QUOTE OF THE MONTH [bonus]

'I had a ringside seat at the carnival of treachery that beset Lady Thatcher after she was ousted by the men Norman Tebbit sardonically called her “friends”.



As William Hague's press secretary in the run-up to the 2001 election when he was leader, I saw first hand how Maude and his modernisers betrayed her.



Their mantra was “concede and move on”. By concede, they meant accept the Left's monstrous lie that Mrs Thatcher was nasty, divisive and old-fashioned. By move on, they meant remove every vestige of her extraordinary legacy.



To Maude and his co-conspirator Michael Portillo, Hague's Shadow Chancellor, she represented everything that made them unelectable. In their view she was political poison.



Which is why …. they wanted her to disappear from the face of the Earth before the 2001 election. Portillo even tried to stop her appearing at an election rally in Plymouth – but Hague, who was always loyal to her, refused to allow this, to the delight of the faithful.



That, of course, was always the problem for the modernisers. Unlike them, and unlike the current crop of privileged public school boys leading the party, the shopkeeper's daughter had an unerring instinct for what mattered to people in the real world.



She was small-state, low-taxing, free market conservative determined to help hard-working families. Hers were the politics of conviction.



In contrast, all that interested the modernisers was making the Tory Party seem nice. So we had Theresa May's “nasty party” speech. Hague's stupid baseball caps, and all manner of other vacuous attempts to appeal to a mythical right-on electorate, including the embracing of gay marriage, overseas aid and the green agenda.'

Amanda Platell, writing in the Daily Mail