But if Margaret Thatcher was a radical moderniser, she was also a pragmatist. She recognised that the Ted Heath approach to trade union reform - frontal assault followed by humiliating retreat - was no good.
Instead she played a long game, literally stockpiling coal so that the country could withstand a long miners' strike. She cut back union power piece by piece, ensuring the slow death of the hard left.
The
same approach
characterised all the great achievements we associate with Thatcherism. Privatisation was not the centre-piece of the 1979 manifesto: it evolved gradually from the first successful experiment with selling the government's shares in BP. Full-scale denationalisation followed as a response to the growing demand for market pluralism and public share ownership.
Today we know what Thatcherism meant for our country - victory in the Cold War, victory against unbridled trade union power, the sale of council houses, the liberation of the British economy. Yet all of this was achieved gradually, by a government that knew it had to take public opinion along with it if real and lasting change was to be made.
That change was made. Margaret Thatcher is a fitting recipient of the Morgan Stanley Great Britons award, when we judge greatness as it should be judged: the scale of the legacy. She made the landscape in which we live today.
But today's circumstances are different. We still have major economic challenges ahead, largely conditioned by a decade of debt, and the failure by Gordon Brown to keep the roof in repair while the sun shone.
But the most fundamental long-term challenge we face is not the broken economy inherited by Margaret Thatcher in 1979, but our broken society, the consequence of years of failed state planning and the denial of social responsibility. Britain has falling school standards, the worst rate of family breakdown in Europe and an endemic crime problem in our inner cities.
I draw inspiration from
Margaret Thatcher's record as a great moderniser and a great pragmatist.