Pitied abroad, where Britain had been largely written off by other governments and the financial markets alike as the terminally sick man of Europe, we were mired in an all-pervasive defeatism at home. It was, to say the least, a daunting inheritance.

Yet under Margaret’s inspired leadership we were able to put in place the most radical change in economic policy since the war, and to save the nation both politically and economically, a success recognised throughout the world. It became known as Thatcherism.

Essentially, Thatcherism consisted of three interconnected principles, each of them a reversal of the post-war conventional wisdom. The first principle was that the recipe for economic success is the greatest practicable market freedom within an overall framework of financial discipline. By contrast, the approach that culminated in the disaster of the 1970s had in practice consisted in an ever-increasing erosion of market freedom, accompanied by the progressive abandonment of financial discipline.

The second principle was that, instead of seeking to use macro-economic policy — that is, monetary and fiscal policy — to promote growth and employment, and micro-economic policy (notably at that time prices and incomes policy) to suppress inflation, we should do precisely the reverse. That is to say, the government should direct macro-economic policy, pre-eminently monetary policy, to suppress inflation, and micro-economic (or supply-side) policy, such as tax reform, deregulation, labour market reform, privatisation and the promotion of competition, to provide the conditions most favourable to jobs and to growth.

In passing, some may have noticed the absence here of any reference to the negotiation of trade agreements. As a member of the European Community, as the European Union was then known, we were not free to do this. But that mattered very little indeed. What is essential on the trade front is the absence of global protectionism; and that is ensured by the WTO (formerly GATT) system. This has relevance to the road to Brexit, to which I will turn later.

So to the third principle, which was to set all this explicitly within a medium term context. The most obvious formal expression of this was the Medium Term Financial Strategy.

Note, incidentally, financial and not industrial strategy. Monetary and fiscal policy is the inescapable responsibility of government. By contrast, in a free economy, it is for business and industry to work out their strategic goals. The business of government is not the government of business.

But behind the MTFS lay a more profound reversal of the old post-war consensus, according to which the essence of economic policy was a largely vain quasi-Keynesian attempt to eradicate the vagaries of the business cycle (more vulgarly, boom and bust), about which policymakers can in reality do very little, and to focus instead on the conditions for improved economic performance over the longer term, about which history teaches us that a great deal can be done, even though it can take a while for the results to become apparent.