On Monday Andy Burnham will be called to Buckingham Palace and asked to form a Government after a stunning coup which saw him seize control of the Government. He will then walk into Downing Street having been effectively crowned as our next Prime Minister, utterly unimpeded by internal debate, scrutiny, or a public vote.

On many subjects Andy has been coy about his designs, but there is one he has never attempted to hide: to reverse the legacy of Margaret Thatcher. Our next Prime Minister has worn his dislike of Mrs T proudly on his chest. At hustings events in the Makerfield by-election he clucked his displeasure of the Iron Lady to a chorus of seal-like applause by youthful supplicants of his cause.

‘We must never forget what Mrs T inherited’

Like many socialist politicians, he wrongly believes the cost of living crisis and many other great ills afflicting our country spring from the privatisation and enterprise of the 1980s.

In his telling, the medicine that saved this country was in fact the poison.

In a different life, I have no doubt the very aspiration Andy would have been barking his praise of his betters.

If it was politically expedient to lavish good wishes on Thatcherism, our popularity seeking premier would have done so.

Labour leaders, lacking perhaps in their own political heavyweights of late, have long tried to flaunt a bit of begrudging respect for the lady who outshone them all – but not our Andy.

Every serious Labour leader of the modern age understood that you did not win Britain by spitting on the woman who rescued it.

He may well be the first to try, which says everything we need to know about the ghetto of resentment from which he now governs.

We must never forget what Mrs T inherited. A broken, humiliated nation shivering through the Winter of Discontent.

Rubbish was left to rot in the streets and the dead left unburied. Inflation consumed the wages of the worker and the trade unions held this country to ransom

But then came the grocer’s daughter from Grantham, and everything changed.

Under he stewardship inflation was tamed and the stranglehold of militant unions was broken.

Next she gave confidence and pride to many, selling them their own council homes and handing them the dignity of owning their own front door.

‘Margaret Thatcher dragged this country up from its knees’

She let working people keep more of what they earned and she turned a nation of the governed back into a nation of owners, savers and strivers.

Under her Britain was at her best, a confident, enterprising and proud country that believed effort should be rewarded, and that hard work should pay.

Make no mistake it is that unbridled spirit that Andy now seeks to take. It is his intention to finish the demolition job begun by Blair and continued by the managed decline of recent years.

If he truly intends to unpick her legacy, then he would seek to expand the state, grow the already ruinously high spending bill, and truncate our country’s enterprises under the whip of the union bosses.

A Britain where Whitehall knows best and the citizen is reduced once more to a supplicant is not one that is mighty.

Express readers have seen where that road leads, because we have walked it before.

It ends in a country reduced: bankrupt, becalmed and ashamed.

Mr Burnham calls the last 40 years a wrong turning. In truth, the wrong turning is the one he now invites us to take.

Margaret Thatcher dragged this country up from its knees. It would be a tragedy beyond words to let Andy Burnham put it back on them.