By John O’Sullivan
Thursday, June 12, 2025
Speaking at a Conservative Party election rally at
Plymouth in May 2001, almost exactly ten years after her defenestration from
the party’s leadership and premiership, Margaret (by then Lady) Thatcher
addressed the cheering Tory faithful in confidential terms: “I was told
beforehand that my arrival was unscheduled, but on my way here I passed a local
cinema and it turns out that you were expecting me after all.”
“The [cinema] billboard read The Mummy Returns.”
It was a joke with sly implications. She was endorsing
the common judgment that her political murder of ten years before had been a
case of matricide. She had been killed in broad daylight by “Thatcher’s
children,” whom she had raised to the cabinet, with a stake driven through her
heart (contrary to rumors that she didn’t have one), and buried at the
crossroads at dead of night, a mixture of salt and garlic scattered over her
grave. Yet now, not only had she risen from that grave, but before arriving in
Plymouth, she showed she had lost none of her taste for blood — sorry,
controversy — by venturing on a sharp criticism of multiculturalism.
“A multicultural society will never be a united society,”
she had said in the election campaign, to the consternation of Tory modernizers
who wanted the party to disown her remarks. William Hague, then Tory leader,
refused to do so yet managed not to provoke hostile reactions. As The
Guardian lamented seven years later, arch-modernizer David Cameron had
since reiterated her criticism of multiculturalism to zero public outrage. But
the main message of her arch little joke was that the mummy was politically
immortal: she had the power not only to rise again but also to kill again — and
perhaps other mystical powers too.
As good as her word, the mummy rose again in the first
quarter of this year, called forth from the vasty deep by desperate Tories
hoping she could perform a double miracle — raise not only herself but also the
party from the dead — on the pretext of celebrating her 100th birthday.
Conveniently enough, Margaret Thatcher, born in October
1925, left them a second significant anniversary to celebrate this year, and
doubtless more if the Tories can unearth them. The second is the 50th
anniversary of her defeat of Edward Heath in the first round of the Tory
leadership contest on February 4, 1975.
She didn’t become Tory leader until February 11, when she
was elected handsomely over four other contenders in the second round. But the
first round was the decisive one. Tories then felt chivalrously that they
couldn’t deny the girl the reward of her courage in taking on the party
establishment. Tories today rightly sense that her first-round success marked a
decisive victory for her brand of conservatism over the anti-traditional
managerial style of Heath’s corporate conservatism — “Heathco” to the satirical
magazine Private Eye — and they have resolved to celebrate it as a major
moment in Tory history.
They have been doing so in nostalgic events, which bring
together three interesting and overlapping but distinct groups: the surviving
veterans of the three Thatcher administrations (1979–90), Tory organizations
that have special links to her legacy, such as right-wing women’s groups, and
those active politicians and apparatchiks who believe that Thatcherism must be
part of any conservative phoenix that rises from the ashes of the last election
and — just as important — is then able to fly.
***
The Thatcher centenary began with three celebrations
blending policy debates with nostalgia. Women2Win, a group within the
Conservative Party that promotes Tory women candidates, produced a documentary
about the 1974 leadership election in which figures on both sides amiably
recalled the battle. The Centre for Policy Studies — a think tank that Thatcher
and Keith Joseph founded in 1974 to promote (in descending order) her
leadership campaign, anti-inflationary economics, and the then-infant concept
of Thatcherism — held a conference on how to pull off a similar revival in the
even more daunting political environment of the 2024 landslide defeat. A
post-Thatcherite think tank, Policy Exchange, where her official biographer,
Charles (now Lord) Moore, is now a visiting scholar, began its coverage of the
centenary with a panel on the 1975 leadership campaign. That event brought
Thatcher and Heath partisans together for a good-humored postmortem on how she
won and what it meant historically.
I was fortunate enough to be invited to all three
occasions, less as a veteran of these Tory wars — that came later — than as a
parliamentary sketch writer for the Daily Telegraph who was reporting on
them at the time. In that role, I had helped to organize a dinner at a London
club for four Telegraph editorial writers and then-candidate Thatcher,
which my late and fearless colleague, Frank Johnson, opened as follows: “What
will you do when the leadership election is over, Mrs. Thatcher?” She answered,
“Well, Frank, I shall be leader of the Conservative Party.” “No,” he said, “I
mean, seriously.” She replied: “If I didn’t think I could win, I
wouldn’t be standing. I don’t take on hopeless battles. I prepare and win.”
Which, of course, she did, and not just during the
leadership battle. When in government, she had to cope with the Falklands War,
the miners’ strike, inflation, and the Cold War. All of those ended in
victories for her, but the miners’ strike was an especially significant one.
