"McGrath, almost every vote in our democracy is carried by a numerical minority of the whole electorate, but the fact remains that the winners get more of the votes than the losers."

That's what I meant when I wrote: "That's not unusual in our system", referring to the fact that Thatcher never had the support of more than a minority of voters.

However, as I then went on to say, most governments in practice recognise the implications of this, and limit the extent to which they impose their ideologically driven extremist policies.

And the reason I think it's important to point out the business about the actual voting proportions is that time after time it gets asserted that most people voted for Thatcher.

You get the same kind of distortion when people say in reference to Hitler that most Germans voted for him - they never did, but the politics of the time meant that it was possible for a politician with a sizeable minority vote to gain total power; and that does not mean I'm equating Thatcher with Hitler - but that's perhaps the most dramatic example of the way in which voters can achieve the last thing they want.