Thatcher the way they like it

It's little surprise that with such an agenda, both the Confederation of British Industry - Britain's main employers' organisation - and the British Chamber of Commerce, have rallied to the New Labour cause.

On foreign policy, too, New Labour has plotted an uncompromisingly Thatcherite path, taking the Iron Lady's Atlanticism to new and, some would say, absurd lengths by joining in with an illegal, unpopular and costly invasion of a country that posed no threat to Britain.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives, faced with a Labour Party that has unashamedly stolen most of its clothes, have been left in political no-man's land. Unable and unwilling to outflank Labour on the Left, the party has been forced to place an exaggerated importance on those areas where differences still exist, and in doing so has made it all too easy for Labour and its allies in the media to dismiss them as scaremongering obsessives.

On Iraq, the issue over which Labour is arguably at its most vulnerable, the Conservatives' attempts at point-scoring have come across for what they are - the opportunism of an increasingly desperate party.

Labour, meanwhile, after years of demonising the woman who defeated it in three consecutive elections from 1979 to 1987, is now less reticent about claiming the Thatcherite legacy as its own.

In a recent press conference on business policies, Brown claimed Thatcher would be "appalled" at today's Tory pledge to spend more, tax less and borrow less. The central message of the Conservative Party throughout the 1980s was, according to Brown, its competence on the economy - and Labour was now the party that would entrench the hard-won economic stability.

"Lady Thatcher's Tory Party used to run the economy", added Trade and Industry Minister Patricia Hewitt. "Mr [Michael] Howard's Tory Party runs away from it."

To the time traveller from the mid-'70s, politics in Britain today would seem incomprehensible. And it's all down to a lady with a handbag.