Thatcher has for all time proved – with her competence, drive, bravery and vision – that women are truly the equal of men.

But her bravery extended well beyond the battlefield – something that Churchill’s did not. She took on and defeated ‘the enemy within’, as she called them: the Arthur Scargills, Derek Hattons and Ken Livingstones of this world. ‘Union Barons’, one by one, fell upon her lance until the wheel had turned full circle and we had the fewest strikes in all Europe.

Churchill had his own bitter enemies among the working classes as well as the establishment, but somehow their vehemence had faded under the glow of his magnificent conduct of the war and the glory of his rhetoric in its early days, urging his countrymen to stand fast and not be seduced by peace ‘with honour’ offer which he knew would turn out to be humiliating. But Margaret Thatcher’s enemies never left her in peace, not even in death. Whole swathes of industrial England, Scotland and Wales died on her watch. Most of them were dying anyway (as they had been under Labour), but she did nothing to slow the process.

Yet much the same was happening all over the industrialised West. Mines were closing and shipyards were losing out to cheap labour in the East; steel was being produced in the same areas at Mickey Mouse prices. Long-established and close communities who had come to rely on a single industry became a wasteland. Standing guardian over these nationalised and loss-making industries was a union hierarchy more powerful, many argued, than the state itself. It was said that no law could be enacted without their approval.

Thatcher believed herself to be on a mission to restore Britain’s governance, finances and greatness. She believed she saw a very sick patient whom only surgery could cure. The medicine, she knew, would be bitter and the recuperation hard. But she insisted it would be all be worth it. Some said she was stubborn, and she was. But she could be flexible when she needed to be; she could duck and dive with the best of them in politics, but on core issues, as she saw them, she would not budge. You don’t stay on the way to twelve years at the top (almost as long as Hitler’s Reich) without heavy doses of pragmatism.

Also she was not above using her sex either to get her way. Flirtatious Mitterrand, the French president, thought her coquettish and remarked that she had “the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe.” He fell in love with her ballroom dancing skills. In another world he would have had her – or at least tried.

For all this, Thatcher was an earnest woman, almost devoid of humour (jokes had to be explained to her). She had an almost childlike certainty that she knew what to do to lift the economy out of the pit of despondency into which it had fallen. When 360 of the country’s leading economists signed a letter to tell her that her policies were doomed, she ignored them. Once she was the boss she would brook no backsliders. She was dictatorial, but luckily she was compelled to operate within the constraints of a liberal democracy. But she got the essentials right and, remarkably, that army of doomsayers were proved wrong.

Personally, she was very kind to her staff and to the little people, the ones without power – but she could be brutal to those who wielded it. However, her all-consuming ambition made it impossible for her to be a hands-on mother; perhaps that wasn’t her style anyway. But in her extreme old age she did feel pangs of guilt. She shed more tears over her lost boys in the South Atlantic than ever she did for her own children. It is said that she never went to bed during the three months of the Falklands conflict, dozing instead on a chair, waiting to hear the telephone ring to tell her of more boys lost in the latest sinking. She took it all very personally. Churchill seldom did. An eyewitness told of her sobbing for 40 minutes non-stop when news reached her that another ship had been hit by a missile. When her own torpedo slammed into the cruiser Belgrano and sent Argentina’s sailors to the bottom of the icy south Atlantic, I have no doubt that her mother’s heart felt for those other mothers in far away Argentina. But if  ‘cruel necessity’ – Cromwell’s justification for cutting off his own king’s head – called for its sinking to save her own precious boys, she would not hold back.

She was tough beyond belief – far tougher than any of the men who surrounded her. She would not yield to IRA hunger strikers, no matter what. It was a case of an irresistible force meeting an immovable object. It took ten emaciated corpses before the IRA conceded defeat. They repaid her by destroying her hotel and almost her.

Her toughness and certainty of the correctness of her policies followed through to the economic woes which beset the country; her monetarist measures brought record inflation to low levels; her privatisation of loss-making, nationalised industries stopped the haemorrhaging and put shares into millions of pockets, becoming a model for virtually the whole world; her sell-off of council houses made property owners of millions; her ‘Big Bang’ financial liberalisation in the City made London the world’s leading capital market; and her curbing of restrictive union practises such as flying pickets and the closed shop brought order to the factory floor. It is an impressive list and there is more.

But she made mistakes. She believed too much in the service economy and failed to realise sufficiently the importance of manufacturing. She was plain stupid in doing a dry run of the Poll Tax in, of all places, prickly Scotland – even though its principals were sound. (She never had any admirers in that part of the kingdom and still doesn’t.) And she should never have allowed herself to be talked into signing up to the ERM at a rate that shadowed the Deutschmark. Her earlier signing of the Single European Act cost her many of her cherished powers of veto. Also her closure of Grammar Schools exceeded even that of her Labour predecessors. It infuriated great numbers of her own followers.

