Guido has remarked previously on Kevin “Make it Up” Maguire’s unhinged hatred of one particular frail old lady. In his (always a good read) New Statesman Diary column this week he insists

Maggie Thatcher’s salivating disciples, eagerly awaiting their heroine’s Downing Street resurrection, may soon be frothing and foaming instead. Richard Stone’s oil painting of the Rusty Lady will not be hung, as was widely anticipated, on No 10’s grand staircase. Once unveiled she will, I hear,* be confined to an attic – or, more specifically, a corner room up the stairs and left down the corridor. Once installed in the Thatcher Study, as the room in which she long toiled is known, Maggie will languish unseen except by escorted visitors.

If Kevin fancies a bet, Guido is willing to make a wager, for he has it on good authority that by June 4, 2010 at the very latest, Margaret Thatcher’s picture will be hanging in pride of place at the top of the grand staircase.

Back where she belongs – in Downing Street.

Kevin Maguire claimed last year that “back home on Tyneside at the weekend, I found many a Labour voter eagerly awaiting the day [the] former premier is dead and buried.” Margaret Thatcher will therefore no doubt be very pleased to learn that Maguire’s hometown, where he helps the local Labour Party, is a Conservative gain.

You won’t find so many Labour voters on the Tyne today…

Not quite their new chant, but the latest edition of Socialist Worker, (the required reading for mockney speaking, public school educated, lefty students) does compare Gordon unfavourably to Margaret Thatcher. He cuts taxes for the bosses and raises taxes on the workers…

Maggie, say the Trotskyites, cut taxes for those on low incomes, Gordon hammers taxes onto the low paid. So can we expect the SWP to update their old chant?

This poll result is phenomenal:

Remember what Hutton and Miliband said about Gordon? They were so right…

UPDATE : Guido forgot to quote the most important statistic, a mere 5% of all voters would rather have Gordon Brown as PM from the list of former PMs given.

The Mirror’s Kevin Maguire has a pseudo-working-class-warrior writing style requiring him to always refer to “Druggy Dave” the Bambi-killing Etonian toff. His incisive analysis of the political dynamic clearly owes a lot to a youthful close reading of the Beano. In his columns he talks down to his readers in a patronising style that assumes Mirror readers are stupid in a manner that, by way of contrast, Richard Littlejohn would never dream of doing. It is not a style that he uses in the Guardian or the New Statesman. It is all good knock-about stuff, Maguire is after all a Labour party propagandist first and a journalist second. He is, without doubt, far better at the former than the latter.

His pathological hatred of the Tories becomes totally unhinged when it comes to Margaret Thatcher. Time and time again he shares his death fantasies with readers. Today again, under the pretext of a theatre review, he reminds us that he will celebrate her death. He describes her as a harridan who should not be afforded a state funeral. His poisonous “death to class enemies” attitude reveals all you need to know about Kevin Maguire’s politics and nature. In another time and place you sense that as a commissar he would have happily dealt out revolutionary justice to class enemies – with a bullet.

A judge has ruled that a man who made a bequest leaving the Conservative party £8.3m was not of sane mind. Pharmaceutical mogul Branislav Kostic believed Margaret Thatcher was “the greatest leader of the free world in history” and that she would save the world from the “satanic monsters and freaks”.

How can that be? These are self-evident truths for the members of Conservative Way Forward, self-appointed keepers of the Thatcherite flame. Guido bumped into CWF’s Mark Allatt at the Tory Party conference, he felt the police had over-reacted to his publicity stunt – parking a 12-tonne tank outside the conference centre and unloading uniformed actors carrying AK-47 machine guns. “They were deactivated AK-47s” he protested incredulously. Not mad at all…

The sheer audacity of Team Brown is breathtaking. Are they really trying to portray him as the heir to Thatcher? It is all very well claiming to be a conviction politician, but what if they are the wrong convictions?

Remind yourself of just two examples of when Gordon was on the wrong side of a big battle born of conviction.

Facing down Soviet Communism – Brown was opposed to installing the Cruise and Pershing missiles that the Soviets feared most and could not afford to match. This brought them to the negotiating table.

Miners Strike – the crucial and decisive battle for the economic well being of the country – at the time he opposed Thatcher’s determination to end once and for all Scargill’s blackmail. He never supported the rights of working miners who faced harassment and violence. When David Wilkie was killed by striking NUM miners there was no condemnation from Gordon Brown.

The list is long. Team Brown is doing this not out of conviction, but for pure spin…