Imagine if Maggie Thatcher was still the leader of the Conservative party...
She would no doubt have provoked the same kind of polarisation of opinions that Boris does, but she wouldn't be ducking out of media interviews with Andrew Neill or hiding in a fridge to avoid Good Morning Britain.
She wouldn't be reeling out repetitive banal 'lines to take' (not just a Boris problem btw, they all do it these days). She would have done all the interviews and used them to tell the public what her vision of Britain would be, including the bits that would be controversial.
A few months back I stumbled on to an old Thatcher interview with BBC World Service where she did a question and answer with listeners from the Soviet Union. I am by no means a Thatcherite. But I was blown away by the eloquence and sincerity of her answers on all sorts of topics, to listeners from behind the Iron Curtain at a time when the Cold War was still on. There were no 'political lines', just an ideological argument for her belief in free markets, with genuine respect for the questioners. A completely different world from what you get today.