When the miners first challenged her government, in 1981, she had looked at the
odds, decided they were unfavorable, and instructed her energy minister to
settle on the miners’ terms. Then she instructed her cabinet to prepare for another
such challenge down the road by building up stocks of coal and ensuring they
could be moved to power stations, and by empowering the police to restrain
“flying pickets” from keeping miners from work by force. When the second
miners’ strike duly came, in 1984, she prevailed outright, entrenching her
labor union reforms and the constitutional authority of the elected government
in one stroke. One very clear lesson from Thatcher’s career is the vital
importance of preparation — or, to put it in slightly different language, of
intellectual investment in formulating policy.
We can see that at present because, by comparison,
Britain’s new Labour government made very little intellectual investment during
its 14 years in opposition. It shows, too. Labour entered office with few
“joined up” ideas of how to govern in a socialist vein, and its first attempts
to do so have already been embarrassingly reversed. Last summer’s budget, which
added billions in extra public spending, has been followed by a “Don’t say
emergency” spring budget that increased taxes and cut benefits to the
disabled. Those are at best half-socialist priorities that in part clash
with the interests of the modern Labour Party’s base — namely, the
administrators and recipients of an expanded welfare state.
Despite these cuts, the latest forecasts predict that
this year’s deficit will be an astounding 5 percent of GDP. Going ahead,
Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government looks likely to be a shuttlecock
batted back and forth between the bond markets and radically statist Labour
activists who, in a post-budget poll, pushed Starmer and his chancellor of the
exchequer, Rachel Reeves, deep into negative popularity. They also gave top
billing to the net-zero fanatic, Energy Minister Ed Miliband, whose ministerial
days are probably numbered. All of which suggests that Labour’s governance will
combine public unpopularity, schizophrenia on policy, and an endless economic
crisis for several years to come.
That’s the political atmosphere — likely to be receptive
to the financial and economic realism of Thatcherism — in which Tories have now
embarked on their own policy rethink. But they will have to solve a range of
problems before they can reinsert Thatcherism seamlessly into the next “New
Toryism.” The first obstacle they face is the hostile caricature of Thatcher’s
economic and social record drawn by a still-angry left, relentlessly
regurgitated by the U.K.’s progressive media-academic-cultural complex, and
(highly inconveniently) embraced by some conservatives in or near the Tory and
Reform Parties. The caricature argues that her anti-inflationary and labor
market reforms created an economy in which British workers are “left behind” in
run-down, crime-ridden, “sink” housing estates, living on disability benefits,
while low-paid immigrants take the unskilled jobs in a deindustrialized economy
lagging behind its neighbors. That economy, in turn, is said to have spawned a
mass of social problems, from crime to family breakdown. These criticisms echo
arguments leveled against Ronald Reagan and Reaganism by some U.S.
conservatives.
Such criticisms ignore the massive contrast between the
outcomes of Thatcher’s (and Reagan’s) policies and those of later governments.
Thatcher was elected in June 1979, when the nation was still reeling from the
“winter of discontent” of spreading strikes. By the mid-1980s, her reforms had
lifted the U.K. economy to the world’s fifth largest, increased its obdurate
productivity rate, and revived a spirit of energy and enterprise in the British
people. Thatcher’s successful economic policies were continued under John
Major’s administration, until Labour’s 1997 victory, when a Treasury official
briefing Gordon Brown, the incoming Labour chancellor, on the state of the U.K.
economy, said happily: “These are wonderful figures.” (“What do you want me to
do?” Brown replied. “Send them a thank-you note?”)
Thatcher and Major had kept immigration to an
economically manageable and socially assimilable 50,000 individuals a year.
Along with labor market reforms, stable finances, and taxation reform, leading
to lower rates and higher revenues, this level of immigration filled local
labor shortages and played a modest part in helping the economy grow under Tory
and Labour governments. But Tony Blair’s Labour government deliberately
increased the numbers of immigrants sharply in order to “dish the Tories”
(i.e., shape an electorate that would make their opponents unelectable). Tory
governments failed to reverse that course — indeed they aggravated it,
admitting almost a million immigrants into Britain in the party’s last year in
office. A contributory factor was that, from the turn of the century, the U.K.
Treasury believed that mass immigration was a surer and cheaper path to
prosperity than higher investment in technically advanced industries. As a
result, when Reeves, Labour’s new chancellor, took over from Rishi Sunak’s
outgoing Conservatives last July, no thanks were necessary. The U.K. economy
was reeling from Covid, the lockdown, net zero, inflation, high levels of mass
immigration, and much else — though it was still outperforming the major
European economies both pre- and post-Brexit.
