As a nation, do we want more 'conviction politicians'?

In case you’ve been living on Mars (or down a coal mine), former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher died this week after a long illness.

She was 87. Every corner of Westminster and Fleet Street has rung out with the condolences, anecdotes and opinions marking the occasion and despite calls for respectful, bleached eulogies, there has been a distinctive tone of for or against.

This should surprise nobody. Thatcher was a politician who polarised opinion; winning three elections on a hard Right agenda, whilst calling dictators such as Augusto Pinochet her friend. That her death provoked street parties is disappointing, but little more.

Actually, I can see a similar phenomenon should Tony Blair perish in the next 18 months or so -  but not in 20 years' time. The entrenched hatred of Blair comes from a different place - not only by those calling him a war criminal (a criticism not thrown at Thatcher) but from old Labour purists who saw him drag his party to the centre - a position in which it has remained.

But with Gordon Brown’s innocuous premiership, even Blair’s reign seems like another generation now. We are in the Cameron era - which will likely last another term -  and it is a period of more gentle politics.

Like many others, I am profoundly alarmed by many of Cameron’s policies, but one is hard pressed to find anywhere the vitriolic hostility people still feel for Thatcher. We’re too apathetic.

Furthermore, the amount of dirt thrown at George Osborne is actually a good example of how the conversation has moved away from crazed hatred. Despite being an undeniable posho, Osborne is managing to steer a consistent path in his role as Chancellor. Events such as the Olympic booing are comical at worst. They don’t draw the same kind of emotional backlash as, say, the miners' strike.

Actually, of the current political class, there are really only two whom I have heard derided and celebrated with true bloody minded polarity. The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, is one such politician.

The Right love him because he is charming, and the Left loathe him because ... he is charming.

Thus the reasoning behind the hatred of Margaret Thatcher is profoundly different. Thatcher was hated because of her perceived inhumanity - in dealing with national industry and trade unions.

But people hate Johnson because he’s seen as a trickster - as a wolf in sheep’s clothing who obfuscates ambition behind a facade of whimsy. Similarly, I have gone on record in the past describing how I am not convinced by this, http://uk.news.yahoo.com/comment/dont-panic/boris-johnson--serious-politician-or-glorified-after-dinner-speaker-.html#hE1UDfi and it pleased me no end when Eddie Mair’s interview tore aside this mask on BBC1. That he is not an MP seems a matter of time.

The second is Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg. Roundly hated by puritan Lib Dems (if that is not a paradox), Clegg epitomises a Blairite breed of manifesto-abandoning gun-for-hire politics; near impossible to pin down on points of principle aside from the right to have them.

I’ve actually got a lot of sympathy for Nick Clegg. In opposition the Lib Dems espoused morally accurate if practically dubious policies that made the two big parties look like advertising sales executives at a trade conference. The Lib Dems carved out an attractive nook for themselves in principled gradualist socialism - Fabianism, if you will.

But were we too soon to think of their role of coalition king-makers as an ‘opportunity’? Under Blair, New Labour had usurped the Lib Dems in the centre and forced them to the Left. Because of this, there is a comprehensive log-jam with the policies of Cameron’s party, and it has wrecked Clegg’s credibility, and cannibalised his party.

Do we want more ‘conviction politicians’? These are the Thatcher-esque leaders, prone to annihilating their own Cabinets in order to entrench power. I don’t know. I do think that people respect them more on balance, but trust them less.

In the meantime I guess we’ll have to make do with what we’ve got. Let’s not misinterpret the street parties, by the way - you’d be hard pressed to find someone at a street party who hasn't thought hard about who Thatcher was and what she did. Everyone in this country has a bloody-minded respect for Thatcher, even if they hated her. She had one quality during her premiership that every politician since early Athens wants. She was relevant.