What on earth is happening in British politics that, on the same day, Margaret Thatcher, the heroine of right wing Toryism, lambasts her successor, John Major, and the leader of the opposition, Tony Blair, praises Lady Thatcher's commitment and some of her achievement in a Daily Telegraph article? Mr Blair is only partly engaged in an exercise of booting the present prime minister and rubbing his nose in the legacy of discord inherited from his predecessor. He also acknowledges the widespread popular appeal of Thatcherism, in its aspirations at least, and claims that he will get it back on course with his vision of a "stake holder society" and correct its errors, notably the way that it has undermined One Nation policies.
There is an element of risk in his strategy, but with New Labour riding high in the opinion polls, and the Conservatives in apparently terminal decline, Mr Blair can be reasonably confident that even his most doctrinaire party critics will hold their fire until after the general election. Trade union reform, lowering grossly high tax rates and expanding higher education are all part of the Thatcher programme that he says were necessary and will not be changed; now management and workers need to co operate, taxes need to be reduced at the bottom of the scale as well, and education must be made a life long experience.
All this may have more than a tinge of opportunism, but it is interesting to compare Mr Blair as the prophet of continuity with the genuine exponent of Thatcherism when she extrapolates from her own period of office to create the baseline against which she judges Mr Major, and implicitly condemns him. Lady Thatcher's motives in her first substantial political speech since she was voted out of office five years ago, are either to be explained in terms of petty malice and egotism, or alternatively interpreted as a world vision and view of society that have run out of control and no longer have any contact with reality. Whichever is true, she has delivered a body blow to Mr Major.
Few prime ministers or Taoisigh for that matter have had to be as aware as Mr Major of the immense shadow of their predecessor looming behind them, or of the moral support still derived by party rivals. Lady Thatcher's explicit instruction to the prime minister (for that is how it reads) to resist "these damaging and dangerous proposals" on European defence and the single currency at the Inter governmental Council later this year, may help Tory MPs who think like Miss Emma Nicholson - who left the parliamentary party two weeks ago to join the Liberal Democrats to decide whether they can continue to sit on the fence. But it will do nothing to strengthen Mr Major's authority in Europe or at home.
This can only deepen the uncertainty surrounding issues, apart from European construction, in which we have a common interest with Britain most particularly the political process in the North. Much of the initial fumbling in British policy on the question of decommissioning and the subsequent inflexibility as the situation developed into confrontation can be ascribed to the political straitjacket in which Mr Major, with his dwindling majority in the House of Commons, has had to live. With Lady Thatcher apparently accepting that the only available strategy is to burn the stockade and retreat into the mountains to regroup, it will require an extraordinary display of Mr Major's acknowledged tenacity for any significant progress to be made before the general election.