Margaret Thatcher gets blamed for a lot of things. The destruction of great swathes of British industry. The growth of the ‘me’ society. The decline of the fabric of British cities. But the BBC’s Hugh Sykes tonight added another charge to the list. Sykes said on Radio 5 Live’s Drive programme that some people blamed her, along with the first President Bush, for failing to protect Iraq’s Kurdish people at the end of 1991 Gulf War.

I’m not usually the first person to leap to the iron lady’s defence. But in this case she has a cast iron alibi. She was ousted from office the previous year….  John Major was the man in Number 10 at the time.