A version of this article was originally published in last week’s issue of The Spectator.

What set Margaret Thatcher apart from so many other Conservatives in the 1970s was that she had read Friedrich von Hayek. In Richard Cockett’s Thinking the Unthinkable – his indispensable account of the intellectual origins of Thatcherism – he describes how Thatcher used to pull a copy of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty out of her handbag, declaring, ‘This is what we believe.