Margaret thatcher

David Cameron has said Christians should be more evangelical “about a faith that compels us to get out there and make a difference to people's lives”. In an article for The Church Times he said he wanted to infuse politics with Christian values such as responsibility, hard work, charity, compassion, humility and love. In recent years politicians have often been shy about talking about religion, reluctant perhaps to invoke the authority of God to score a political point. William Ewart Gladstone had no such anxiety, saying in 1832: “Restrict the sphere of politics to earth, and it becomes a secondary science”.

You may not have agreed with the late Tony Benn’s politics, but as Mary Wakefield points out in her interview with him, ‘his faith in humanity had deep roots’. And here’s an example of it. Back in 2001, Benn took it upon himself to erect a plaque in the broom cupboard where Emily Wilding Davison hid during the night of 2 April 1911, the night of the Census, so that she would be registered as a resident at the House of Commons. As a woman - with no right to elect who could stand in Parliament - it appealed to her sense of irony that she would be recorded as a resident. Speaking in the House of Commons in 2001, Benn said: 'I have put up several plaques—quite illegally, without permission; I screwed them up myself.

Cunning work from Milband at PMQs. He played Syria like a fixed-odds betting machine and came away with a minor jackpot. Last week he had urged the prime minister to accept a few hundred of the neediest Syrian refugees. Cameron duly said OK. Today Miliband was quick to claim a victory for decency, for humanity, and for Miliband. ‘I welcome this significant change of heart,’ he said. Choice word, heart. He’s got it. And Cameron hasn’t. That’s the implication. Miliband tried the same tactic with the 50p tax rate. When Ed Balls unfurled this this new policy he got a mixed bag of reviews. Economists put their fingers in their ears and ran around wimpering. The popular response suggested it was a top ten hit.

It is perhaps the most striking failure of the EU that nearly 30 years since Margaret Thatcher signed the Single European Act with the vision of a single trading market by 1992, that in 2014 we do not yet have a genuine single market in the services sector. This profound failure has cost the EU billions in economic growth and disproportionately affects the UK, which has a huge service industry base. The EU official website, with a delicious piece of understatement, comments: ‘Despite its achievements so far, the single market is not yet complete. Important gaps remain in some areas. Pieces of legislation are missing. And administrative obstacles and lacking enforcement leave the full potential of the Single Market unexploited.’ The cost of this failure is stark.

The campaigning backbench MP Robert Halfon was invited to say grace at the First Annual Margaret Thatcher Memorial Dinner at Churchill College, Cambridge on Saturday night. It's not often you get table thumping after a prayer: 'For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly grateful for the free market that keeps the price of food down and competition forever and ever. Amen.' Amen to that.

Mr Steerpike was among the throng that gathered at the East India Club on Thursday night to hear about the development of the Margaret Thatcher Centre, the project to perpetuate the legacy of Britain’s greatest post-war leader. Donal Blaney, the Thatcher Centre’s CEO, and Conor Burns MP invited the Lady’s ‘most fervent supporters’ to pledge £1,000 each in a ‘true sign appreciation to Lady Thatcher’. Blaney also explained why he is ‘devoting his life’ to the project, telling the predominantly male but surprisingly young crowd: ‘Lady Thatcher delivered; now it’s our turn.’ The organisers have drawn inspiration from the USA.

Boris Johnson prides himself on being one of the few politicians who gets away with saying the unsayable. He stuck to that theme tonight with his Margaret Thatcher lecture to the Centre for Policy Studies, in which he argued that greed isn't a bad thing. He said: 'But I also hope that there is no return to that spirit of Loadsamoney heartlessness – figuratively riffling banknotes under the noses of the homeless; and I hope that this time the Gordon Gekkos of London are conspicuous not just for their greed – valid motivator though greed may be for economic progress – as for what they give and do for the rest of the population, many of whom have experienced real falls in their incomes over the last five years.

The news that Hull has been crowned the UK’s City of Culture for 2017 was discussed at PMQs. The PM extolled the virtues of the city, and made special mention of native eighties alt rockers The Housemartins. However, with a crashing sense of inevitability, the band’s founder, Paul Heaton, was unhappy with the endorsement: ‘Well, apparently David Cameron likes ‘London 0 Hull 4’. Which part of the attack on his policies and rich friends did he like best???’  The poor wee lamb ranted for a while about Thatcherism, and then concluded: ‘Cameron has ruined my day.’ My heart bleeds. Still, you would have thought that Cameron might have learned his music lesson by now.

The BBC’s former political editor, John Cole, has died aged 85. As their political reporter during the Thatcher era, he covered many major stories concerning her, including the miners' strike and the Brighton bombing. We have dug up from the archive a review, by John Campbell, of Cole’s memoir, ‘As it seemed to me’, from April 1995.  John Cole's Ulster accent was a shock to metropolitan ears when he became the BBC's Political Editor in 1981. Scottish or Yorkshire voices were no problem, but there was unfamiliarity amounting almost to incongruity in hearing that particular accent discoursing on subjects wider than the tribal politics of Northern Ireland.

The most extraordinary thing about the scandal of Unite at Grangemouth and in Falkirk is how long it took the outside world to notice. Partly, this is an effect of devolution: almost nothing Scottish is now considered news in London, even if it is of kingdom-wide importance. Partly, it results from the loss of media and political attention to trade union affairs. So successful was Mrs Thatcher in taming union political power that newspapers laid off the labour correspondents who, in the 1970s and early 1980s, had been the aristocrats of the news room. As for the Tories, they have forgotten the Cold War arts of keeping dossiers on subversion.