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New Statesman
09-07-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
Mrs Thatcher's bastards
Illustration by André Carrilho The intellectual right increasingly resembles the student left, a quarrelsome delta of factions, feuds, tendencies and doctrines. But one thing can still bring it together: the idolisation of Margaret Thatcher. If nothing else, that was the achievement of the inaugural Margaret Thatcher Symposium, held on 7 July in this, her centenary year. We were in Churchill College, a scattering of modern buildings on the very north-west of Cambridge, from which the pinnacles of King's College Chapel are little more than golden candlesticks atop the treeline. The college is home to the Thatcher archive, chosen by the baroness, partially to be near Winston's, but also because her own university, Oxford, declined to award her an honorary doctorate during her premiership. The distance from the university was instructive. This was an event that aspired to be an academic conference but tended consistently towards a séance. These men (every single speaker was male, along with maybe 94 per cent of the audience; rather like Thatcher's cabinets, I suppose) regard Thatcher as a wronged deity. In good order, the jostling denominations put aside their differences and congregated to worship. Though they were dressed in the same uniform of pocket squares and lapel badges, you could divide them by sociology: anxious schoolteachers, free-thinking academics, minor politicians elevated to the peerage, and, of course, misfit sixth-formers with experimental moustaches. The ideological range was equally various. There were the washed-up free-marketeers recycling Ronnie Reagan jokes, and the defrosted Cold Warriors. There were old faces in new guises – Neil Hamilton pretending to be an elder statesman, and David Starkey, TV historian turned fanatical critic of the New Labour consensus. And then there were newer strains, including from Reform UK (as well as splinters within Reform UK – at lunch there was a Richard Tice fan at one end of the table, and a Ben Habib backer at the other). The bulk of the day passed in wearying discussion. Thatcher's supremacy was affirmed and reaffirmed, both in its own context and as inspiration for today. In a speech of self-satisfied alliteration, an assistant headmaster raved about the socialist infiltration of secondary education and the 'red threat in the classroom'. One eager-eyed young academic talked about Thatcher's longest-serving secretary of state for Wales; someone else talked about naval supply lines during the Falklands War. Old men traded erotic stories about meeting the 'lady': about the 'electric current' in the room, about how she 'flirted' and jabbed her finger in your chest. As speakers finished, a smooth convenor used that strange right-wing word of approbation, 'sound' – as in, 'I did say that was going to be sound,' after one talk, and, 'Really, very sound,' after another. To punctuate the tedium, we had to rely on a semi-seething audience, some of whom have not moved on since November 1990. At various points the cabinet members who deserted the lady were referred to as 'bastards' and 'invertebrates', while one woman asked what could have happened if the late Norman Tebbit had not been removed from front-line politics by his wife's injuries in the Brighton bombing. The implication was that he might have been free to stand in the 1990 leadership election. What could have happened, indeed. This is Thatcherism's emotional aftertaste, bitter and defeated. But its real legacy – physical and ideological – was to be found among several of the more high-profile speakers. Between the decrepit and the predictable, a new current did thrum, one modelling itself on Thatcher's 'new right' and posing as its equivalent today. By summoning her ghost, they believe they can recall her geist, and revivify not only the Conservative Party, but conservatism itself. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Neil Hamilton addressed the conference in the afternoon, and I was excited to see him – mainly because I wanted to know who the hell dug up this guy and invited him to pronounce, in his dunce cap of humiliation, on the future of British politics. For those who've forgotten, Hamilton was at the centre of the cash-for-questions scandal involving Mohamed al-Fayed in the mid 1990s. He later declared bankruptcy, and was last seen leading Ukip as it slipped into the far-right abyss. He has also appeared in several pantomimes, but declined to star in Celebrity Wife Swap. He may be one of Thatcherism's bastards, but that's no reason to name him its heir. He'd brought the Eighties with him, wearing a big double-breasted suit that looked like it has been mothballed since 1988. He proudly told us how he and his parliamentary faction, the 'No Turning Back Group', helped to promote the idea that the revenues from privatisation should be used for tax cuts, not for building new infrastructure. Thanks, Neil, a grateful nation writes, as its brooks run brown with sewage. He went on to tell us how he wished