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It is 50 years since Margaret Thatcher was elected Tory leader and at this week’s shadow cabinet meeting, Lord Forsyth was invited as guest speaker to mark the occasion. He noted the similarities between 1975 and 2025. Back then the party was broke, reeling from defeat and facing the fallout from a reorganisation of local government. But, despite threadbare resources, Thatcher managed to rebuild to win power four years later. ‘You have the potential to do the same,’ Forsyth told Kemi Badenoch.
Yet there is a crucial difference between then and now: a rival on the right. Nigel Farage’s Reform party is vying with Badenoch to inherit Thatcher’s mantle. Each leader is competing for the same voters, members and donors. Across the country, Tory associations are split as old activists peel off to form new Reform branches. Jacob Rees-Mogg, the former Tory MP, suggests it is a familial split. In some cases, this is quite literal, with married couples serving as local officers for rival parties.
Reform supporters argue that if a young Thatcher were around today, she would be one of their own. Her father’s family were old-fashioned Liberals; she knew the Tories were her best bet for advancement. With Reform making inroads with Gen Z, might the party have appealed to her? ‘I don’t think there’s any doubt about it,’ says Farage. ‘It was made very clear to me that she voted Ukip in 1999. She believed in meritocracy, she put Jewish people in her cabinet, working class people like Norman Tebbit. She would have hated wokery and DEI.’
Unsurprisingly, members of Thatcher’s party disagree. Lord Forsyth told Badenoch’s team that she would have dismissed Reform. ‘She was a Conservative through and through,’ says Sir Conor Burns, the former MP and a friend of Thatcher’s in her final years. ‘Her antipathy to wets would have evolved into hostility towards the mouldy pasteurised wets of today.’ He suggests she ‘would probably use her science degree to explain to Kemi the ingredients of successful eradication techniques’.
‘It was made clear to me Thatchervoted Ukip in 1999. She would have hated wokery and DEI,’ says Farage
If Badenoch is to follow Thatcher in leading her party to government, she will need to confront various myths about the Iron Lady. Chief among them concerns her respect for the rule of law. It was a cause close to Thatcher’s heart as a former barrister. In recent years, appeals to this fact have been wielded by various charities and NGOs to beat various Tory governments. From asylum and migration to regulation and policing, many Thatcherites now feel the law too often works against the public. The Margaret Thatcher Centre has launched a rule-of-law programme to reset this relationship.
Such frustrations are not restricted to the right. While the shadow cabinet this week was learning the lessons of Thatcher out of power, their opposite numbers were reappraising her actions in office. In No. 10 on Tuesday morning, Keir Starmer began the weekly cabinet by hailing the Western Alliance, before moving on to New Towns, nuclear power and investment. At the beginning of his premiership, Starmer removed Thatcher’s portrait from his Downing Street study; now he invokes her in speeches as he seeks the elixir of growth. ‘The Mummy returns,’ jokes one minister.
Both Starmer and Badenoch were inspired by Thatcher in their youth; she in support, he in opposition. Badenoch grew up in the patriarchal world of 1980s Nigeria. She says when boys told her ‘girls can’t do this, girls can’t do that’, her two-word response was ‘Margaret Thatcher’. Today Badenoch mixes with Thatcher’s courtiers and admirers. She is currently reading Patrick Cosgrave’s biography of ‘the Lady’. Her hero is Airey Neave, the Colditz escapee who became Thatcher’s campaign manager for the party leadership.
As a graduate, Starmer fulminated in the Socialist Alternatives journal, which declared in 1987 that ‘those committed to radical change’ must ‘fight Thatcherism’s growing popularity among the Labour party itself’. Like others, he has since had to admit to himself her successes.
In his career as a lawyer, Starmer championed much of the post-Thatcher legal framework – that same framework which now frustrates some of his colleagues in government. This past week alone, it has been reported that British judges have refused to deport a Pakistani paedophile on family grounds, suggested that the Ukrainian refugee scheme ought to be used for Palestinians and agreed that an aversion to chicken nuggets is a justifiable reason to pause the deportation of an Albanian criminal. The European Convention on Human Rights was reportedly cited in each case. ‘How can any government get anything done?’ asks one despairing Labour aide.
Values are one thing; interests are another. Thatcher was able to assemble an electoral coalition which rewarded its supporters with cheap shares, low taxes and council houses in key southern marginals. If Badenoch wants to rejuvenate her party’s withering support, she may have to confront these same Thatcherite voters who have benefited from generous pensions, benefits and high house prices.
As CCHQ flogs branded Iron Lady mugs to members, party apparatchiks acknowledge the current situation is neither sustainable nor desirable. Members of Badenoch’s inner circle acknowledge that the party needs younger voters too. One aide proudly displays the famous 1979 party poster at home, which features Thatcher declaring: ‘Don’t just hope for a better life – vote for one.’ That ability to convince the under-fifties that it is in their material interest to vote Tory is key to any hope of electoral revival.
Many of Reform’s big players are former Tories, but the party hopes to attract disillusioned Labour voters in areas such as South Wales and South Yorkshire. In developing its platform, the party has so far relied mostly on informal contacts with economists and in the City. But now it is exploring the possibility of a new thinktank to aid its work – much like the institutes which enabled the Thatcher revolution of the 1970s and 1980s.
So Thatcher clearly continues to inspire. The question is whether, 50 years on, Badenoch, Starmer and Farage can learn the right lessons from her success – and separate the fact from fiction.
What would Margaret Thatcher have made of the political landscape today? James discusses further with Tory grandee Lord Forsyth:
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