"Far from authoritarian" ?

She put hundreds of thousands of UK citizens under secret service surveillance for the crime of disagreeing with her government's decisions.

I was one of them. Aged sixteen I walked out of our house on the way to school every morning and passed the fake BT engineer changing the tape in the green switch box outside the house next door, reattaching something to our house phone with crocodile clips.

Mail took weeks to arrive because it was intercepted and read en route. I was stopped for questioning at every border point I passed in Europe until I was in my late 20s.

All this because not being a Thatcherite in Britain in the 1980s made us "enemies of the state".