The modern Conservative party is the party Margaret Thatcher built. She took it to power, changed its ideas, built its two decades of domination, made it seem to be the only party of government. In at the beginning, this week she set her seal upon its end. This symmetry is only right.
Forces of nature destroy as much as they build, and the baroness remains a force of nature.
She owed it to her ungovernable character to hammer the last nail into the coffin of her creation. The evidence of her unique capacity for destruction was in Tuesday's Tory press conference. It had been designed to introduce Europe into the campaign on William Hague's terms. He and Michael Portillo produced a draft European Commission document proving to their satisfaction that Labour ministers were the secret architects of a plan for EU-wide tax harmonisation. It would have been a speculative piece of scare-mongering at the best of times.