the market had been unleashed on state education, too, and the school vouchers scheme mooted under Thatcher adopted. If Neil Hamilton can be forgiven by conservatism, and if the lesson of the Eighties can be that we left the economy too rigidly controlled by the state, something fundamental in our history and our politics has been misunderstood. The wider direction of travel was indicated by the conference's star speaker, Starkey, whose journey from garlanded and wealthy Channel 4 presenter to renegade YouTuber is among the most fascinating in British intellectual life. Since Tebbit's death on 7 July, I've been wondering what he would have made of Starkey's presence. Were there homosexuals (or 'sodomites' as Tebbit called them) in cabinet in 1983? But Starkey quickly displayed his bona fides. The cancelled historian has become one of the most erudite exponents of a new theory of contemporary British history. We are living through our version of the 1970s, he told us, one in which Britain is not being strangled by the trade unions, but by a bureaucratic knot that tightens around politicians the more they struggle. The strings of this knot are the Blair government, the Human Rights Act and the Equality Act, which between them subordinate Britain to international regulations and make it impossible for us to function as a nation-state. This is the spirit of Thatcherism revived, a project to 'undo', in Starkey's phrase, much as she 'undid' the socialist Britain built by Attlee. But, in Starkey's typically vulpine manner, it was Thatcherism with not even the thinnest mask of beneficence. I don't think Margaret Thatcher would ever have said 'this country needs a nasty party', or compared the immigration that took place under Blair to Bertolt Brecht's line about dissolving the people and electing another. The best historiographical judgement on Thatcherism is a joke, an ironic gag, usually credited to the bohemian Tory journalist Peregrine Worsthorne. While Thatcher had set out to recreate the country of her father – sober, Methodist, Victorian – she ended up creating the country of her son, Mark Thatcher, 2nd baronet, international man of mystery. That is, a country run for arms dealers and bagmen. Even Thatcher started to see this by the end: after she died, the Labour MP Frank Field revealed she had once told him: 'I cut taxes and I thought we would get a giving society and we haven't.' If Thatcher's bastards have an elder son, it is Nigel Farage (no one I spoke to thought Kemi Badenoch would be leader of the Tories for long, though they had some kind words about Robert Jenrick). Thatcher is widely seen as the last titanic prime minister in British history, and even she could not pilot the winds she unleashed. Who knows what historical ironies we could be condemned to if her followers get their way. [See also: Morgan McSweeney's moment of truth] Related
New Statesman
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Stop taking Glastonbury so seriously
Illustration by André Carrilho Worthy Farm in Somerset, where Glastonbury Festival has been held 39 times, is 25 miles away from the sea. But once a year it is thronged by seagulls: this is an annual chips-in-styrofoam mecca for the scavenger birds – an event as unmissable for them as it is for the ageing-millennial liberals who populate the site, squatting on the fun that was once the preserve of the young. Parsing the 210,000-strong crowd at the festival is a process of subtle distinction, such as: who is 35 and who is 38? And, does this person live in Stoke Newington or Finsbury Park? Do they work at Deloitte or at a respectable grade in the civil service? Glastonbury in 2025 is where the professional class come to listen to Busta Rhymes (doyen of the 1990s) perform 'Break Ya Neck', with right-hand man, Spliff Star, and pretend the culture hasn't left them behind. Even though of course it has. It is not totally homogenous: there are the elites literally at the peripheries, their clean and catered camps looming from on-high over the grounds (metaphor alert!); and there are attendees on the more feral end of the spectrum (who would think, may I ask, to pitch their tent one metre downstream of the busiest bathrooms on the grounds?). But in its total average, the Glastonbury crowd leans towards the staid, stable and rote. When Richard Tice, the deputy leader of Reform, turned down a chance to debate a Green Party leadership hopeful he said his team feared that Glastonbury would not be safe for him. This is fair – if he is afraid of seagulls or management consultants. I was surprised, nonetheless, by the level of political noise the festival generated this year, from this most un-radical of crowds: a man with a straw boater and a collapsible camping chair – a friend for Tice, perhaps? – sat politely in front of me as Kneecap exploded on to the West Holts Stage on the Saturday afternoon. One member of the Belfast rap trio, Mo Chara, was charged with a terror offence in May, accused of brandishing a Hezbollah flag at a 2024 gig. There were questions about whether the festival should cancel the set entirely; the BBC did not air it live