09-07-2025
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.
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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]
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