Another day, another British political wannabe making remarks about Margaret Thatcher that you can only file under: “Did you ever meet Thatcher? Fine, most of us did not meet her, but did you ever meet anyone who was alive under Thatcher?”
To Liz Truss and free market fundamentalists everywhere, channelling Thatcher means forging ahead against all expertise, making dumb and predictably immiserating decisions, then turning round when things go wrong and saying that it is everybody else’s fault that you couldn’t vandalise hard enough.
On no account should you mistake this for approval, but Thatcher wasn’t anything like that. One of the many infuriating things about her was that the consequences of her most radical decisions landed long after they had been made. She sold off council flats in the 1980s, and it would be another 30 years before we would realise that none had been built since and 40% of housing stock was now in the hands of private landlords. In 1979, we all owned our shared utilities and 7% of us owned shares. Today, 8% of us own shares, the rest own nothing, everything is more expensive and the waterways are full of raw sewage.
Penny Mordaunt channels Thatcher mainly by always having a blow-dry and speaking with incredible emphasis. OK, Thatcher did both those things; but she did attach some meaning to her words. It wasn’t just random “stand up and fight” nonsense, like a pub brawler.
Keir Starmer, meanwhile, lauds Thatcher as a politician who made lasting change, which is true. But the change was bad. Thatcher herself would never have said something so dumb. She would have measured whether she agreed with the revolution before cheering it for its own sake.
Starmer was just doing what Gordon Brown did in 2007, when he invited Thatcher into Downing Street for a two-hour chat over a cup of tea: using Thatcher emblematically to project to the commentariat just how non-scary and non-socialist he intended to be. Brown described Thatcher in similar terms, as a “conviction” politician, which is true: her conviction was that society is for losers. A lot of people were astonished that a Labour prime minister would fawn over that, and three years later Brown resigned when the election resulted in a hung parliament. Impossible to say whether those two events were related.
Let’s just recap what life under a Thatcher government was like. She stewarded incredible rises in inequality, wiping out all the redistributive gains since the second world war. The health service was rickety, local authorities were struggling, public spaces looked degraded and unloved and people suffered terrible hardship. High unemployment, tight-fisted benefits and deindustrialisation told a clear story of a government that didn’t lose much sleep over people’s dignity and happiness. I remember the first time I heard Brown – yeah, the same guy! – say: “What’s an economy for, if not to give people jobs?” I had never heard that before, that the economy existed in the service of the people. I was completely acclimatised to the opposite frame, that people had to be fed into the jaws of the economy.
Thatcher was also no stranger to culture wars, and section 28, banning the “promotion of homosexuality” by local authorities, vicious in its own right, was actively terrifying when it coincided with HIV: it felt as if there was a genuine question mark over whether the state would sacrifice lives on the altar of its performed bigotry. The day after the 1987 general election, I was 13; I remember my mum wore a badge saying “Don’t blame me – I didn’t vote for her”, and people on buses smiled sad smiles at her.
So, yes, in 1990, after 11 years of Thatcher, I’d call the mood depressed and angry: but it wasn’t white-knuckle like this. She didn’t seem to be in it for personal enrichment, and nor did she seem incompetent, at sea, lacking any basic grip of events or any understanding of the principles of government. In short, no one in politics today is anything like the Iron Lady: her own party has nobody of her efficacy; the opposition, pray God, has nobody as cruel. I wish they could just choose a new role model.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
