Rhetoric and practice …

…What Hath Thatcher Wrought? — New English Review.  (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

History does not judge politicians: it is people who judge, usually in the light of their own current preoccupations. No final estimate of Margaret Thatcher can be made, therefore, but it is unlikely that she will ever be considered a mere machine politician, dull and grey as John Major, Gordon Brown or David Cameron, or shallow and meretricious as Anthony Blair. Whether you agree with them or not, it would be easy to put forward a reasonably coherent set of views in which she believed; by contrast formulating the political philosophy of the others would be like trying to catch a cloud with a butterfly net.