Too long in power, and with the inevitable hubris setting in she finally gave the game away when she used the ‘royal  we’ to announce the birth of a grandchild. Her patronising treatment and her public put-downs of her loyal chancellor and foreign secretary, Geoffrey Howe, were not pretty to watch and her hectoring style got worse the longer she remained in office.

But for all her faults and mistakes, she was nevertheless a force of nature that moved the economic firmament. There was no going back, even for an incoming Labour government. She also moved the political centre ground. It might be said that if you seek her monument, as Sir Christopher Wren once famously stated, “look around you”.

Nothing is the same. She was not interested in spin doctors, focus groups, think tanks, legions of special advisers or even the nasty things the papers said about her. She had a job to do and she would do it come what may. There is a certain courage here also.  But if we still have difficulty in recognising her greatness then we have to cast our eyes around the world. All of its leaders are in awe of her achievements. They know a colossus when they see one. They were not distracted by the smoke and din of battle as we were here at home. They could see more clearly where she was headed. Their universal opinion was that Great Britain was a more respected nation than it had been at the start of her reign. Flags flew in many countries at half mast when her death was announced and most of all across the broad expanses of North America. There her name, alongside Ronald Reagan, is revered – as it is too across Eastern Europe, as the liberator from Communism. It was she who brought Gorbachev in from the cold and told her friend, the president, “this is a man we can do business with”. Together, their steely resolve and willingness to do whatever it took, brought the Cold War to a triumphant end. It might justly be said that had she accomplished nothing else, that alone would stand as a fitting testament.

Finally there is the no small matter of a grocer’s daughter – a woman – scaling the heights of a man’s world to achieve the highest office in the land.  Women everywhere, and that encompasses the whole world, owe it to her that she has for all time proved – with her competence, drive, bravery and vision – that women are truly the equal of men and that there is no office of state that they cannot handle. In the great scheme of things I do believe that history will place her before Churchill – who, after all, was born to privilege – as our greatest 20th century premier.

Ethnic minorities are over-exposed by the BBC. Black, asian and homosexual groupings individually represent relatively small minorities in the United Kingdom as a whole, although they are often congregated in particular areas. The BBC seems to promote them as equal in size and relevance to the vast majority of the actual population.

The representation of homosexuals on screen and on the radio both in presenting and performing is way in excess of their percentage of the population. Before the cheerleaders of this particular group start screeching homophobia at me, I am perfectly happy with their existence and their right to live in the way that they choose. Quite a few of my friends etc etc. What I resent is the way in which their opinions and way of life is portrayed as perfectly normal while the rest of us are, somehow, out of step. And I do really dislike their efforts to remove husband and wife from heterosexual marriage. Perhaps it is time that a crime of HETEROphobia was introduced.

‘EastEnders’ rightly portrays many black and Asian characters because that is generally what life is like in the east end of London. And it is encouraging to see specifically Asian comedies easing their way into mainstream television. Diversity in this country is a welcome development and adds richness to our cultural and sporting life. Long may it be so and the day cannot come too son when we refer to footballers without adding a ‘black’ prefix. They are all footballers of exceptional talent that play in the Premier League ( I may have a little doubt here as a lifelong supporter of QPR !).

The BBC would do well to keep in mind that great swathes of the United Kingdom are virtually without any representation of some of the minorities mentioned above, so it is difficult to understand why they are so disproportionately represented on the BBC.

Anyway, I digress Mr Entwhistle. It is in BBC News that the organisation’s strong left-wing bias is most apparent. Just the other day (Friday October 19th), the BBC promoted the left-wing agenda so blatantly that I had to switch to ITV for a better representation of this country.

BBC News led its national and (my) regional bulletins on the union march involving Ed Milliband, puffing up its importance with phrases like ‘more than 100,000′people present and conspicuously not offering a balancing viewpoint from a Government minister noting how well the economy is beginning to perform after Labour wrecked it over 13 years. It was all about Milliband and his paymasters.

What a contrast on ITV. The national news led on the carnage in Cardiff caused by a motorist running people down and had the charging of a man organising the firework display that caused so many deaths on the M5 as its second item. The great left-wing hypocrisy march, led by union barons earning hundreds of thousands of pounds and distorting the truth about the economy, was only third, noting ‘tens of thousands’ rather than the BBC’s hyperbole and including a balancing piece by a Government minister.

ITV’s regional news placed the march’s local elements in fifth place in its bulletin. I would say ITV got it about right and the BBC exposed itself as a mouthpiece for the left-wing, pseudo-intellectual minority. The BBC seems obsessed with aligning itself closely with the Guardian and the Observer in biased reporting.

