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Good morning. Yesterday on this programme we went back thirty years to hear a rather younger John Humphrys interviewing Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher during the 1987 election campaign. In the course of the interview she said something that in today’s context sounded quite extraordinary. She said, and I quote, ‘the fundamental reason of being on this earth is so to improve your character that you are fit for the next world’. This emerged from a remark that the most important choice everyone has to make is between good and evil, and that no one can express unselfish love if they have no choice. I had two instant reactions to this. One was the picky one of the Christian heresy hunter. There was just a whiff of the very British heresy of Pelagianism in what she said: the idea that you work on your character so as to earn your salvation. But my other reaction was on a different level. As she spoke of what was clearly her deepest belief her tone seemed to change. Just for a moment I felt I got a glimpse into her soul. This was the real person speaking. I can see why we so rarely get these moments today. Exposed to public life and endless scrutiny, politicians may feel that their deepest beliefs are private. And they don’t want to be thought divisive, if they declared their own beliefs they might be thought to be favouring one belief system over another. So whether they are believers, or humanists, or atheists or agnostics rarely gets onto the CV. But deep beliefs, whether religious or not, are important. I can see both the virtues and the downsides of what we now call Thatcherism in the way she articulated the religious roots of the doctrine of self-improvement. As a 17th century hymn writer put it: ‘Redeem thy mis-spent life that’s past; live this day as it were thy last: improve thy talent with due care, for the great Day thyself prepare’. You can see why Margaret Thatcher believed that each individual had a fundamental choice to strive and live productively. Her belief connected her with many. You can also see why her impatience with contrasting beliefs about our social nature and responsibility to one another through the state eventually put her out of office. I wonder whether one of the reasons for the disillusion with politics today is that we so rarely see the soul of politicians. We see plenty of rhetoric and sometimes genuine emotion of course, but it is all pretty controlled. What we rarely get is that unexpected change in voice, that moment of revelation. I miss that in today’s politics because it is profoundly humanising. But I also think the loss of soul harms the political process. Politicians are people. If they are not prepared to give us a glimpse into who they really are, what reason do we have not to think that they are motivated purely by self-interest?