Mummy Returns: The ghost of Margaret Thatcher still – still! – haunts British politics
The IndependentRishi Sunak’s claim to be a “Thatcherite” was one of the first things we knew about him. She was moving in that direction in her later years – some Tories will never forget William Hague’s second Tory conference, when she unhelpfully declared: “In my lifetime all our problems have come from mainland Europe.” Even more unhelpfully, however, she died before the 2016 EU referendum, thus creating a cottage industry in speculation about how she would have voted. “I think Margaret Thatcher would have agreed,” he said, that it’s “not right to just assert a headline chase the short-term popularity that that might give, without a clear and deliverable plan for how to get there”. I don’t think she would have agreed with Theresa May making net zero carbon by 2050 the official policy of the UK government – which is something that Sunak cannot say. But now we are straying into a different area of alternative history: “What Would Tony Do?” Perhaps it would be best simply to judge Sunak’s policies on their merits, rather than in relation to his predecessors – and rather than, in particular, invoking a controversial prime minister who died a decade ago.
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