"The lady is not for turning. Margaret Thatcher's words to her own party, in moments of vacillation about the political course, are an accurate portrayal of her personality. Reliability, consistency; firmness bordering on obstinacy, integrity. In the political world of her time, and ours, a rather exceptional phenomenon.

Thatcher deeply divided the spirits of her time and is doing so again with her death. The traditional maxim of mortuis nil nisi bonum (do not speak ill of the dead) does not apply to her. Nor discretion or nuance: the most ardent eulogies go hand in hand with the most forceful disqualifications.

She looks like a re-enactment of the Cid Campeador who, according to legend, rode in death to fight the Moors. The conservative Daily Mail spoke of her on the front page as the savior of Britain. Neil Kinnock, former leader of the Labour Party, described it as an "absolute disaster".

I remember an Oxford colleague, a Catholic and therefore a Labour voter, describing her as a manic-depressive who had no known depressive phases. Chris Patten, who was a minister under her and now chairs the BBC, explained that "it is impossible to be agnostic about Thatcher's stuff".

Ideological biases aside, her figure stands out for more than one reason: a woman who knew how to reach the top in a profoundly sexist world (something that feminism has never been able to recognize); a head of government who received a country plunged into a deep crisis and applied brutal surgery with a firm hand to pull it out of the abyss.

No one in the West had the courage to break the omnipotent power of the trade unions. Just these days the British Government has declassified the papers relating to the Falklands War, and we have been able to see how it was she who had to impose herself on her own cabinet and her party to declare and win the war against Argentina.

Opinions differ, depending on ideological affiliation, when judging her economic policy. In a Europe with a rather social democratic mentality, where political and social protagonism is left in the hands of the State, Thatcher-style liberalism is viewed with suspicion. It is not easy to assess what a different policy would have yielded; we would be moving in the realm of political fiction.

I would like to highlight a trait that I dare to propose as an example for our current political class , ideologies aside: consistency between what is said and what is done; reliability, regardless of the ups and downs of public opinion and changeable circumstances. With Thatcher we always knew where we stood.

Our current politicians seem to be chameleons, constantly listening to popular sentiment and always moving closer to the majority opinion. What a difference between Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel, whom some would like to portray as today's Thatcher!

After eight years at the head of the German government, it is impossible to show the political statement of core values of Merkel, champion of dazzling metamorphoses as long as they help to maintain power.

A certain dose of opportunism is essential to make degree program, but in many cases there is nothing more than cynicism in so many sinuous trajectories. Party programs and government policies change, sometimes to become their opposite, without difficulty and without explanation, as if the electorate were a minor and could not understand the arcana of high politics.

Chesterton defined commitment as a quotation with oneself in the future. I feel in control of myself - freedom understood as self-possession manager - and I know that I will meet on the appointed day at the appointed place. Others can count on me. In a world where the idea of commitment is becoming a foreign body, examples like Margaret Thatcher's show something of the best of being human.

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