Mrs Thatcher 50 years on: it's a different country now but she still has lessons for Mrs Badenoch

Yahoo

07-02-2025

Fifty years ago this coming Tuesday, Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party. She had got there by a two-stage process.
The first part was the harder. For the first ballot, she had to challenge and defeat the existing leader, Edward Heath. To widespread surprise, she did so, with 130 votes to his 119. (In those days, the only electorate was Tory MPs.) When she had told her loyal husband Denis she was standing, he muttered, 'Heath will murder you'. She reversed that prediction. It was a striking example of 'Who dares, wins'.
Having dared, Mrs Thatcher had the advantage over later entrants. In the second ballot, Heath having resigned, she quite easily defeated Willie Whitelaw, the Heathite establishment candidate. The world's oldest and most electorally successful political party had chosen Britain's first woman leader. Half a century on, the Tories are now on their fourth. Labour still hasn't dared.
Mrs Thatcher's future nemesis, Geoffrey Howe (19 votes in the second ballot to her 146), witnessed the scene as the victor appeared, surrounded by the executive of the 1922 Committee: 'She suddenly looked very beautiful and frail as the half-dozen knights of the shires towered over her. It was a moving, almost feudal occasion.' He wept.
On Tuesday night this week, the anniversary of the first ballot, I chaired a panel at the think tank Policy Exchange to bring together veterans of that struggle to recall those heady days.
Alison Wakeham shocked a contemporary audience used to the political overstaffing of modern times, by revealing to us that, as Mrs T's secretary in 1975, she had been her sole employee. The jolliest surprise came when Mrs T's daughter, Carol, accepted our invitation at the last minute, and read out passages from the funny letters her mother had written her (Carol was living in Australia) during those opposition years.
I can remember my own reaction to the news of the Thatcher victory. In February 1975, I was living in Paris on my gap year. My French landlord expressed interest in the new woman leader. 'Oui,' said my young Liberal self, 'Elle est vraiment horrible.'
In the second half of Tuesday's commemoration, we organised a separate panel about lessons for today, half a century on.
Given what unfolded over the 15 years that followed Mrs Thatcher's election as leader – three consecutive general election victories, the recovery of prosperity, the defeat of militant trade union leaders and the collapse of Soviet communism when faced with the Reagan-Thatcher alliance – our dominant tendency was to celebrate her example.
It is right to do so, but as the Conservatives have again innovated, choosing a young, black, female outsider, there is a danger that Thatcher fans will try to dress the new leader in clothes which were right for then, but would not necessarily fit now.
The basic similarity is that neither Mrs Thatcher nor Mrs Badenoch would have been chosen if things had been going well for the Tories. The party would have settled for a comforting clone of what it had already.
Both women were brave choices. In the Civil Service the word 'brave' is code for 'foolish', but in politics in bad times, that is not so. Both Mrs T and Mrs B were suitable choices to follow electoral defeat, because of their will to make things better.
But it is instructive to focus on the differences. The first is that Mrs Thatcher inherited, almost without having to think about it, a nationwide machine called the Conservative Party.
Behind it stood a large tribe with cultural confidence. They represented well-established ways of life in all classes, from great landowners and industrialists, through well-educated professionals (in those days, incredible to relate, even doctors and teachers were often Tories), possessors of private pensions and armed services much more numerous than today, to shopkeepers, sole traders, what we now call 'start-ups', police and many of the skilled working classes. Such people, in their hundreds of thousands, gave their voluntary effort and quite often their money to help the party.
In the intervening years, all this has atrophied. Mrs Thatcher used to speak confidently of 'our people'. I am not sure I know what equivalents Mrs Badenoch can call on today.
Organisationally and culturally, everything is fragmented, and constituency life is weak, even in the mere 121 Conservative seats which remain.
With this decline has come a decline in respect for MPs and therefore in their average quality. Those knights of the shire whom Geoffrey Howe romanticised were not necessarily brilliant, but they had standing as patriotic people, with quite wide experience, often in war. Such declines are deeply serious, because the Conservative Party's entitlement to power has always rested on its representative authenticity. This has provided the party's vehicle and its engine. Policies matter, of course, but they are only the cargo.
Ever since Tony Blair altered the hours of the Commons ostensibly to be 'child-friendly', but really to prevent opposition from questioning his legislation, the Commons has become a place that makes laws without understanding them. As a result, it no longer tests the abilities of politicians as they rise. When they get to the top, they often disintegrate.
Counter-culturally, I would suggest that Kemi Badenoch should work extremely hard to cultivate the talents of her best MPs – as Mrs T did successfully with people of the calibre of Howe or Nigel Lawson – and to plan reforms which, if she won office, would re-empower Parliament against the executive.
Another difference is that Mrs Thatcher faced no serious challenge from the Right. Mrs Badenoch does. Mrs T's whole task was to fight the Left. That meant Labour, large parts of the trade union movement, the worst bits of the public sector, most Liberals and even some in her own party. It was conceptually simple, though never practically easy.
Usually, she could head off revolt on the Right. In 1978, when, still in opposition, the Tories were doing badly in the polls. Mrs Thatcher said that many people felt 'swamped' by the scale of immigration (though levels were 10 per cent of current rates).
The 'Wets' in her party were horrified, but that one word from her shored up voters otherwise tempted by the extremists.
Today, the stratospheric levels of immigration in recent Tory years mean that it has become the biggest single cause of mistrust. That is why the subject has this week produced Mrs Badenoch's first new policy. She knows it will need much, much more.
The centre of political gravity has shifted. Where once an obsessive fear of immigration suggested racism, today the scale of the problem, and the effects of the resulting welfare costs, crime and Islamist extremism put it almost top of the agenda.
The sense of politicians' helplessness to deal with immigration because of 'human-rights' constraints has hit the Tories even harder than Labour because theirs was the party that was supposed to understand.
Nigel Farage has shown political genius in exploiting these discontents, against both main parties. Who can blame him?
But my second rather countercultural suggestion is that Mrs Badenoch should not try to out-shout Reform but should develop her party's thoughts more carefully and systematically. By 2028-9, having witnessed many years of governmental incompetence by both parties, voters might come to admire a party which had put in the work in opposition rather than making the most noise.
'Times spent in reconnaissance is never wasted,' was the old saying that Margaret Thatcher most liked to repeat.
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