“We shall tell the people the truth, and the people will be our judge”. So speaketh the blessed Margaret, a leader who understood that you neither could nor should shy away from the truth, no matter the consequences.
Not for the first time, Labour could learn something from the Iron Lady. Instead, they are as committed to hiding the truth from the British public.
This week, it’s Ed Miliband who is perpetuating what Winston Churchill called “terminological inexactitudes” – or lies to you and me - has been accused of burying a cost-benefit analysis of his whole Net Zero project because it reveals the depths of his untruths to the public.
Miliband has also spent months blocking the release of an official impact assessment of his decision last summer to scrap something called zonal electricity pricing.
He promised to publish the document by the end of the year. He has not delivered it. His department, breaching the rules of basic disclosure, took five months to respond to a freedom of information request and is now warning, with the desperate vagueness of a man caught in the act, that publication could "disrupt energy and financial markets".
Translation: it would disrupt Ed’s bonkers plans.
Credit, then, to the campaign group Britain Remade, which has refused to let this go. Sam Richards and his team have held ministers to the basic standard that decisions affecting tens of billions of pounds of consumers' money should be subjected to the discipline of evidence.
Zonal pricing, supported by Octopus Energy, Ovo Energy, and the National Energy System Operator itself, would have cut bills by an estimated £3.7billion a year.
It would have ended the absurdity of paying wind farms £1.5billion to switch off when they generate too much electricity. It was, in other words, the rare thing in modern British policy: a market mechanism designed to reward efficiency rather than rent-seeking.
Naturally, Miliband killed it. He killed it because he is not, in any meaningful sense, a politician operating within the constraints of economics.
He is a millenarian. For Miliband, net zero is not a policy framework requiring the careful balancing of cost, supply, and consumer welfare. It is eschatology – end of the world stuff.
He wants a legacy, and the only audience whose applause he craves is that thin, shrill stratum of climate-credentialed progressives for whom any cost borne by an ordinary British household is simply the price of his sainthood.
Ed Miliband's mask has slipped - and the man underneath must be stopped at any cost | Getty Images
He is pursuing it, moreover, precisely as the rest of the world wakes up to the essential national interest of energy security.
Only Britain, under Ed, is doubling down, tripling offshore wind capacity by 2030 while bills climb and the cost of grid expansion (already almost a third of the average bill) spirals further.
Worse is that Westminster gossip has Miliband as the dark horse to replace Keir Starmer, possibly within the month. A wounded Prime Minister, a restive party, a candidate of the activist left with deep union backing and a martyrdom complex.
Imagine, then, this same anti-evidence, anti-science, anti-human instinct (and let us be honest about its lineage: it is Marxist in temperament, contemptuous of markets and of the people who depend on them) applied every bit as much to housing, to industry, to the courts, to the very machinery of British life as it is currently being applied to energy.
Miliband has shown us, in one buried document, exactly how he governs. If he were to finally get to Number 10, we wouldn’t need to ask the last one to leave to turn off the lights – they wouldn’t be able to stay on in the first place.