Endorsements for the Conservative leadership election continue to appear with alarming rapidity. But it’s a sign of our new impotence in opposition that the most notable story to involve a Tory this week focused on a leader who stepped down (the bastards) over three decades ago. There is a spectre haunting Downing Street, and its name is Margaret Thatcher.
The back and forth about the location (or lack thereof) of the Iron Lady’s Downing Street portrait is a quintessential silly season story. The big hacks are on holiday, as per their Instagrams. Two months in, this government continues to sink into the ooze, as Keir Starmer sprinkles hope and optimism on a weary electorate. Our leadership election won’t hot up for a few days yet.
And yet one still needs to fill newspapers. So we hear that Tom Baldwin – the man tasked with the unenviable job of making Starmer interesting to the book-buying public – has attended a literary festival, and informed his audience of his subject’s dislike of a portrait of his predecessor-but-eight in her former Number 10 study. He has had it moved, although we don’t know where.
Starmer found the portrait “unsettling” and aimed to “get rid of it”. The pair had been touring Downing Street. The Prime Minister has to find some way to fill his day whilst Big Sue takes all the meaningful decisions. Starmer described the room as somewhere they could go “and have a quiet talk”. Having the Iron Lady observe their conversation rankled for lefties of their particular age.
I understand their concerns. I had to take down my Thatcher pictures once I started bringing girlfriends home, on the basic assumption that her staring at you while you’re doing your best to woo was a tad distracting. Starmer’s job is even more important than pulling. It is now his house. If he doesn’t want a picture of her hanging there, he is in his right to remove it.
But that he chooses to do so is interesting, not least because the portrait was commissioned by the last Labour Prime Minister. Gordon Brown had it unveiled in 2009 and intended for it to remain permanently in Downing Street. Number 10 hasn’t yet confirmed whether it has been moved to a different room, or palmed off to some gallery at the other end of Whitehall.
Starmer is older than you think. It’s one of my favourite facts about British politics that he is almost two years senior to Nigel Farage. He was in his twenties during the 1980s, studying law, becoming a barrister, and going for the Morrissey look, before that got you put on a Home Office watchlist. Thatcher would have loomed impossibly large in his formative political imagination.
As Jacqui Smith put it, Starmer “can’t win”. He was previously lambasted from the left for daring to suggest he admired Thatcher for “setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism”. That was a shallow act of pointless triangulation, designed to court and win that all-important Charles Moore endorsement. It a sign of how, a decade after her death, she still lives rent-free in in very many heads.
Tory leadership candidates continue to pledge fealty to the Lady. Laura Trott’s endorsement of Kemi Badenoch is only the latest of the genre. We produced an entire leader and Prime Minister on the back of Thatcher-cosplay. Grumpy lefties continue to buy those “Still hate Thatcher” shirts that they advertise in the back of Viz. She elicits cask-strength emotions from all sides.
She does so for the same reason that Starmer disliked her portrait. She is a constant reminder that there was a Tory Prime Minister who challenged Evelyn Waugh’s dictum – who did put the clock back more than one second. You can debate whether she was the butcher of post-war social democracy or its saviour. But she still tamed inflation, neutered the unions, and gave the Argies a hiding.
We may be living in Clement Attlee’s miserable shadow. But Thatcher still privatised moribund industries, reversed the ratchet of a pointlessly punitive tax regime, and took the fight to those forces of inertia, both internal and external, which were condemning Britain to torpor and irrelevance. She gave us our confidence back. Read Who Dares Wins, and swell with patriotic fervour.
Since her, Tony Blair has managed to also win three elections. Through the proliferation of the legalistic perma-state, his shadow hangs over subsequent governments as readily as she did his. But will Blair get the statues that she does? The funeral? I doubt it. His memory will be tainted by Iraq. That third election win came with an almost Starmer-esque absence of enthusiasm.
Thatcher reminds us that politicians can change the country and can be rewarded for doing so. She shows that leaders do matter. Had it not been her who succeeded Edward Heath and James Callaghan, and instead some chinless One Nation grubber, Britain would not have been brought out of its death spiral. She set a bar any future leader will have to match. Where there is discord…
Starmer is not made of iron, so he fears her. However hard he tries these next five years, he will not supplant her as our last Prime Minister of whom a good chunk of voters still think fondly. He will not reshape Britain in his image, for the simple fact he has no vision, except the tedious yet inexorable extension of lawfare, bureaucracy, and the reign of the pious, petty, and bland.
Too often, we Tories do little more than pay homage to the Thatcher cargo cult. We buy mugs and posters of her and dear Winston. Children are given garbled takes of their achievements alongside the First Miracle at Headingly. My father played The Downing Street Years on the way to school. Darkest Hour always raises a tear. Parties need heroes and myths to get activists out of bed.
But rather than simply cheer their memory, we should abstract what they achieved in office, and apply the same principles to today. We need our updated version of Stepping Stones. We need a leader who knows what they believe and has the confidence in their destiny to know that they are best placed to win an election, push through their principles, and save Britain from her stagnation.
Starmer is scared of her because she is a reminder of what the Conservatives can achieve when we get our act together. We can be magnificent, if only we have the willpower, the ideas, and the balls. If Starmer is more worried about a portrait than he is about the Leader of the Opposition, it’s a sign of how little a challenge we pose. But being underestimated never did Thatcher any harm.
The ambition of any leadership candidate should be to have a portrait in Number 10 one day that generates similar angst. Do any of those running have that potential? Perhaps. Only time can tell. But learning the lessons of the Lady is no bad start for any aspirational Tory. Plenty of suitable works are available. Long may she plague Starmer’s subconscious, the saucy minx.