A Tale of two Tories: Comparing Theresa May and Margaret Thatcher

Differing contexts

The Thatcher era had a very different feel from the second decade of the 21st century. The internet, social media and the process of globalisation have transformed politics. Britain now is much less dominated by two tribal parties. There is a fluidity about present day politics which was not in evidence four decades ago.

Thatcher came to power against a background of public concern about trade union power, rising prices and inefficient nationalised industries – dragons that are slain now, partly as a result of the policies of her governments. By contrast, May became Prime Minister because of her predecessor’s unexpected resignation and the implosion of her main rivals during the subsequent leadership contest. From the start she had to grapple with the immensely complex, divisive issue of Brexit.

In addition, the political fortunes of the two Prime Ministers have been sharply divergent. Thatcher gained majorities of over 100 seats in the 1983 and 1987 General Elections. By contrast, in June 2017 May lost her slender 12-seat majority, leaving her dependent on the support of the Democratic Unionist Party at a time of far greater political difficulty than Thatcher ever faced.

Iron lady and ice maiden

How similar are the Thatcher and May styles of government? Both were capable of ruthlessness in their treatment of Cabinet colleagues. May established herself by dispatching the key figure of the Cameron years, George Osborne, to the backbenches. Thatcher unceremoniously sacked arch-wet Foreign Secretary, Francis Pym, after the 1983 election. She was certainly assertive in her handling of Cabinet, though not uniquely autocratic. All prime ministers since 1945 have used Cabinet committees to take decisions that are then rubber-stamped by the Cabinet as a whole. When May replaced Cameron there was talk in some quarters of a restoration of true Cabinet government, after her predecessor’s presumed reliance on an inner circle of privileged ‘chums’. But this has been vastly overdone. The decision to build the third Heathrow runway, for example, was taken in a sub-committee and then approved by the full Cabinet.

All prime ministers rely on certain key colleagues. ‘Every prime minister needs a Willie,’ Thatcher memorably said of her deputy, William Whitelaw. May has used Damian Green and David Lidington in this role, although neither has enjoyed the formal title of Deputy Prime Minister. She has also been accused of unwisely relying on a tight circle of unelected advisers, just like Thatcher. The latter’s decision to prefer the advice of Professor Alan Walters to that of her Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, led to his resignation in October 1989 and contributed indirectly to her own downfall a year later. Meanwhile, May managed to preserve her position by reluctantly jettisoning her two chiefs of staff, Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, after they were blamed for the 2017 election debacle.

Cabinet has imposed important constraints on both Prime Ministers. For her first two years in Downing Street, Thatcher had to retain old-style paternalists alongside more ideologically congenial free marketeers. May has had to balance Remainers such as Philip Hammond with Brexiteers like Michael Gove. Factionalism is a fact of political life. The difference of course is in the circumstances – with the passage of time Thatcher became increasingly confident, whereas May has been more tightly constrained since the 2017 election. This is largely why her Chancellor – widely tipped for the chop before polling day – is to all intents and purposes secure. It also explains the lacklustre, frustratingly limited January 2018 Cabinet reshuffle. Thatcher too, if less obviously, was restricted as events started to move against her towards the end of her premiership. She was obliged to take Britain into the Exchange Rate Mechanism in October 1990, largely because she could not risk the resignation of a second Chancellor, John Major, less than a year after Lawson’s departure.

Theresa May, ‘Thatcherite’?

How, then, do the two leaders compare in terms of ideas and policies? Does it make sense to see May as an ideological heir to Thatcher? Much depends, of course, on how one defines the concept of ‘Thatcherism’. The key features of the philosophy are well known – a desire to roll back the state, reliance on market forces, the preservation of a traditional moral framework for society and a robust defence of the national interest. In practice, of course, these ideals were applied with a high level of pragmatism by the governments of 1979-90.

Nonetheless, here are some provisional reflections, beginning with social and economic policy and moving on to look at relationships with the USA and Europe.

Theresa May first came to national attention in the autumn of 2002 when, as Party Chairman, she warned that people saw the Conservatives as ‘the nasty party’. She was alluding to the popular view of the 1980s, politically toxic in the new millennium: a divided, uncaring Britain, a world in which ‘there is no such thing as society’. Later, May showed herself socially progressive enough to fit into the modernising programme of the Cameron years. She accepted same-sex marriage and more recently promised to end the practice known as ‘gay conversion therapy’. This is a far cry from the ban on the promotion of homosexuality in Section 28 of the 1988 Local Government Act, although this feature was introduced by a Conservative backbencher, Jill Knight, rather than being a Thatcher government initiative.

Thatcher and May also took contrasting positions on women’s interests. May actively promoted the adoption of more female Conservative parliamentary candidates through the pressure group Women2win, whereas Thatcher always gave the impression that women could succeed through their own efforts, just as she had done. The iron lady notoriously put just one woman in her Cabinet: Baroness Young served as Leader of the Lords, and then only for two years. By contrast, four full members of May’s Cabinet are female and until April 2018 the Home Office was held by a fifth woman, Amber Rudd. This may still fall short of expectations but it does indicate changing times and priorities.

