I am subtly torn here.<p>I am one of "Thatcher's children" having grown up in the late seventies and eighties. I clearly remember watching her enter Downing St and my mother telling me that things were going to get better now a woman was in charge.<p>She oversaw wrenching shifts in Britain's social and economic structures, was hated, respected, but rarely loved and kicked out without ceremony.<p>But my abiding memories are of <i>something</i> getting done. Rarely were there somethings that everyone agreed upon, rarely was it done well, but things were done. Thatcher had an agenda when she came to power. Her "success" over the Falklands enabled her to push that agenda - one of massive economic change. It seemed obvious and overdue to her and her main advisors that the semi-Keynesian establishment needed shaking up. And she and her band of, at the time, outsiders, did just that. Something happened. Something inevitable.<p>In the deadlocked worlds of politics I see in the UK and US, this is a trait that might be worth admiring.<p>But now in my own middle age, well, if I were PM now, my personal focus would be on the changes needed to deal with the Internet as the Central nervous system of humankind - issues of privacy, of government accessibility, of security of networks and national assets, of education policy. Those are my "Bleedin obvious" policy shifts. Things I would drive home ruthlessly, because not to do so would be like a time traveller knowing the all the days winning horses and still not betting.<p>So, to sum up, doing <i>something</i> in politics takes a special kind of ruthlessness. Sometimes we need to have people who will sacrifice others in order to make the inevitable happen now - there are many mining towns feeling the sacrifice to this day.<p>But we need now not to debate the issues of 1980, but to look at the next inevitable changes - and do our best to get ahead of them. Much of the Eurozone troubles are down to the countries missing a Thatcher, and having politicians who simply waited till the inevitable happened. Can anyone spot a politician who gets the needs of 2040?