“[Ronnie Millar] was.. surprised to be ordered by [Mrs. Thatcher] to contribute a script for her first television party political broadcast as leader, which was to go out on 5 March 1975. For it, Millar chose some words which he, like most others, attributed wrongly to Abraham Lincoln (the true author was one William Boetcker, writing some seventy-five years later): ‘You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift..’ When he came to see Mrs. Thatcher with the draft, she asked him to read it aloud to her. After he had done so, there was a silence which Millar attributed to her dissatisfaction. Then she reached slowly and dramatically for her handbag and produced from it a piece of yellowing paper containing the same ‘Lincoln’ lines. ‘It goes wherever I go,’ she told him.”
- From ‘Margaret Thatcher: the authorized biography’ by Charles Moore.