Few suspected at the time that the 1979 election was also a 1979 moment. Sure, the gravediggers were on strike and James Callaghan spoke of a "sea-change in politics" about which there was little anyone could do. But the Conservative manifesto of that year was far from unadulterated Thatcherism. Not least because the party's leader was yet to become a Thatcherite herself.
"I think she became a Thatcherite in, well, about 1987, 1988," says Ken Clarke with a grin as wide as Britain's 2010 fiscal deficit. "When people persuaded her there was something called Thatcherism to which she was the leader."
It would therefore be quite something to watch the Thatcher of 1975-1979 deliver the annual Mais Lecture, the prestigious event where chancellors, opposition leaders and central bank governors set out their economic principles in front of an audience of City financiers, economists and academics.
Such an address would have sounded different to old Labour orthodoxy, but it wouldn't have been a full-throated defence of privatisation, deregulation and a ripping up of the post-war consensus. Thatcher may even have had nice things to say about the European Economic Community.
All this isn't to suggest that Rachel Reeves, who is set to deliver the Mais Lecture this evening, hasn't thought it all through. Reeves is, unusually for a senior politician, an economist by training. She also recently wrote a book (which I reviewed here) about the women who made modern economics. But it is safe to say we don't yet know what Reevesism, or Starmerism, is, or whether they exist at all. Few politicians are granted an 'ism', and for good reason.
The broad strokes of what Reeves is to say have been fairly well briefed. Britain faces a 1979 moment that will require a "decade of national renewal". In response to a series of economic crises and political turbulence, what is required is growth built on "secure foundations" with "active government" that will deliver the "supply side reform" needed to "unlock the contribution of working people and the untapped potential throughout our economy." So far, so Reeves-y.
But it got me thinking. In preparation for today's newsletter, I re-watched Rishi Sunak's 2022 Mais Lecture. I wouldn't rush back. Not least because precious little of it has come to fruition. This is largely out of circumstance. No doubt Sunak meant what he said about the moral case for government stepping back and cutting taxes, or the importance of fostering the conditions for private investment.
But timing in politics is everything. Months after he delivered the lecture, Sunak resigned as chancellor, and when he returned as prime minister he had to focus on cleaning up the impact of the Truss mini-Budget and managing a high-interest-rate world. Now, he faces the hard deadline of the 2024 election.
There remains something intrinsically unstable about Labour's economic position. On the one hand, the party says that everything is terrible (low productivity, high taxes, decaying public services) but on the other, it will do little to radically change things short of imposing 20 per cent VAT on private schools.
Much of this is down to sheer terror that the party will not survive an election campaign in which its policies are markedly different to the Tories. But if this position is intellectually incoherent in opposition, it will be even harder to maintain in government, when Labour voters will expect Budgets to do Labour things such as increase spending on the NHS and tax unearned income.
The reality is that we do not know all that much about what Labour intends to do in office, and we are unlikely to learn a lot more today. The extent to which this is caution as opposed to the party not yet understanding how it will address Britain's economic and social problems is unclear.
It took Thatcher time to become a Thatcherite. Of course, she enjoyed two large strokes of luck along the way: a useful enemy in General Galtieri and the vast revenues from North Sea oil, without which Thatcherism may not have had the political capital and economic resources to become anything at all.
