A version of this article was originally published in last week’s issue of The Spectator.
What set Margaret Thatcher apart from so many other Conservatives in the 1970s was that she had read Friedrich von Hayek. In Richard Cockett’s Thinking the Unthinkable – his indispensable account of the intellectual origins of Thatcherism – he describes how Thatcher used to pull a copy of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty out of her handbag, declaring, ‘This is what we believe.’
Charles Moore shows in his definitive biography just how widely Thatcher read in the period before she became prime minister. Karl Popper, Frédéric Bastiat, John Maynard Keynes, Edmund Burke, Joseph Schumpeter, Alexis de Tocqueville, Alfred Marshall, C.S. Lewis, Adam Smith and Rudyard Kipling – all were quoted in her speeches after she had done the requisite homework.
In preparing for a single speech in 1977, Thatcher read and annotated articles by Shirley Robin Letwin, P.T. Bauer, Milton Friedman, Samuel Brittan, Robert Skidelsky, Hayek, Alan Walters and Paul Johnson. When was the last time a Tory leader chose Dostoevsky’s The Possessed and Koestler’s Darkness at Noon as ‘holiday reading’?
When I first got to know Kemi Badenoch, I realised at once that she was cut from the same cloth. Four-and-a-half years ago, in anticipation of a trip to California, she wrote to me to ask a favour. The standard ask by British politicians visiting the Bay Area is for a meeting with one of the masters of the technological universe. (‘Do you know Peter Thiel and/or Marc Andreessen?’) This was different: ‘You wouldn’t by any chance know Thomas Sowell personally would you? He is probably the biggest reason I am a Conservative MP today and probably my last surviving hero. I am feeling very guilty that I postponed every opportunity to meet Roger Scruton when I had the chance and now it is too late! Don’t want to repeat the mistake.’ That got my attention.
Tom Sowell is less well known in the UK than he deserves to be. At the Hoover Institution and among American conservatives more generally, he is a legendary figure. Born in segregated North Carolina and raised in hard-knocks Harlem, Sowell is now the grand old man of conservative economists. His being black is important, but not the most important thing about him. He was one of that extraordinary generation of free-market economists trained at the University of Chicago after the war. In a prolific career, he has made the case against minimum wages, affirmative action and many other misconceived progressive policies. His most recent book, Social Justice Fallacies, is a tour de force.
Now aged 94, Sowell is more or less a recluse, and to my embarrassment I failed to get Badenoch the meeting she sought. But the fact that she credits Sowell with making her a Conservative MP is all the reason any Tory party member should need to vote for her.
I have nothing against Robert Jenrick. I have never met him. I have never read him. But that is the point. Jenrick is such an archetypally uninspired Tory frontbencher that he’s earned the nickname ‘Robert Generic’, whereas Kemi has convictions. She has principles. This is hard for some people to take. ‘She doesn’t suffer fools gladly,’ I have heard it said. She has ‘sharp edges’ and ‘rubs people up the wrong way’. It is astonishing to me that any British Conservative could regard any of these qualities as demerits. They are the things the party establishment said about Thatcher even after she, Hayek in her handbag, had won them three consecutive general elections.
Of course, 2024 is not 1979. The challenges Britain faces today are not the same ones we faced on the eve of the Thatcher era. But they are not completely different either. The economy has been performing worse than peer economies for most of the past decade – just as was true in the 1970s. Inflation has been more of a headache than elsewhere – as in the 1970s. Public finances are in a dire state – rather worse than in the 1970s in fact. And the entire country feels run down, the result of decades of under–investment in housing, transport and energy infrastructure. That, combined with an increase in population largely due to substantial net immigration, explains the mood of malaise that afflicts modern Britain.
What is different is that because of immigration, we are a much more racially mixed country than we were 45 years ago. And that is why Badenoch would pose such a formidable threat to the Labour government if she were to be elected Tory leader. We British are not, despite our reputation in the New York Times, mired in nostalgia for the imperial past. It should come as no surprise that we could soon have Europe’s first black female leader – and that she is a Conservative.
A country adrift needs a leader with conviction
Badenoch has been an effective opponent of ‘critical race theory’, arguing that ‘adherents to this modern creed do not think in terms of individuality and personal responsibility, freedom of association or expression and shared experiences, but separated, segregated identities of victims and oppressors’.
But being black is not the most important thing about Badenoch. Like Thatcher, she is middle-class, the daughter of professionals. Like Thatcher, she studied a hard subject at university (computer systems engineering) and came to political and economic theory later in life, after experiencing the real world of the private sector.
Like Thatcher, Badenoch is a free–trader in a world of tariffs, as she made clear in a speech on trade at Chatham House in March in which she strongly opposed ‘hosing industries down with subsidies or slapping tariffs on products from abroad’. Like Thatcher, she is also keenly aware of the threat posed to liberty by an increasingly aggressive Communist superpower.
Best of all, from my point of view, is her sense of history. One of the books that has influenced her thinking is Daron Acemoglu and Jim Robinson’s Why Nations Fail, which makes the point that Britain’s spectacular rise in the 18th and 19th centuries owed more to constitutional constraints and the rule of law than to (as she put it) ‘colonialism or white imperialism or privilege or whatever’. That is a fundamental argument not only about Britain’s past, but also about its future, which will be prosperous only if we return our government to the principles that Badenoch holds dear.
A country adrift needs a leader with conviction. We are lucky to have her.
Watch more on SpectatorTV:
Comments
Comment section temporarily unavailable for maintenance.