With the Conservatives having whittled their list of leadership hopefuls down to two, one thing is clear: this lot are obsessed with Margaret Thatcher. They dress up as her, do impressions, genuflect before her memory and – where they think the membership might not get it – lay it on with a trowel. Leaving it to others to unpick why Liz Truss, after such an underwhelming start, beat Penny Mordaunt and the rest to make the final with Rishi Sunak, it might be useful to ask: what does Thatcher still have over this party?
Her period in office ended more than 30 years ago – and it ended in ignominy. Her context was so dramatically different from ours that, even if Truss et al managed to approximate Thatcherism in policy terms, those policies would make no sense. In popularity terms, she was always more Marmite than Nutella, and this was particularly apparent within her party.
So why, decades after her departure from Downing Street, do so many seek to reanimate her? Have they forgotten what she was like? Or does Thatcher represent something elemental and timeless about what it means to be true blue?
Generally speaking, the Iron Lady impressions of this contest have leaned heavily on vibe. The journalist, broadcaster and author Peter York was the essayist of the Thatcher age (he co-wrote The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook, which came out in 1982). He notes three Thatcher traits that have been distributed among this year’s candidates.
Kemi Badenoch has “a way of presenting her ideas – ‘I’m an engineer, I could strip this down and put this right’ – that is very much channelling Thatcher the practical, the Thatcher who reworked Joe Lyons’ ice-cream technology, the chemist and lawyer”. Thatcher was direct and robust. “She believed what she said she believed and she enjoyed debating,” says York. This has passed into lore as honesty, even if it was a bit more complicated than that.
Mordaunt, meanwhile, employs Thatcher’s “breaking the fourth wall”, York says. “She is saying: ‘You out there must be finding this all a bit incestuous, but I’m on your side, I know the real problems.’” Mordaunt has also worked hard on that low-voiced, calming, strict-mother shtick – see her campaign launch video – that was a distinctive draw of Thatcher in rightwing politics, certainly by the height of her term. This comes out most strongly when you look at 80s satire: how Spitting Image portrayed Thatcher with dominatrix overtones; how political cartoons covered policies with captions such as: “Give generously to Mumsy now.”
The more preposterous it is to summon the spirit of Thatcher, the more brazenly Mordaunt does it. When she unveiled her new anti-trans position, she did so saying: “I think it was Margaret Thatcher that said that every prime minister needs a Willie; a woman like me doesn’t have one.” It was hailed as clever wordplay in the circles that would have found Thatcher’s line clever (she was talking, of course, about her deputy, Willie Whitelaw). It was, in fact, a clumsy pick-me play: “I’m so close to the spirit of Margaret that I can simultaneously channel her and common sense.”
Truss’s approach is to play Thatcher dress-up. This started ages ago: Truss in a tank, Truss in a fur hat, Truss in last week’s Channel 4 debate wearing a pussy-bow shirt. The latter was theatrical and ham-fisted – and she completely got away with it.
Part of what has made this contest fascinating and depressing in equal measure is the quality of cosplay: Tom Tugendhat as a soldier, Mordaunt covered in medals, Truss as the new Thatcher, the messages thin and half-witted. Thatcher wasn’t like that, York says. “You could not but be aware, in however difficult or conflicted a way, that she respected intellectuals and those who could translate other intellectuals for her. She would take an hour’s tough interview and enjoy it.”
Perhaps the legacy they have all found toughest to emulate is Thatcher’s economic one. The writer and broadcaster Steve Richards is driven to distraction by the shallow understanding of Thatcher’s economic programme. “She didn’t say: ‘You just cut taxes by magic.’ She wasn’t a con artist. It was very explicit in the 1979 manifesto that they were going to switch from direct to indirect taxation – in other words, there would be income tax cuts, but they would be paid for by increases in other taxes.”
It was all quite softy, softly, catchee monkey. “It took them eight years to get to Nigel Lawson’s budget of 1988, which modern Tories all revere, including Sunak,” Richards says. “And this didn’t lead to magical economic growth. That was never her argument. She never said: ‘Tax cuts lead to growth.’ Many people think it triggered a recession.”
In other words, Truss might think she is a Thatcherite, and may have support in that view among tabloids and MPs including Jacob Rees-Mogg, but she is much more Reaganite: treat pandemic debt like first world war debt and pay it back over 50 years, while lowering taxes to create fantasy growth. All the other candidates were in accord on this “shallow, politically immature position”, Richards says, except Sunak, whom he considers “the true Thatcherite – no tax cuts until we’ve worked out how to pay for them”. Sunak tried to take up this mantle, telling the Telegraph: “We will cut taxes … and we will do it responsibly. That’s my economic approach. I would describe it as commonsense Thatcherism. I believe that’s what she would have done.”
Yet he struggles to get this message across. Even were he prepared to don a pussy-bow, it probably wouldn’t transmit, because Thatcher, this fairly cautious, mid-century economic thinker, has been re-engineered in the Tory imagination as a fiscal Boudicca, slashing and burning on faith alone. Her support for the single market has been similarly swept away – for goodness sake, she wore it on a jumper – as the candidates try to prove their authentic Thatcherism by saying how much they hate the EU.
