinochet. The spectacle of Lady Thatcher taking tea with the Butcher of Santiago, a man whose subordinates trained dogs to rape women, sickened even her old supporters.So can we really be witnessing a Thatcher revival? I first drew attention to this scary possibility in this column last autumn, when I pointed out that the former PM was being touted as a rather unlikely fashion icon.