Letter to the editor: On your front page you reported MP Bob Neill’s tribute to Margaret Thatcher (‘Iron Lady Had a Heart of Gold’, News Shopper, April 10).

He described her as “the greatest peacetime politician of the 20th century”. Was he asleep during the 1980s? What about her management of the Northern Ireland crisis and the response to the Brighton bombing?

As a leader in “peacetime” her massive defence review, including one-third naval cuts in 1981 and the proposals to withdraw the Antarctic supply vessel HMS Endurance, signalled to Argentina she might not have any interest in defending the Falkland Islands.

Her approach to national economics as mirroring the housewife’s domestic accounts, without any possible international policy effects, was simplistic and dangerous.

Indeed, if the Argentinians had invaded perhaps a year or so later, Britain would not have had the naval resources to restore the freedom of the Falklands.

Instead her action in authorising the task force resuscitated her political fortunes.

In my perception Margaret Thatcher, as a war leader and as a much-resented politician, did not hold a candle to the stature of Sir Winston Churchill. Her memory is not deserving of a funeral of anywhere near the same scale as his.

Her decision in life to not have a RAF flypast at her funeral reflected the size of her ego which was the basis of her political style.

I remember at the end, she was actually referring to herself with the royal “we”.

Eventually the majority of her own party resented her style sufficiently to dispose of her without even the assistance of a general election. Has Mr Neill only remembered the thing he wanted to?

Alan Harris, address supplied