Beaten, marooned, demoralised – and yet still the right clings to Thatcher. I’ve seen them: they’re so lost

Multi-screen TV images of Margaret Thatcher's last speech as PM at the 1990 Tory party conference. Photograph: Richard Baker/Corbis/Getty Images

I crept into the inaugural Westminster meeting of The Future of the Right, a Policy Exchange project from a bygone age of Tory ascendancy. I admit it: there’s a certain schadenfreude in observing the remnants of what was the “natural party of government” for most of my lifetime as it tries to adjust to its worst defeat in history. The programme from the group that still calls itself “the UK’s leading thinktank” will mark next year’s 50^th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher becoming party leader, and the 100^th anniversary of her birth. Are the Conservatives capable of grasping how profoundly they have lost any sense of the country they used to govern or why their eviction was the single, clear-as-a-bell voters’ imperative? Are they willing or able to do so? Not from what I heard.

This is a project of “the right”; its commissioners include Rupert Lowe, Great Yarmouth’s new Reform MP, sitting alongside new Tory MP Katie Lam, a former Goldman Sachs vice president and special adviser to Suella Braverman. Charles Moore is their august keeper of the Thatcherite flame. They are led by Paul Goodman, a Tory grandee, who writes a column that warns: “Unless the right changes course, Britain is dooming itself to perpetual Labour rule”. Their Tory-leaning pollsters include Rachel Wolf – founder of Public First, No 10 adviser and author of Boris Johnson’s 2019 manifesto – and James Kanagasooriam of FocalData, coiner of the phrase and idea of the “red wall”.