Needless to say, since the days of that government, globalisation has continued apace and with it the (sometimes healthy, but sometimes unhealthy) development of the banking and financial services industry; and in the light of the current banking crisis there are important lessons to be learned and well-judged reforms to be introduced, both in the UK and around the world, about which I have written elsewhere.

But those who write gleefully of the failure of free-market capitalism, are unable to escape from two fundamental realities. The first is that the greatest single economic event of the past 25 years has been the unprecedented economic development and extraordinary success of much of the developing world - notably, but by no means exclusively, China. This has been made possible by the move towards a global market economy and by the current global financial system. And the second inescapable reality is that, for all the present system's undoubted flaws, every other method of economic organisation has proved to be infinitely worse.

So the history of the Thatcher government is highly unlikely to be just that, the history of a long-gone era. Indeed, since economic and political history are always better guides to public policy than economic and political theory, the story of that remarkable decade, with its great (although by no means unalloyed) successes in the face of great challenges, has important lessons for today.

Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Lawson: They transformed a grossly over-regulated economy into one that was imitated around the world (PA)