With the hundredth anniversary of her birth and the thirty-fifth anniversary of her resignation in sight, Margaret Thatcher still looms large in British politics. This year alone, Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch have both spoken about her. In January, writing of his plans to cut regulation, Starmer noted how the Thatcher government had deregulated financial capital. In a speech to the Centre for Policy Studies’ ‘Remaking Conservatism’ Margaret Thatcher Conference in March, Badenoch commented, ‘For me, Margaret Thatcher wasn’t just a historical figure. She shaped my entire view of politics, of leadership and of Britain itself.’ ‘We must be as bold as Thatcher was’, Badenoch declared.
As my new book – ‘Margaret Thatcher: Life After Downing Street’ – reveals, this invocation of Thatcher in relation to contemporary events was one of the hallmarks of her life as an ex-premier, and is why even now she has political relevance.
This has not happened by chance, however. It is the result of how Britain’s first female prime minister conducted herself after 1990, and of how we reacted and continue to react to her both as an individual and as an idea.
Until illness forced her out of active political life in 2002, Lady Thatcher was, in the words of The Margaret Thatcher Foundation, the ‘guardian of Thatcherism’. All around the world, she extolled what she saw as the achievements of her time in office. At the same time, she also stressed the ongoing relevance of her ‘ism’ to the politics of the day, seemingly to the politics of all days. In a famous 1992 Newsweek article, she declared, ‘Thatcherism will live. It will live long after Thatcher has died’. Surveying the history of the United Kingdom since 1990, who could say she was wrong? We seem still to be grappling with Thatcherism and its application to policy.
There is also another side to Margaret Thatcher’s post-1990 life, one that is key to her continued and continuing political influence. Whatever may or may not have happened on the policy front, more fundamentally, we have never really stopped grappling with the idea of the Thatcher way of governing – and her success at it. Just as Margaret Thatcher was more than a person, so Thatcherism was more than a philosophy. As she herself made clear after 1990, it was also a particular style of leadership, her being the embodiment of it. Interviewed by her daughter Carol Thatcher in 1995, she commented, ‘That’s why I’m an ism…It is recognition that we didn’t just govern from day to day – we had principles, we had purpose, we had action, and we had perseverance.’
It is largely against this version of Margaret Thatcher – the idea rather than the individual – that the Conservative leaders and prime ministers of all parties who have followed her have been measured, sometimes by themselves. This was not a phenomenon confined to the United Kingdom: in the US, she became and remains an icon of conservatism – both in terms of substance and style. On her last birthday in 2012, Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney tweeted, ‘Happy birthday to the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher – a tower of strength in the cause of liberty.’ A more recent presidential candidate, Nikki Haley, has spoken about her in similar terms. Asked in February 2023 what inspiration Lady Thatcher had been, Haley replied, ‘Oh, I adore her….She was the ultimate Iron Lady.’
Thatcher was not just the ultimate Iron Lady, she was also the ultimate politician – more nuanced as an ex-prime minister than we have previously appreciated. For all her criticisms of her successor’s government, for example, she was also always supportive, at least publicly, of Major’s leadership; and whatever her disagreements with the Major and Blair governments, she consistently promoted Britain’s interests across the globe, perhaps most notably in her work on Hong Kong and China under Major and on Kosovo under Blair. Above all, on the central issue affecting British politics for the past four decades – our relationship with the European Union, in which she herself played such a leading role after 1990 – she never publicly advocated withdrawal, despite privately favouring it.
This combination of the idea and the individual, the neon of one and the nuance of the other, and their interplay, makes Margaret Thatcher’s life after Downing Street a fascinating period to study, not just for what it reveals about her both as a person and as a persona, but also for what it reveals about the role of a former prime minister. With a record-breaking eight ex-premiers currently alive, we need to understand that role perhaps more than ever before.
‘Margaret Thatcher: Life After Downing Street’ is published by Biteback.
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