Britain’s Conservative Party has spent three decades seeking an heir to Margaret Thatcher. It now has two pretenders to choose from
has spent three decades seeking an heir to Margaret Thatcher. It now has two pretenders to choose from. On July 20th, after nearly a fortnight of often vicious campaigning, the field of would-be Conservative leaders was reduced to just two. They are Rishi Sunak, whose resignation as chancellor helped precipitate Boris Johnson’s fall, and Liz Truss, the outwardly loyal foreign secretary who made up ground as other contenders dropped out.
Both seek to harness the ghost of Thatcher as they battle to follow her into Downing Street. Ms Truss was raised by nuclear-disarmament activists before turning to the right at university. Her critics see in her a bizarre tribute act to the party’s most deified figure: she flecks her speech with Thatcherite aphorisms, dresses like the former prime minister and lauds Ronald Reagan.
For Mr Sunak this is a partial telling. He recalls Thatcherism as a project to tame inflation, which he regards as “the ultimate enemy” and which tax cuts now would risk fuelling. Prices rose by 9.4% in the year to June, the highest rate since 1982. Mr Sunak styles himself as a fiscal disciplinarian, who, like Thatcher, helped with the books in his parents’ shop and who was blown off course only by the pandemic.
The two candidates agree on a Thatcherite agenda of post-Brexit deregulation, although Mr Sunak’s plans are more fleshed out. He promises a “Big Bang 2.0” for the City . And both have Thatcherite instincts on the climate; the former prime minister was hostile to government subsidies but increasingly agitated by the state of the planet. Both have said they support the target of reducing Britain’s carbon emissions to net zero by 2050.
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