Like Mike Smithson I love the play This House, I saw This House at the theatre back in 2012 and when it was repeated in the cinemas in 2013, so I utterly delighted a wider audience will be able to see this.

I was born in the late 70s but I’ve always been fascinated by these crucial votes in Parliament, particularly the 1979 vote of no confidence, something which is a pivot moment in the history of this country.

It’s fascinating to see alternative history if things had happened differently. The SNP MPs who helped usher in a Thatcher premiership and eighteen years of Conservative government, is that a long game the SNP were playing that might see Scottish independence realised within the next decade

Frank Maguire, the Irish Nationalist MP, who abstained in person, some say because Roy Mason’s tenure at the Northern Ireland office that gave the IRA such a good hiding, which saw deaths plummet, did Maguire really want the approach of Thatcher to the IRA?

Then there’s the honourable decisions taken about an agreement between Walter Harrison and Bernard Weatherill that would have seen Callaghan win the vote of no confidence. If that had happened then who knows, Thatcher may have failed to win an Autumn 1979 election, which would have seen her ousted and saw a non Thatcherite replace her.

So if you’ve got just over two and a half hours spare, watch this, you won’t regret it, the show will be removed from YouTube on Thursday, so it won’t be up for much longer.

TSE