AT LEAST MR. HATTON IS ACKNOWLEDGING THE POINT OF THE PROCEDURE:

She's hailed as this country's saviour. So why, 30 years on, do the Left still hate Maggie so? (A N Wilson, 15th January 2009, Daily Mail)

Want to know what Britain would be like if ruled by extreme Left-wingers? Then you would only have had to visit Liverpool while Derek Hatton was deputy leader of Liverpool City Council in the early Eighties.

He was expelled from the Labour Party as a member of Militant Tendency, but not before turning Liverpool, once the proud port of the mightiest empire in the world, into a bankrupted, slum-ridden, crimeridden dump.

And Margaret Thatcher? Well, ask any working-class person who, during her premiership, was suddenly able to buy their own council house.

Ask the liberated people of the Falkland Islands. Ask the peoples of Eastern Europe. They would say she was undoubtedly the greatest political leader Britain had after Winston Churchill.

Yet Hatton has delivered a verdict on Margaret Thatcher which reflects his own repulsive character far more than it tells us anything about her.

'The only problem I've got with her, with her mother, is that she never believed in abortion . . . It's a shame she was born,' he told a newspaper in Cyprus.