If this bipartisan responsibility for the failures of
Britain’s economy is denied, as the left understandably denies it, it’s but a
small step to attribute increased crime, family breakdown, the growth of the
underclass, and other social evils to Thatcher’s neglect of society and social
provision. As a critique of Thatcherism, however, that attack runs slap-bang
into the fact that government social spending rose sharply in the Thatcher
years. So when did these pathologies start? When did crime start to rise?
Illegitimacy to increase? Family breakdown to get seriously worse? Divorce
figures to rocket?
As it happens, we know the answer to these questions. In
his book The Strange Death of Moral Britain, the late Christie Davies, a
distinguished Welsh sociologist, established that these major changes started
in the 1950s and early 1960s, almost 20 years before Thatcher entered Downing
Street. Another expert witness is the socialist writer Jeremy Seabrook, who
lamented in his 1978 book What Went Wrong? that low-income council
estates (what Americans call public housing) were squalid and crime-ridden,
crime was increasingly endemic, illegitimacy was rising, families were being
weakened, and an underclass had been created.
Note that Seabrook’s book was published the year before
Thatcher’s election and four years after Sir Keith Joseph was almost
driven out of politics for giving the speech in which he identified these very
same social evils as a “cycle of deprivation,” called for policies to tackle
them, and suggested (very hesitantly and with moral qualms) that state-supplied
contraception might be a “bridge” to the more fundamental cultural and moral
changes that were necessary. Britain’s media, the progressive left, “the great
and the good” all the way down to the bishops, and critics in all the parties
promptly joined in denouncing Joseph for proposing to “sterilize the lower
classes.” Serious reformers were frightened off, and the problems of the
underclass were fenced off from serious consideration for another decade.
Could Thatcher have tackled these pathologies more
vigorously in the years that followed? I doubt it. She and her governments did
tackle them, in health and education, with different levels of success. Some of
their solutions, e.g., in educational reform, ran into the obstacle of the
civil service “blob” that weakened essentially conservative reforms by “adding
on” quite different objectives. Health reforms, too, multiplied managerial
complexities because simpler proposals were considered too controversial. In
addition, Blairite ministers reversed some of Thatcher’s reforms — and then
reversed them back again. If a case is to be made against her on such grounds,
it would have to be that her governments shrank from more fundamental reforms
because, as the anti-Joseph hysteria had shown, they carried a high risk of
calumny, unpopularity, and defeat.
If Thatcher didn’t make the reform of the welfare state
the signature policy of her administration, however, she had at least the
excuse that she first needed to tackle the larger and more pressing problems of
economic decline, inflation, overmighty labor unions, and the Soviet threat.
Whatever your judgment on that, Thatcherism can hardly be held responsible for
failures that either began a quarter of a century before Thatcher entered
office or resumed 18 years after she left it.
What is the excuse of later governments?
***
If Thatcherism is to play a serious part in any revival
of the Tory party, the leftist myths about Thatcher’s record will have to be
rebutted by serious historians and by party leaders. Her real record is
well worth defending. That’s important for the Tories, because Thatcher is one
their few remaining serious assets. Keeping her as their sole property is vital
for them. Since they lost last year’s election in a landslide, emerging with
only 121 seats in a Parliament of 650, they are frequently dismissed as being
on their way to extinction. Recent opinion polls have shown Reform to be the
most popular of the three leading parties, followed by Labour, with the Tories
lagging in third place. In the recent local elections, Reform won hands down,
with almost a third of the national total, drawing votes not only from the
Tories but also from Labour. It also looked like a more substantial threat to
Labour than the Tories, which is a political factor in itself. It negates the
main weakness of a new party — namely, that the votes it gains are “wasted”
because it can’t win. That fate now threatens the Tories.
One unnoticed factor, however, is that Thatcherism has
supporters in both of the conservative parties. Reform’s leader, Nigel Farage,
in addition to being a naturally gifted politician, is the nearest thing to the
perfect Thatcherite outside her old party. Between now and the next election,
both conservative parties will be fighting for predominance in every special
election and local election. Only as the election looms will they have the
evidence of which is stronger and where, which they need if they are to
discuss an electoral pact between them at all seriously. That will be a tall
order at any time. But one can’t dismiss ideological sympathy when estimating
its chances.
Even without the challenge of Reform from the right,
however, the Tories know that they have to change drastically. That realization
undercuts the prediction (made immediately after the general election) that,
because the surviving 121 Tory members of Parliament tended to be drawn from
the liberal wing of Toryism, they would tilt the party leftward in order to woo
the Liberal Democratic vote rather than Reform’s. Most of these “one nation”
Tories have since realized that if they were to go down that road, they would
lose their party outside Parliament and probably even more votes than last
time. The Liberal Democratic pool of votes is smaller than Reform’s, moreover,
and every other political party is fishing in it.
