It’s sign of how large Margaret Thatcher still looms in Scotland that of all the things Keir Starmer and Anas Sarwar could disagree about, it’s Mrs Thatcher that does it. “She brought about meaningful change,” says Starmer. “She decimated Scotland,” says Sarwar. Guys, guys! Break it up. She’s not worth it.

So what did the two men say exactly? Writing in The Telegraph, Sir Keir said that Mrs Thatcher had tried to drag Britain out of its stupor by setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism. He also said later that you can divide leaders into the ones with a plan and the ones that drift and Mrs Thatcher, he said, had a driving sense of purpose.

Mr Sarwar wasn’t having any of it. Mrs Thatcher, he said, decimated Scotland and he made it clear he didn’t think the former PM had a good legacy in any part of the UK. Sir Keir, he said, was emphasising Mrs Thatcher’s sense of purpose rather than what she actually did.

To be fair to Mr Sarwar, that’s a pretty fair reading of Sir Keir’s remarks but it also emphasises how weird they were. Leaders can have a sense of purpose and be driven, but if they’re also wrong on the fundamentals, the policies, the stuff they actually do, then a sense of purpose becomes a vice not a virtue. In my experience, it’s often the most misguided, ill-informed or incompetent people who are the most driven. The point is you need to have a sense of purpose and the right policies. You need both.

Sir Keir probably understands this perfectly well which is why he said what he did. For some reason he felt the need to praise something about Mrs Thatcher and her sense of purpose was all he could manage. Quite why he felt this need I do not understand: maybe he thinks some swithering Thatcher-loving voters will see him as a fellow Thatcher lover and vote Labour, but he isn’t and they won’t. So what’s the point?

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Sir Keir and Mr Sarwar have missed the actual truth about Mrs Thatcher. Sir Keir says she brought about meaningful change without saying what the change was, while Mr Sarwar suggests she decimated Scotland. But the truth, as always, is more nuanced.

Did she decimate Scotland? Yes, parts of it. The reason there is such deep-seated poverty in large parts of Ayrshire, Lanarkshire and elsewhere is that many of the towns and villages there were detached from their only big source of employment when the coal mines shut down in the 1980s, and it’s one of the big failures of the Thatcher government that there was no kind of recovery plan.

But to talk about the communities that were damaged without also talking about the communities that thrived is misleading. I talked to one of Thatcher’s former ministers, Malcolm Rifkind, about this and he quite rightly talked about the success of right-to-buy, a policy he introduced as a junior minister. Remember, he said, what some of the big estates were like in the 70s: huge, monocultural places run with authoritarian zeal. But after right-to-buy, a lot of the estates were better and healthier than before. And people owned their houses in a country where the levels of home ownership were once lower than in Communist Hungary. It’s all good stuff.

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Sir Malcolm also pointed out the other ways in which many Scots embraced Thatcherism. Privatisation and buying shares in privatised industries? The Scots queued up as much as the English. Reducing income tax? Just as popular in Scotland as down south. And even the grim consequences of the coal mines needs context. The decline in heavy industry was happening all over western Europe, not just in Scotland.

I’m guessing lots of Scots get this and can see that Mr Sarwar is being over the top when he says Mrs Thatcher decimated the whole country. Not true. As for Sir Keir, I wish he’d be less wishy-washy. If he hates Thatcherism, say hate. If he loves it, say love. And if he’s going to bring the subject up, he needs to tell us which of her policies he thinks worked, and which he thinks didn’t. Instead, he’s gone for the “sense of purpose” thing in an apparent attempt to woo those of us who admired Thatcher. But sorry, we are un-wooed. Try again.