A short time ago most other news outlets greeted the latest employment statistics with the angle that employment in this country is at a record high – one of the encouraging things about how the economy is beginning to move slowly forward after 13 years of Labour disastrously throwing borrowed money at their supporters. How did BBC News see this piece of news? UNEMPLOYMENT had dropped a little while employment had risen, although it was mostly part-time work (which, of course doesn’t count when you wish to give a particular impression in a news story).

Throughout the recent issue of toughening up school exam grades, BBC News relentlessly promoted the view of the militant teaching unions and never once, to my viewing, presented a more balanced view that such moves were rightly a step towards improving the education standards in this country, which fell from eighth in the world to TWENTY-EIGHTH during Mr Balls’ tenure at the DoE, despite his squandering £70 billion in the process of trying to award degrees to every child in the country.

The BBC claims, with some justification, that it has the best news-gathering organisation in the world. Why then does the BBC not use it to present the best news programmes in the world ? There are too many empires built around individual programmes in BBC News. The only thing they share is this Guardian-obsessed bias.

BBC News should be organised like a newspaper with national and local news integrated with the best stories reaching the top of the agenda. The feature pages like Newsnight, Daily Politics, Andrew Marr, and the Today show (among others) plus the genre editors’ contributions find their place along with sport, now bizarrely centred in Salford (Alex Ferguson for Director of Sport ?). At the moment even the five, six and ten o’clock news are quite separate empires with Huw Edwards rated the number one news-reader when George Alagiah is patently the best news-reader. It’s a bureaucratic shambles, exemplified by the frequent use of mobile phones to provide third-rate pictures and reports. Whatever happened to camera crews ?

BBC News 24 is pathetic. It’s really BBC News 14 (between 8.30am and 10.30pm). When many people would like to see hard news – e.g. early in the morning – they get the truly awful, mumsy, twinset-and-pearls ‘Breakfast’ show until 8.30am. Has the BBC not heard of night shifts for journalists and presenters ? Stick that cuddly crap on BBC One and give news fans a proper programme. (And shift those signers during the main news bulletins to the Red Button – why does the majority have to put up with a person hogging half the picture and flapping their hands about for the sake of a minority of unfortunate deaf people who could easily flick over to the red button, instead of forcing the majority to find a complete news picture elsewhere ?)

If the BBC resources for news-gathering are so wonderful, then there should be a constant 24-hour supply of news, national, regional and international so that News 24 doesn’t have to endlessly re-run the same clips of film over and over again during a report. A talking head is quite acceptable, especially instead of out-of-focus mobile phone footage. And it is simply lazy to go ‘live’ for long periods of the day on one story when there is clearly no news update to add to a decent, concise report.

BBC News Online is clearly a 10-5 operation and is similarly lazy. The Business, Health, and Politics etc sections sit there for up to 36 hours and are only slowly refreshed. The UK and Local News slots are almost exclusively emergency services reports on crime, accidents and fires, spoon-fed by the relevant authorities. Isn’t there any other news in the country, gathered by this awesome news organisation ? It’s just lazy and editorially weak as well as biased.

You have a lot of work to do Mr Entwhistle, always assuming you survive the Jimmy Savile saga, and I don’t envy you your task. Similarly I don’t expect you, as a career BBC man, to do much about it because the bias is deeply institutionalised in the BBC.

I am a fervent supporter of public service television (imagine Sky replacing it !) but it’s time you moved the BBC firmly away from its left-wing agenda and back to Lord Reith’s original mantra for the Corporation – information, education and entertainment (not to mention strict neutrality).

One way that his could be achieved would be if people could only donate, on an annual basis, for candidates in the constituency in which they were registered to vote.

This would be achieved, because political candidates have to submit a return on electoral expenses, which is, itself, capped.

The returns, for electorl expenditure, are available for public scrutiny and candidates can be convicted of electoral fraud, if a defeated opponent, or newspaper, can find proof of it. (Not police as they are being privatised, in a particular way)

MP’s contributing to party funds is already taken care of in terms of shared expenses. These have to be legitimate (fair market price) costings, or the whole party becomes liable to criminal prosecution.

It could also be used to counter the problem of Union Barons.

Unions could still raise a political levy but such funds would have to be earmarked for the appropriate candidate, with excess funding being returned, or with permission, being used for Union advertising of their wishes:

Unions could put up posters such as “We support Labour to re-nationalise the NHS”

Goldman-Sachs could put up posters saying “We support The Conservative and Unionist Party to reduce taxes on bankers”

No need for State funding,

No need for lavish, party political broadcasts, pushing the two party system.

No need for lobbyists running the country.

Best it would put party hacks and “parachuted in” candidates on a level with local independents.

As for Union Baron problem