THE Tory government decided to push the self-destruct button right in the middle of its own conference. Normally guaranteed to be the showcase that gets them good headlines, instead Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng engineered a financial crisis before the conference and crowned this with an embarrassing U-turn in the middle of their showcase event.

To get a sense why, I went to a Tory conference fringe meeting organised by the Thatcherite Centre for Policy Studies titled “What would Maggie do.” The short answer for how the Tories screwed themselves is that a life-size cardboard cut-out of Thatcher was put on the platform, as if this lifeless icon could join the debate.  

The real-life Thatcher was a tactical fighter for their side, who by a mix of force and guile transferred money and power from working people to big business and the rich. Unable to repeat the trick, the Tories have settled for a cardboard imitation, which is rigid, thin and doesn’t work.

The longer answer came from the debate. Former Tory minister Lord David Willetts who worked for Thatcher in her policy unit, tried to tell delegates Thatcher was “rather more pragmatic than people realise.”  

This pragmatism didn’t mean being nice, it meant being tactical, including “being pretty clear on the sequencing” in politics. Willetts gave the example of the miners’ strike.

Thatcher first tried closing the coal mines that sparked the miners’ strike in 1981. She faced the threat of a national strike — and backed down, because the government did not have enough coal stocks to resist. Thatcher withdrew the pit closures only to start the fight again in 1984 when she was more prepared for battle.  

Willetts said Thatcher prepared the ground as Tory leader for four years before becoming prime minister “but this government was elected in 2019” under Boris Johnson, offering something very different from straight Thatcherism.  

Despite taking over in midterm “Kwasi and Liz have tried to do in six months what Thatcher tried to do in 10 years.” He is saying they are trying to rush the job without support and messing it up.

Willetts also made a subtler point, saying: “Most of the dilemmas that Thatcher faced is because there is more to life than the market,” that she wanted to promote capitalism within a “Christian moral framework,” and that the “challenge is” to replicate this “in a more secular age.”

The point here isn’t that for Thatcher, Christianity restrained capitalism. It’s rather that Thatcher used pre-existing small-c conservative “moral frameworks” that bound society together — religious obedience, “family values,” “law and order” and so forth. By putting too much emphasis on the market to build a conservative political coalition and ignoring “flag, faith and family” values, the right risks losing popular support.

Willetts made very clear “I’m not a left-wing conservative.” Indeed, he isn’t. As well as serving in Thatcher’s policy unit, he also served as a universities minister under Cameron.  

The standard profile of Willetts by Parliamentary biographer Andrew Roth describes him thus: “David Willetts has consistently backed every right-wing cause: the poll tax, the Tories’ NHS reforms, which he pioneered, and proposals to raise the pensionable age to 67. He urged the unemployed to undercut wage standards to get jobs and opposed a national minimum wage.”

Willetts also previously led the Thatcherite Centre for Policy Studies, host for the event.

But, despite his experience of Thatcher in power, the Tory delegates were unenthusiastic about Willetts lessons, reserving their applause for Nile Gardiner director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at US conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation.  

Gardiner worked as a researcher for Thatcher in the 2000s, a decade after she lost power; if you like old black and white films, he is like the young hustler who works with the deluded fading star Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard.  

Gardiner also had a touch of the Antony Perkins “I’m-not-mad-honestly” performance from Hitchcock’s Psycho, where the psychopath pretends the stuffed body of his dead mother is giving the orders. Gardiner’s experience of Thatcher is from her years out of power, bitterly reminiscing over a gin and tonic, but that is the one the delegates liked.

Gardiner backed Truss as a free marketeer who “we should support.” Her only fault was the U-turn on tax as “it is vital the Prime Minister projects strength, determination and resolve. Another couple of U-turns would be disastrous.”  

For Gardiner the main enemies were Tory “wets” and “those in the Conservative Party who are aiding and abetting the socialists.” In a paranoid rant that was popular with the delegates Gardiner said Truss “should not be listening to the howls of condemnation from the IMF, Joe Biden or the Labour Party,” because Biden was the “most far left President in US history.”

The third speaker, Taxpayers’ Alliance founder Matthew Elliott, also had few criticisms of Truss. He mused Thatcher was still relevant because he’d left conference to bid £6,000 on a Thatcher portrait because “I could run to that” — but it actually sold for £30,000.

The Tories have trapped themselves worshipping cheap cardboard cut-outs or expensive portraits of Thatcher, instead of actual, tactical Thatcherism.  

Thatcher’s project hit a barrier around 1990, derailed by nurses strikes, the poll tax struggle and the prospect of electoral failure.  

Her neoliberal reforms have been preserved and even extended, but only with a series of compensations and distractions and different ways to “sugar the pill.”  

Even these were running out of steam, post financial crisis, with the Tories resorting to repeated “rebrands” and a rotating series of prime ministers — Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss. But the relaunches and bursts of state support — over Covid and energy — are no longer covering the cracks.  

Finally in desperation, a section of the Tories has looked at this mix of “free-market” policies kept on the road by a series of distractions and payoffs and decided the problem isn’t the free-market policies, it’s the distractions and payoffs.  

It is a last gamble on an unsophisticated, headbanging imitation of Thatcherism, like an unconvincing tribute band. It’s vicious enough to hurt a lot of people, but also stupid enough to lose badly.