How Margaret Thatcher made Britain great again

When Margaret Thatcher was asked what she had changed about British politics, she answered: "Everything." It was uncharacteristically immodest of her, but it was true. After she became prime minister in May 1979, she changed the atmosphere of the pre-emptive cringe that successive ministries of both parties and industrial management had exhibited towards the trade unions ever since the World War Two.

She changed the sense of embarrassment that Britons felt towards the concepts of productivity and profit. She changed British reliance on manufacturing industry just in time, inaugurating the services and information technology industry revolutions.

She changed the attitude of appeasement and post-imperial guilt that had actuated foreign policy making since the Suez Crisis. She changed British politics so fundamentally that the Labour Party had to drop socialism and change its name and objectives in order to get elected.

No one was in any doubt about what Lady Thatcher stood for or believed in

Along with her friend and ideological soulmate Ronald Reagan - the greatest US president since Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940s - Thatcher changed the failing policy of detente with Communism into the confrontational one that eventually brought the Berlin Wall down at the end of her premiership.

She changed the ownership structure of vast industries, exchanging the nebulous concept of 'national' ownership for the more efficient, purer (and ultimately fairer) one of shareholder ownership. She changed the way we financed the European budget.

Meanwhile she fundamentally changed - for the worse - the career paths of the Labour PM Jim Callaghan, the Argentinian junta leader General Galtieri, the next Labour leader Michael Foot, the extreme left-wing National Union of Mineworkers leader Arthur Scargill, the next Labour leader Neil Kinnock and especially the IRA terrorist and hunger-striker Bobby Sands.

Those things that she did not change for the better she would have, if she hadn't been knifed by an over-ambitious cabal of cowards, fools, traitors and - worst of all - Europhiles, who split the Tory party and left it feuding for half a generation, until the advent of David Cameron in 2005.

The election victory of 1992 was largely down to her legacy rather than the non-leadership of her absurd successor John Major, since when the Conservatives were thrice defeated by Tony Blair - an ideological son of Thatcher - at three general elections.

By encouraging George Bush Sr not to 'wobble' during the First Gulf War, she set the international scene that allowed