Yet even if the candidates’ supposedly Thatcherite positions did look anything like Thatcherism, Richards says, “she was absolutely rooted in the economic problems of the late 70s and early 80s and they just do not apply now. There was chaos in the last years of [Jim Callaghan’s] Labour government, so she targeted the state in a particular way, both as a political and economic act. This lot have been in power for 12 years; they just cannot say: ‘The state isn’t working.’”
For the former foreign secretary Margaret Beckett, this collective amnesia and myth-making is most aggravating in what it omits altogether – the fact that Thatcher largely balanced the books with the North Sea oil windfall. “The Norwegians have a national wealth fund; we haven’t got one because she used it to save herself financially. At one point, we were getting something like £32m a day out of the North Sea. That was at a time when you could buy a full district hospital for £32m. It was the greatest opportunity the nation ever had – and she used it to steer away from problems of her own making.”
This did not go unremarked in her own party – the MP and diarist Alan Clark intended to write a book about how the frittering away of oil profits constituted a “betrayal of the country”, but he died before he could, Beckett says. The orthodoxy we are witnessing now – Thatcher as the one true Conservative, who led the country into prosperity with judgment that was at once magical and replicable – is a relatively recent development. It was niche even in her final years and has gathered pace since her death in 2013.
The broadcaster Iain Dale told me about a dinner at the Savoy in London in 2002, at which Thatcher, who was soon to publish her book Statecraft, was the guest of honour. “My task was to prevent her from getting to the microphone,” he says. “They were frightened that, if she spoke, she’d have a heart attack.” (It wasn’t an idle concern – she had had a stroke three weeks earlier.) “So, she was scheduled to leave before the end, but, on the way out, she was up like lightning and straight to the microphone. It was like a Nuremberg rally. People were shouting: ‘10 more years!’” But nobody took this seriously as a barometer of her standing in the party, least of all Thatcher herself, who replied: “That’s the kind of reception only an ex-prime minister can get.”
As formidable as Thatcher may have been in her prime, anyone with a memory knows how underwhelming she was before 1979, as leader of the opposition. “She was appalling,” Beckett says. “She had the high squeaky voice, she moved very badly, she had this thing, when she started to speak, of going very fast. Our lot would shout: ‘Faster, faster!’ and she’d go faster. It was really embarrassing.”
But the blue-on-blue attacks in the early days were far more vindictive. Ted Heath, her predecessor as leader, was openly cruel from the start. Before her first speech in parliament as leader of the opposition, he reserved the seat next to her and then failed to show up, so that when she looked around for support there would be no one there. Colleagues privately called her a “cultured pearl” – low-quality, not the real thing. “I used to warn them: ‘Once she gets into office, she won’t owe anything to any of you lot,’” says Beckett. “‘Although you may have elected her, you’re treating her like shit. If she doesn’t owe you anything, she’ll be able to do what she wants.’ And that’s what happened: once she got her feet under the table, she was away.”
This figure the party now lionises – visionary, messianic and unifying – is at odds with the reality. Thatcher spent many years forging ahead in isolation, followed by many years dodging a stab in the back. But this false image – that a leader once existed who was so pure in her Conservatism that the fractious coalition constituting the party was set at peace – is at the heart of these present-day impressions.
One thing that isn’t a myth? She was popular with the so-called “aspirational working class”, for reasons practical and atmospheric. Selling off council houses may, in the long term, have created a bloated landlord class and a housing crisis, but at the time it seemed to reflect a true understanding of the life and dreams of the ordinary Joe. This can’t be replicated, since social housing, like North Sea oil, was an asset that she exhausted. She was, Dale says, “so in tune with what middle England and the aspirational working classes wanted” and genuinely loathed by elites. York says: “Old toffs found her style pretty emetic. They were always calling her clothes ghastly and her voice grating,” even after her elocution transformation. “That will have endeared her to 99% of the population.”
This dynamic has been pivotal to Conservative strategy and rhetoric for the past six years. The elites in their towers want to tell you how to think, but you, the authentic, raging Briton, will always follow your own destiny. It worked over Brexit, but was always ersatz and decontextualised, since it derived from this Thatcherite era in which “elite” meant something: an aristocracy trying to act as the gatekeeper of public life through inherited wealth. “Elite” doesn’t mean that now – it means academic or expert, latte-drinker or snowflake. It is a confected category without roots or coherence.
It has been interesting to watch all the candidates fall apart as they try to describe what liberal elitism means to them. Does it mean objecting to It Ain’t Half Hot Mum or failing to laugh hard enough at Friends? Many have used transgender rights as the proving ground of their anti-wokeness; as disheartening as that is, it highlights an important discontinuity with Thatcher, whose homophobia was ideological – she genuinely saw homosexuality as corruption. She wasn’t trying to instrumentalise it to range herself with the masses against the establishment. Who knows, maybe some of the modern Tory Thatcheralikes are as anti-trans as they make out. But if, as I suspect, it is just a populist pose, I would be surprised if they manage to pull it off.
Richards is looking forward to what happens when the curtains come down. “We’re going to have this Thatcher parade for another few weeks. And then one of them will win and have to start spending money. The first thing that will happen is that Martin Lewis will pop up saying no one can pay their energy bills. They’re not going to cut spending on the NHS in the run-up to the election; they’re not going cut spending on defence.” Whoever wins, even if it is Sunak, will be fighting an election on the promise of a Thatcherism that never existed, with a platform that Thatcher would have despised.