for fear the group would say something on stage that contravened its guidelines and standards ('kill David Attenborough', perhaps). Before the festival had even started, Kneecap – with its anti-British posture and radical Irish republicanism – became the story. And then the trio were overtaken when the previously irrelevant rap duo Bob Vylan led the crowd in chants of 'death, death to the IDF'. Everyone – Wes Streeting, Glastonbury itself – was 'appalled', the BBC terribly sorry for broadcasting it; the world rather worried that these rappers had finally been the ones to radicalise the farmer's-market liberals around the festival. But as I watched Kneecap in the baking heat and saw exactly what I was expecting to (Palestine flags and Irish tricolours everywhere) and heard exactly what I was expecting to (Deloitte account managers joining in with 'Free Palestine' and 'Fuck Keir Starmer' chants) I was struck by the powerlessness of it all. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe This is transient, ephemeral politics. In 2017 Jeremy Corbyn was the main character of Glastonbury, and when his electoral platform totally fell apart, all of a sudden no one at the festival was singing 'Oh, Jeremy Corbyn' anymore. Brexit was the great affront to the Glasto-class at the festival in 2016, and I spotted not one EU flag over the entire week in 2025; the very lonely Ukraine flag I saw looked almost out of date. There is no idée fixe of Glastonbury, but instead the politic du jour. It is hard to blame the millennial consultants and civil servants for rifling through a Rolodex of causes at such a clip. They came of age in the financial crisis and have been politically impotent since; things they don't like (the 2011 Liberal Democrat betrayal, Osborne austerity, Brexit, 'Boris Johnson') keep happening to them. In a country where politics itself is no longer very political and culture feels stuck – Rod Stewart (80) shared a stage on the Sunday with Ronnie Wood (78) and Lulu (76) – all that's left is these end-of-June howls of outrage from staffers at the Big 5. There was a time when liberal Britain could group together to stop the things it did not like, such as the slave trade or Mary Whitehouse. Or redirect the national trajectory: abolishing the death penalty and legalising abortion. They can't anymore. And so here they are with me in Somerset, eating cheese toasties, worrying about seagulls and raging against a non-specified, shapeshifting machine. The ambient Remainer-ism of the past decade of Glastonbury has been traded for this slightly edgier cause, with spikier standard bearers (Kneecap, Bob Vylan). But the sense of a non-committal, window-dressing politik is the same. To fly a Palestine flag in front of the Other Stage during Franz Ferdinand's set is to say: yes, I am a Glastonbury Goer. Just as was the case with open borders in 2018 (prime-time bullshit, by the way, in a camp that has border walls resembling Trump's). But to interrogate the hard politics or even the logic of it all is to misunderstand the project. There are too many drugs to do for that. The worst place to have an ear infection is 41,000 feet over the Atlantic in Delta economy class. The second worst place to have an ear infection is during country/hip-hop crossover event Shaboozey's performance of 'Bar Song (Tipsy)' on Sunday afternoon. It was – like the set by rock band Terrorvision, the crowd at the Information Stage when the independent MP Zarah Sultana appeared, and the 'sound bath' I suffered through at the, er, Healing Fields – extraordinarily loud. But not merely content with the audial invasion, Glastonbury Festival endeavours to assault you with wall of visual noise too: 'PASTA,' a sign screams at me; 'REDUCE, REUSE [and, plot twist], RESPECT' rolls across a TV screen; a posh woman with a hat like I have never seen before (steampunk meets pheasant massacre) walks past; the firework budget alone for the five days I suspect could feed a medium-sized Cambodian town for a year; the lights at the Levels Stage, designed for the ecstasy brain, are too frenetic for the sober one. I understand why these 'Sensory Calm' tents have cropped up everywhere: the one next door to the Kneecap performance got more use than usual. By Sunday the drugs had nearly run out; the politics – already predictable – were exhausting; the atmosphere was increasingly antsy. Deloitte awaited the revellers, they had just remembered. The site smelled like pickled sewage and everyone was taking the last of their ketamine. But, after a three-week cleanup job, the only evidence left of this, all the noise and all the mess, will be the famous Pyramid Stage. The rest – the pheasant-graveyard hat, the man in the boater, the PASTA vendors, the pair camping one metre downstream of the toilets, the elites at the top of the hill – will be gone from Worthy Farm for another year, almost as though nothing happened. And the seagulls will flee, like the ravens leaving the tower of London, to declare a new political lodestar for the Glastonbury class. All of it fair weather, all of it temporary. 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