It is all the more remarkable since, at least in economics, she laid down a set of rules to which every serious modern politician now conforms. Indeed, that is just what lies behind the - for Conservatives - cruel irony that it is a Labour Prime Minister, rather than a Tory leader, who can effortlessly invoke this illustrious ghost for his own purposes. Mr Blair can, of course, pick and choose the parts he likes: strong national leader, international beacon, union-tamer, privatiser of the nationalised industries, while eschewing those he doesn't: tribalist, social divider, laissez-faire individualist. The ease with which he does exactly that serves only to mock the Tories' chronic hang-up with their electorally and ideologically most successful leader this century. This is particularly so since, on the one peacetime issue on which she is most adamant - the euro - Mr Hague is on her side and Mr Blair isn't.So why can't William Hague come to terms with his party's past? Why is so much of his energy devoted to devising a story about its relationship to the last leader but one, that will pass muster in explaining what modern Toryism really is?The answer can only lie in the brutal regicide perpetrated more than nine years ago but still traumatising the party.

The minority who were then genuinely and fearlessly confident that it was high time she went, have no difficulty in talking about her now in tones of respect. But, for the majority of the party, it is as if in childhood they had witnessed an unspeakable murder with which they are still either complicit or enraged, depending on how they voted then.How appropriate, therefore, that Peter Lilley should now be the man being fitted up by the right wing for execution for daring to suggest that dismantling the core public services of education and health may not be the best starting- point from which to rebuild the credibility of a party brought to its knees on 1 May 1997 by an opposition committed to renewing those very services? For Lilley was always seen as a Judas in the Thatcherites' midst, the one hitherto true disciple who deserted her in her hour of need by telling her the dumbfounding news that he, too, thought she could not win a second leadership election in November 1990. He may have been on a hit list for longer than he realises.This isn't to say that psychic trauma is the only reason for the downward spiral into which the Tory party now appears hell-bent on hurling itself. There were two problems with the Lilley lecture, the principal content of which was stoutly defended by William Hague in his speech on Wednesday night, for all the nervous passages of obeisance to Lady Thatcher The first was tactical For this, practically everybody is getting the blame.

Some point to the fact that the party's chief of staff, Archie Norman, was absorbed by the merger of his company, Asda, with Kingfisher, and thus absent from the fray.Others ask, with lethal force, what on earth Sebastian Coe, Mr Hague's chief of staff, has been doing. But whoever is to blame, a big statement of policy was to be made which apparently cut directly across the kind of hints that, say, Ann Widdecombe has been issuing, about an expanding private health sector. It should have been cleared by, or at least discussed with, the Shadow Cabinet first.It was not smart to bill a speech as breaking with Thatcherism at the time of an anniversary dinner to mark her victory in 1979. And finally, while Francis Maude has been busily distancing himself from Mr Lilley, his own robust reaffirmation of the Tory pledge to match Labour spending on the NHS, however admirable, is tactically problematic. If the Tories are sticking by Labour's spending totals, how do they propose to pay for them other than through the "stealth taxes" which they routinely accuse Mr Brown of imposing?The second problem, however, is more profound.