Also, liberal Toryism is suffering an even deeper
identity crisis than the party as a whole. Its traditional concept of political
imagination has long been limited to “catching the Whigs bathing and running
off with their clothes,” i.e., adopting a more moderate version of the policies
of the left. Liberal Tories pursued that policy to destruction, all too well
represented by net zero and uncontrolled mass immigration, under the last
government. What they cling to now, in policy terms, can best be described as
symbolic totems of “niceness” and “moderation” that have nasty consequences,
such as continued U.K. membership of the European Court of Human Rights.
Liberal Toryism is now — and for some time will be — an exhausted political
tradition in need of convalescence and a regime of reading and reflection (and,
some would add, penance).
Where does that leave other Tory factions? Paradoxically,
though the fortunes of the Tory party are low, there is a festive upsurge of
many conservative intellectual and moral traditions and organizations all
debating what being conservative means and should mean today. Their debates
were exemplified by the two think tanks whose conferences I attended, mentioned
above, but also by the books, pamphlets, conferences, and podcasts of such new
insurgent groups as Peter Whittle’s New Culture Forum, “communitarian” Tory MP
Danny Kruger’s New Conservatives, and former Prime Minister Liz Truss’s Popular
Conservatism. Oversimplifying greatly, these three groups represent,
respectively, the defense of Britain’s history, culture, and identity; the love
of home, family, neighborhood, nation — and, in terms of sensibility, religion
and beauty; and the defense of democracy and popular liberties against
Leviathan at home and in Brussels. All of these themes and memes overlap,
interweave, and enrich one another, and they are encouraged to do so by an
overlooked social reality: namely, though political parties in a two-party
system contain different and potentially quarrelsome groups, the daily
experience of working, talking, and “fighting” (i.e., campaigning) together
creates a common identity and tradition that have an independent value for all
of them. Each then wills the success of the others.
Under the influence of such camaraderie, I would argue
that the Tory party is capable of bringing all these factions together in three
broad groups — “one nation” liberal Tories, Thatcherites, and national
conservatives — and then uniting them in a single, largely harmonious party.
Liberal Toryism I have already dispatched to a sanatorium for a rest cure,
where it can consider its eventual reactions to the likely national and
international events that will redraw political and ideological boundaries. Those
events are, first, Britain’s serious economic and financial difficulties
described above, and, second, a general international shift from global bodies
to nation-states and national governments, from liberal institutions to
democratic ones, and from elites to voters and their representatives.
As I argue above, the first set of challenges plainly
advantages the Thatcherites within conservatism. As the word is currently used,
Thatcherites are the devotees of economic and financial realism. To borrow a
U.S. metaphor about the Fed, they are the people who take away the punch bowl
when the party is really getting going. Fortunately for party unity, a
significant number of liberal Tories are also market libertarians, which
is one of the two ways of being a Thatcherite in the U.K. Enough of them will
hold senior positions on the parliamentary front bench to soothe liberal
distress and to remind other Tory factions of the need to contain their
communitarian and cultural ambitions within the laws of economics.
The second shift of political priorities means that the
Tory Party will have to adapt its future policies in the direction of a more
populist national conservatism, with a stress on patriotism, respect for
Britain’s religious and constitutional traditions, opposition to open borders
and mass immigration, commonsense skepticism of gender theory, and most
obviously the restoration of national democratic sovereignty over supranational
technocracy. That national conservatism — inside which most of the smaller factions
mentioned above would fit quite comfortably — is what conservative voters
plainly want, and they are fed up with not getting it. And all of the above
positions are ideas that Thatcher either liked or would have liked if they had
been on the political agenda of her day. It will be a long time before the
voters take a serious interest in the Tories again. Until then, they should
forswear febrile leadership-swapping, invest time and thought into creating a
modern political organization and rethinking policies along post-Brexit lines,
and give the party’s current able and unorthodox leader Kemi Badenoch the
chance to succeed — as the party did in 1974–79.
An undeniable Thatcherite who realized very clearly that
Thatcherism encompassed all the aforementioned different Tory traditions —
indeed, that they helped one another to survive and prosper in good times and
bad — was Nigel Lawson, one of her two great chancellors. He defined
Thatcherism early and prophetically as follows: “A mixture of free markets,
financial discipline, firm control over public expenditure, tax cuts,
nationalism, ‘Victorian values’ (of the Samuel Smiles self-help variety),
privatization and a dash of populism.”
Would Nigel Farage dissent from that? His only known
deviation from this right-wing orthodoxy is on gender identity. He thinks he
could become an Iron Lady.
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