Stephen Pollard

issue isn’t about whether she is now dead, I regret for the sake of millions of people that she was ever born.”

The same sentiment was expressed by Mark Steel, one of those Left-wing comedians beloved of the BBC who has never been known to have made anyone laugh. He tweeted: “What a terrible shame that it wasn’t 87 years earlier.”

On and on it went, such as Colchester Labour councillor Tina Bourne posting a photo of a bottle of Bollinger with the words: “Chin chin everyone.”

They all had one thing in common of course: they lost.

In her time as PM, Baroness Thatcher won every argument, changing Britain and destroying the soggy Left consensus that had taken Britain to dire straits in the 1970s.

Three times – in 1979, 1983 and 1987 – the Left tried to beat Baroness Thatcher. And three times they were swatted away as she won landslides.

The abuse was all they could manage in response. As Lord Powell pointed out in his letter: “I fear that, because the Left know that they cannot defeat you on substance, they will only redouble their abuse over the next few years.”

There is an important lesson for us today in all this.

On one level this same hardLeft is now triumphant within the Labour Party personified by the likes of shadow chancellor John McDonnell who in 2010 said he would like to travel back in time and kill Baroness Thatcher. Last year he repeated the wish, saying there was “massive support” when he spoke in 2010 for murdering the former prime minister.

Sitting in the audience as he spoke was his fellow Corbynite shadow education secretary Angela Rayner who could be seen laughing her head off at the sick comments.

This is the mindset of the people now running Labour. Triumphant as they certainly are within the Labour Party, it sometimes seems the hard-Left is intellectually ascendant as well.

SINCE the election in June the Tories have run around like headless chickens, convinced that Labour is sweeping to power and the electorate has suddenly embraced its hard-Left agenda.

But Lord Powell’s insight is worth thinking about.

Shattered as the Tories’ intellectual confidence may be, the non-stop abuse by the hard-Left against anyone who opposes them betrays a deep flaw. They simply do not have the intellectual tools to win a battle of ideas.

Politically they may be having a moment but the fundamental problems with the hardLeft’s agenda remain.

During the last election there were widespread reports about intimidation by supporters of Jeremy Corbyn. Some was physical – Tory posters vandalised, for example – but much of it was and remains online.

And we saw at this year’s Labour conference where this can lead, with Laura Kuenssberg, the BBC’s political editor, requiring personal security protection against Left-wing thugs. I have seen for myself that when you post something critical of the Corbynites on social media they pounce, swamping you with abuse.

I take strength from it, knowing that it shows they can’t win the arguments.

And although it’s a depressing thought that Baroness Thatcher should have had to put up with such behaviour, you can bet that that’s how she took it too: as a sign that she was winning.

‘Corbynites have targeted opponents’