Yes, the financial crash of 2008 is to a significant extent to blame for the fact that the national debt is now 90 per cent of GDP. But the trajectory under Tony Blair, whom Conservative MPs cheered at his last performance in the House of Commons as Prime Minister in 2007, was already upwards.

The spiritual and moral debt is even worse. I remember as a trade reporter in 1989 working for a small publishing company in Swanley, Kent, being told by the lady who ran the accounts' department that my monthly net pay cheque was going up due to the married man's tax allowance. It was not so much the financial boost that warmed the heart at the time but the sense that the institution I had just entered into was hallowed by wider society. Is there any sign that such practical political support for the institution of marriage will be resurrected under the politically-correct consensus that has gripped the governance of the UK?

Mrs Thatcher's hated Section 28 regulation, which forbid the promotion of homosexuality in schools and was later repealed under the new morality, was seen by many Conservatives at the time as an important protection against the proselytisation of children by the Jesuits of the permissive society.

The truth is that a person with Lady Thatcher's convictions would never be selected as a Conservative parliamentary candidate in the post-Blair world of politics. If they were by some mischance, then they would be rapidly de-selected by Central Office.

I did not know until I read her personal assistant's tribute in The Daily Mail that Mrs Thatcher had prayed at her hotel bedside for those bereaved by the IRA's Brighton bombing atrocity. Apparently, until her magnificent speech to the Church of Scotland in 1988, she was reluctant to give her Christian faith too high a public profile because of her support for some of the social measures introduced in the 1960s such as easier divorce and legalised abortion, which she knew were strongly opposed by many Christians.

As a conservative evangelical Anglican, I would respectfully suggest that she should have been more combative towards the permissive society. Norman Tebbit displayed no such reticence in denouncing the Heathite legacy of tacit Conservative support for moral permissiveness when he was a cabinet minister in the 1980s.

But, despite this, she protected and supported traditional Christian faith and morals in Britain in a way that no Prime Minister has done since. Her deliberate decision to appoint an evangelical Archbishop of Canterbury in George Carey was an important practical expression of that commitment. Now that he has been freed from the constaints of high Anglican office, her judgement about Dr Carey's underlying biblical convictions has proved sound.

More than 20 years after Mrs Thatcher was shamefully removed from office by a combination of political egotism and misguided Euro-enthusiasm, it is now commonplace on British television for the sacred person of the Lord Jesus Christ to be grossly insulted, as highlighted by Ann Widdecombe's recent BBC programme about comedy and Christianity - Are you having a laugh?

That is truly the scale of the spiritual and moral debt Britain has racheted up since the Conservative political establishment's disgraceful treatment of the last recognisably Christian Prime Minister in November 1990.

http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/390965/Touching-letter-to-a-schoolboy-that-shows-Margaret-Thatcher-had-a-warm-heart

Julian Mann is vicar of the Parish Church of the Ascension, Oughtibridge, South Yorkshire - www.oughtibridgechurch.org.uk