I THINK I reacted exactly the way I was supposed to last week when a Tory MP suggested that we should have a national Margaret Thatcher Day. I started cussing and swearing and giving it “that-bloody-woman” all over the shop. Which means, if I understand the concept right, I was suitably “owned”.

Sometimes it feels like “owning the libs” is the main policy platform of this Westminster government. Drop the word “woke” and “remoaner” the odd time, grab a few headlines, watch the predictable reaction and hope that people forget that your actual governance of the country is a clusterfudge of blundering malice (and that’s me being polite). It’s Trumpian in its crude but effective divisiveness.

Thatcher’s memory is inevitably in the air as we reach the 40th anniversary of the Falklands War. That war did more to politicise me than anything else in my teenage years. That line by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges line – “two bald men fighting over a comb” felt so apposite at the time.

On reflection, though, the war, as pointless and unnecessary as it was, did hasten the end of Argentina’s military junta, one of the most heinous regimes in South American history (and there have been a few; some of them supported, of course, by Mrs T). As such, the war and its consequences offer a simple lesson in complexity.

But we’re not very good at complexity in our political discourse these days. Social media has emboldened the simplistic hot take and we’re stuck in a culture that is constantly shouting opinions rather than listening and responding to arguments.

As should be clear from the top of the column, I can shout as loud as anyone. But I’m not sure it’s a strategy for governing a country.

And in many ways this culture war shtick that the government is obsessed with is a sign of its weakness not its strength. This is a government that has to pick fights with the “libs” because it has nothing else. It promotes policies (the selling off of Channel 4 being a prime example) to play to its base. And that increasingly seems to be the only idea that it has.

The other irony of the last couple of years is that Thatcher was someone who wrecked lives and communities because she was effective in delivering her destructive policies, ie, she was good at her job (however horrifying the consequences often were). What gets clearer day by day is that Boris Johnson’s government are absolutely hopeless at theirs. A shower of overpromoted mediocrities, they seem incapable of doing anything right. It’s not just that they couldn’t organise a p***-up in a brewery, it’s that they’d have booked a Women’s institute coffee morning by mistake.

There’s a bright side to that. I’m presuming that I will not be still around in 2062, but if I am, I’m pretty certain I’ll not be cussing and swearing about the idea of a National Boris Johnson Day. Because surely no one would be stupid enough to suggest it.