And yet he may be the next Prime Minister. He really might. I wonder what Lynton Crosby would then say as he boarded his 747 for Sydney. That the recovery came too late for people to give due recognition to the Tories’ achievement? That years of penny-pinching and making do had inevitably taken their toll? I daresay he would have all kinds of smooth arguments along these lines. It’s the economy, stupid. What I am practically certain of is that he wouldn’t admit David Cameron and the Tories had lost the election for want of moral courage. Or that they failed to convince voters as a result of being too focused on issues of economic competence.

I’ve just finished reading a fascinating new book by Eliza Filby called God and Mrs Thatcher (Biteback, £25). She argues persuasively that Margaret Thatcher was the most religious prime minister since William Gladstone. As a young woman she even preached to Methodist congregations. Her faith, formed as a child when she attended her father’s Wesleyan chapel in Grantham, underpinned everything she did. She sought a Christian justification for every political act, and puzzled constantly about Christian duty.

At the heart of her beliefs, which grew more sophisticated  but did not fundamentally change over the years, was the conviction that man is a spiritual being, and immeasurably more than just an economic animal. This is what she said in a lecture in 1977 while still leader of the Opposition: “Every human being is unique and must play his part in working out his own salvation. So whereas socialists begin with society, and how people can be fitted in, we [Conservatives] start with Man, whose social and economic relationship are just part of his wider existence. Because we see man as a spiritual being, we utterly reject the Marxist view, which gives pride of place to economics.”

Ironically, of course, Thatcher’s enemies accused her with some justice of doing the very thing for which she criticised socialists—putting economics first. Among her critics were Anglican bishops such as David Sheppard of Liverpool, a former England cricket captain, who believed that paying tax was a more moral undertaking than giving to charity, and even doubted whether it was possible to be a Christian and a Conservative. In 1985 he was one of the authors of the Church of England’s semi-socialist, and strikingly secular, critique, Faith in the City. Thatcher was outraged, as was the right-wing Press.

In fact, notwithstanding Tory harrumphing there’s absolutely no reason why the Church should not stand up for the poor and defenceless. Jesus certainly did. Where it tends to go wrong—both in 1985 and in a letter published by the Anglican bishops this February—is in making divisive party political points and betraying basic ignorance. In their latest epistle (the ostensible purpose of which is to guide people on how to vote) the bishops come close to advocating membership of the European Union and to suggesting that the Trident nuclear deterrent may have passed its sell-by date. They also appear to believe that unemployment has risen since 2010, as Labour predicted it would, whereas it has actually fallen by 600,000.

What Margaret Thatcher wanted to do in 1979 was to liberate people so that they could be responsible for their own lives.  The consequence, she believed, would be that successful people would assist the less fortunate—a kind of forerunner of David Cameron’s now shelved and mostly forgotten “Big Society”. She once reasonably pointed out that the Good Samaritan was only in a position to help because he had money in his pocket. As things turned out, though, the beneficiaries of her revolution did not always behave as they were supposed to. The greed and selfishness of City bankers came to grieve her. In a way she was too optimistic about human nature. Eliza Filby, who I suspect hails from the Left, suggests that her religiously-based project was undone by events. I would say that the jury is still deliberating.