Markets and individuals

There are yet more fundamental differences between the two leaders. Both have drawn heavily on a middle England, Christian upbringing; one the daughter of a Methodist shopkeeper, the other the child of an Anglican vicarage. But they took very different lessons from their formative years. Thatcher’s values centred on the moral as well as the economic power of the free market. May’s tone has been quite different. “It is not anti-business to suggest that big business needs to change,” she said on taking office. “We must make Britain a country that works not for a privileged few but for every single one of us.” She indicated that larger, independent schools would have to justify their charitable status by fostering academies and proposed the appointment of workers’ representatives to company boards. The 2017 Conservative manifesto condemned, in a wholly un-Thatcherite phrase, what it termed ‘the cult of selfish individualism’. It is impossible to think of Thatcher talking, as May did, about fighting the ‘burning injustice’ facing those born into underprivileged circumstances and pointing out that someone born poor in Britain will ‘die on average nine years earlier than others.’

There is common ground between Thatcher and May on economic policy. “A free market economy,” May has insisted, “operating under the right rules and regulations, is the greatest agent of collective human progress ever created.” In January 2018, she mounted a trenchant defence of free enterprise when Jeremy Corbyn used the collapse of construction and outsourcing firm Carillion to attack the concept of the private finance initiative. In distinctly Thatcherite tones she responded, “the vast majority of people in this country, in employment, are employed by the private sector – but the Shadow Cabinet calls businesses the real enemy.”

Yet this commitment does need to be qualified. At the 2016 party conference, May stated that “where markets are dysfunctional, we should be prepared to intervene” and reminded her audience of “the good that government can do.” The 2017 Conservative manifesto proposed an energy price cap which was strikingly similar to Ed Miliband’s policy two years earlier, denounced at the time by the Conservatives as an example of misguided socialist interference in the market. It is highly unlikely that Thatcher, who famously argued in another context that ‘you can’t buck the market’, would have supported price controls to assist lower income households.

The wider world

The coincidence of having, from January 2017, two right of centre leaders in London and Washington, one female, the other male, unavoidably prompted comparisons with the Thatcher/Reagan relationship. Donald Trump himself initially expressed a wish to emulate the closeness of their two predecessors. It has not thus far worked out quite like that. Trump is said to find May weak and lacking in charismatic leadership qualities. During his July visit he criticised May’s handling of Brexit. But it is not just a matter of the evident lack of personal chemistry. Trump’s unpredictability, his tendency to comment on the internal affairs of his allies, and his isolationist and protectionist instincts are major obstacles to a close transatlantic alliance.

Reagan and Thatcher had important differences – for example, on the US administration’s initial equivocation in the Falklands conflict, and its invasion of the Commonwealth territory of Grenada – but the relationship was broadly harmonious. By contrast, it was concerning for the ‘special relationship’ that Trump’s much-discussed UK visit was postponed for so long, after he had already been to European countries, such as France and Poland, which have been much less central to US foreign policy. The public reason for the delay – the president’s objection to the design and cost of the new US London embassy – was widely queried.

Finally, how are we to assess Thatcher and May in relation to the great issue of our own time, that of Europe? It is irresistible to speculate as to which side Thatcher would have taken on the 2016 EU referendum. The Daily Express was absolutely certain: Why Thatcher would tell EU to STICK divorce bill: Europe is ‘out to get as much as it can’, read one headline. But it is ultimately an unanswerable question. What political leaders say in opposition, or in retirement, is often very different from what they do in government.

Thatcher was certainly hostile to the EU in her final book, Statecraft, published in 2002, condemning it as an emerging super-state and arguing that Britain should contemplate leaving if it could not obtain better terms for its membership. In office, however, it was a different matter, even if she had become deeply anxious by the late 1980s about the direction that Europe was taking. Charles Powell, her closest foreign policy adviser, argued that she would have done as Cameron did – renegotiate British membership and then advocate remaining. This was essentially May’s position in the referendum campaign, and even after the Brexit vote, she has refused to say whether she would have taken a different position with hindsight. This was the classic prime ministerial position throughout the period of UK membership; trying pragmatically to protect British interests, whilst criticising the way that the EU operated.

Important differences

Beneath the superficial similarities between two determined female leaders of the same political party, there are important differences. Thatcher was not as inflexibly ideological as some have portrayed her, but she certainly had divergent political and economic priorities from May, and a different set of social attitudes. This is of course only to be expected. A political figure who came to maturity in the Second World War would have markedly different values and experiences from someone who reached that stage three decades later.

Nor has May aroused the extremes of adoration and loathing associated with Thatcher. Yet more worryingly, from May’s point of view, is the way in which she is satirised. Although Thatcher was caricatured, she was never treated with the contempt which has descended on our current Prime Minister. This has grown apace since last year’s electoral miscalculation and has been reinforced by other misfortunes, including May’s tragi-comic October 2017 party conference speech, in which a stage prop collapsed and a prankster handed her a P45 form. Thatcher was sometimes lampooned as demented and vicious, but she was almost always depicted as a dominant figure, mercilessly crushing the opposition – a far cry from the luckless ‘Maybot’ image. In the cruel world of politics, it is much harder to survive people’s scorn than their hatred.