Thirty two years ago, on a cold November Thursday, Margaret Thatcher resigned as prime minister, pushed out of office following 11 years in government. In 2022, after just 44 days, Liz Truss stood outside Downing Street on another Thursday autumn afternoon, to tender her own resignation to the British public. It had taken a cabal of ministers to topple Thatcher, while Truss’s fate was decided by a single MP, Sir Graham Brady, Chairman of the 1922 Committee. These final differences aside, Liz Truss cosplayed her heroine Margaret Thatcher to the last.
Liz Truss’s emulation of Margaret Thatcher always had a whiff of teenage fantasy or fairytale about it. She was the Talented Ms Truss taking on someone else’s identity and living out a dream. ‘You shall go to the ball’, some celestial godmother had clearly cried at her in Tory heaven, waving a magic wand and coating her with true blue fairy-dust. That on the release of her first mini-Budget she would turn into a pumpkin went unmentioned, as did the fact that, far from being ‘not for turning’, she would enact more U-turns in her few weeks in office than an episode of the Sweeney. Fairy godmothers, as we know, are not big on the small print.
Until then, the dream held and Truss seemed to sashay in her idol’s footsteps through scores of recycled photo-ops. Like her heroine she got to go to Moscow and wear a svelte fur hat. Like Maggie, she got to drive a tank, nuzzle farm animals, and pose with a matey pint-glass. Thatcher got school milk, Liz got cheese, a leap ahead if anything up the dairy product ladder. While Mrs. T told us she couldn’t ‘bear Britain in decline’, Liz assured us Britain’s best days were ahead of us and berated Rishi Sunak for ‘talking down the country.’
Like all dreams which turn sour – and few dreams were more transparent than this one – it is all very sad
It worked, as her election by party members as Prime Minister proved on 5 September. ‘An Heir to Thatcher’ proclaimed Australia’s ABC News. ‘Could she really emulate her hero’s 11 years in power and still be wearing pussy-bows around Downing Street in 2033?’ the Independent essayed, with rhetorical breathlessness.
At this point the soundtrack to Truss’s life seemed to speed up like an overwound record-player. The cosplaying continued, but now at breakneck pace. The announcement of Truss’s and Kwarteng’s new economic policies on 23 September seemed a weird collation of Mrs T’s devastatingly unpopular budget from Geoffrey Howe in 1981 (after which 364 economists wrote to her to protest and Mrs. Thatcher’s approval rating stood at a dismal 16 per cent) with that of the tax-slashing Nigel Lawson in 1988.
It proved definitively that mashups, though creative, don’t always hit the spot. Maggie lost Lawson as her moneyman in 1989 because, as he muttered to her on quitting, there had to be, or ‘seen to be, full agreement’ between PM and Chancellor. Liz shed hers because there appeared to be rather too much. There was a breathing space for Thatcher of over a year before Geoffrey Howe resigned in 1990, administering the terminal loss of her second major Minister. Liz, before Suella fell on her sword, had just five days. But these details – like variations on a theme – merely reinforced the parallels.
There were of course other discrepancies too. In Michael Heseltine, Thatcher was felled by a millionaire with mad blonde hair. Truss replaced one. Maggie was assassinated by a beautifully crafted speech from ex-Foreign Secretary Howe, a revenge served deliciously cold replete with cricketing metaphors. Liz was taken out by the sawn-off shotgun blast of Suella Braverman’s up-yours resignation letter: ‘hoping that things will magically come right is not serious politics. I have made a mistake; I accept responsibility: I resign’. It was, to use a Thatcher metaphor, one bouncer that Liz couldn’t duck. In 1990, no British citizen could quite believe Thatcher had finally gone. After just 45 days, most of us can’t quite take it in that Liz Truss was ever there.
Like all dreams which turn sour – and few dreams were more transparent than this one – it is all very sad. Liz Truss may be as different from Margaret Thatcher as it is possible to be, but no one who saw her competent fightback at Prime Minister’s Questions this week could fail to note that here was someone more robust and gutsy than many had given her credit for. ‘I fight on, I fight to win,’ vowed Thatcher after that mortally wounding vote in November 1990. ‘I’m a fighter not a quitter,’ declared Liz Truss three decades later to a jeering hostile parliament, seeming to channel Peter Mandelson as well. Within 24 hours of her bravado Liz, like Maggie, would be gone.
More tears, the writer Truman Capote said, are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones. If Thatcher’s epic fall was like a Greek drama so, on a lesser scale was this. Seldom can Nemesis have followed Hubris so abruptly. To paraphrase Karl Marx, this was the Thatcher tragedy happening a second time as slapstick, played at high speed à la Keystone Cops, and to a Benny Hill soundtrack.
We will never know if Truss, before her final PMQs, received a vitamin B-12 injection like her heroine Margaret Thatcher did before hers in November 1990. Nor whether she took a stiff whisky as the Iron Lady was rumoured to at moments of pressure, to oil the creaking hinges. If so, it was surely a final goodbye. The long Thatcherite possession of Liz Truss is now over: she is free to become herself, without the great she-elephant backseat-driving in her soul.
As the wraith of Maggie Thatcher gathers up her red boxes, says her ghostly goodbyes and goes on to haunt other Tory leadership hopefuls, one imagines Liz Truss like Regan at the end of The Exorcist, demons driven out and spirit vacated at last, off to live a happy, normal life. But, returning to her Norfolk constituency, reflecting on her forced resignation in the next few days – perhaps angry, perhaps rueful, perhaps even slightly relieved – Liz Truss might console herself with one final maxim from her former role-model. This time, alas, there really was no alternative.
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