I often saw Jimmy Savile on television in his heyday and I never liked him. His schtick just seemed phony and vulgar. And when I learned that he had been systematically abusing children throughout his adult life, I wasn’t surprised. Not only that, but everything he did, his television and DJ work, his “voluntary” activities had the primary aim of maximising his opportunities to abuse children, while ensuring that any that complained would have difficulty getting a hearing.

But this post isn’t about Jimmy Savile.

It’s about the woman who seized on him and touted him as an exemplar of the kind of self-reliance she preached about. Jimmy Savile didn’t campaign to have the Stoke Mandeville Orthopaedics unit rebuilt at the taxpayer’s expense. He launched a massive fundraising drive that was only topped up at the end by a small amount of public money. And the woman who touted this as the way things should be done was none other than Margaret Thatcher. People should solve their own problems, not come begging to the Government. There was no such thing as society.

So essential was it to hold him up as a paragon that she tried multiple times to have him knighted.  She was always advised that there were skeletons in his closet, but in the end she overrode the advice and put his name forward. By the time the truth was revealed she was already dead. But the story of their relationship typifies the shallow fraud that lay at the heart of what she might have generously described as her philosophy.

I say “generously” because, it it’s heart, all this "philosophy" amounted to was contempt for anyone who was weak or in need. She had no problem about overheating the economy by handing out tax cuts to the well off, while trying to devise even more punitive measures to screw over those who were just getting by, like the infamous poll tax. She cut funding on social welfare and health, but made sure that the police were sufficiently well resourced to lure striking miners into an ambush at Orgreave and beat them up. It’s true that she inherited a mess, and not all of the things she did were bad. But. Essentially, all Thatcherism amounted to was cronyism, bullying and spite.

She was succeeded by John Major, who was well-intentioned but weak, managing a fractious party, racked by divisions over Europe that she had helped to foment with her petty and opportunistic jingoism.

And then, when the Tories eventually came back to power, they were led by the monster, David Cameron. His false narrative, or let’s call it what it was – a lie, was that Labour overspending had left the national coffers empty. He embarked on a vicious austerity programme that was Thatcherism on steroids, and only deepened the already perilous divisions in British society. So sacred was Thatcher in his vision that he attacked the movie "The Iron Lady" for dramatising her dementia. When she died he hailed her as the woman who "saved" Britain, and was able to find the money for a massive State funeral. He then went on to embark on the reckless gamble of the Brexit referendum, which was a gift to other monsters in his party; opportunists like Boris Johnson, and chauvinistic bigots like Michael Gove.

Michael Gove’s Prime Ministerial ambitions failed. But, after a short interregnum came Johnson’s disastrous premiership. This was a man with no principles and no redeeming characteristics, but self-centred with a boundless sense of entitlement; a true product of the Thatcher era. He didn’t seem to think he had to do any work in the job, just enjoy his new status and help his cronies. The short but even more disastrous Premiership of Liz Truss was another lap on the race to the bottom. When she was succeeded by Sunak, everyone knew he lacked empathy or principles, but people thought he might at least be competent. How wrong they were.

When Thatcher died, I was one of the many who celebrated on Facebook with “The witch is dead” memes. But none of us knew then that the poison of her legacy was by no means waning; quite the opposite.

Britain’s standing in the world has fallen. It’s economy is tanking. And the social divisions are deeper than ever. Thatcher isn’t solely responsible, of course. But she started the rot.