This Margaret Thatcher fact tells you all you need to know about her greatness

Next Monday marks a momentous occasion: the 100th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher's birth. Say what you like about her (and many have) but she was a momentous politician, towering above the rest like a mountain above a field, and she has not, to this day, been matched. The current Conservative leader might feel, with justification, that she is subject to both sexism and racism, but her battles to get there were as nothing to what the Iron Lady had to do.

I was in my teens when Mrs T became the Tory Party leader and I remember, on the eve of the 1979 election, having a talk with my mother and we agreed that because of Maggie's slightly hectoring personality, the Tories would lose. It would be very sad for her. Never have I been so glad to be proven wrong.

We didn't know it then, but she went on to rescue this country from what was openly being spoken of as "managed decline." She reinvigorated it, restored our pride, and made it acceptable to wish to be a successful entrepreneur.

It is often said Maggie didn't do anything for women as she refused to call herself a feminist: never has an untruer word been spoken.

The Blessed Margaret (as I referred to her in a speech at university when debating opposite her daughter Carol, story for another time) did more for women than any other female in my lifetime.

She didn't spout drivel about male privilege or demand special treatment: she got out there, wiped the floor with her opponents and proved she had more cojones than any man in her cabinet. Or anywhere.

And she did so in the face of constant sneering and sniping about her lower-middle class background as the "grocer's daughter", with wine-sodden hasbeens from her own party opining they couldn't possibly work for a woman. Heavens above.

The fact no one can remember their names and no one will ever forget hers says it all. In some ways she was such a hard act to follow, especially for future female leaders, the fact that Kemi & Co are not reincarnations of Mrs T, has made it harder for them.

But if Kemi does manage to make that breakthrough and lead the Conservative Party to greatness (it looks a little unlikely, but you never know) then she really will have proved a worthy heir.

Yet another characteristic that Maggie was mocked for was running the country as a prudent housewife would do her household. Couldn't we just do with some of that now?

Labour is dragging us towards financial catastrophe, throwing money that we do not have around with all the recklessness of a drunken gambling addict at a casino. Where will it all end?

After the last election I predicted, in these pages, that we'd end up begging for an emergency loan from the IMF. It happened before, under the very Labour government that laid the grounds for the emergence of the Iron Lady. Let us hope, and pray, that the same outcome happens again.