From the moment of her being voted Prime Minister in the wake of the leave vote in the European Referendum last June, Theresa May has been seen by many as the second coming of Margaret Thatcher. Upon assuming office, May became the second female Prime Minister that Britain has seen and therefore it is perhaps natural that she immediately drew comparisons with Thatcher rather than any other Prime Minister, from Sir Robert Walpole to David Cameron. And it can’t be denied that there are similarities between May and Thatcher. Both women had impressive parliamentary careers before their ascension to head of government (twenty years in Thatcher’s case and nineteen in May’s). Both women had a devoted (and wealthy) husband behind them and both studied at Oxford University. But the socioeconomic climates of Britain when both women became Prime Minister are vastly different which begs the question; how similar will their leadership really be?
On the 4th of May 1979, Thatcher arrived at Downing Street in the first Conservative majority victory since the beginning of the decade. Although neither she nor anybody else could have known at the time, this was the first of four following consecutive victories for Thatcher’s Conservative party. Within months of taking office, Thatcher had begun to put in place strategies which would later see her as one of the few in history to have an ‘ism’ after their name. Some of her key concepts include promoting low inflation, privatisation of state-owned industries and sale of council houses to their tenants. It was these social and economic policies as well as her political style are referred to with the noun ‘Thatcherism’.
During the eleven years she spent at Number 10, Thatcher developed her own style of government that has gone down in history books as being unique to her. So is it possible that we will now see the beginning of a period that will, in the future, be referred to as ‘Mayism?’ Given that May’s Prime Ministership is, as of yet, only six months old, the one thing that we are currently lacking is the distance with which we can retrospectively discuss Thatcher’s government. Given that May only assumed office in July, it is currently difficult to unpick what constitutes as the beginning of her government and what is still the tail end of David Cameron’s, particularly given that Britain’s exit from the EU has not even happened yet.
Rather than successfully winning a general election as Thatcher had, May obtained the position after former Prime Minister David Cameron’s unexpected resignation as a result of Britain voting to leave the European Union (EU). The EU traces its origins back to the European Economic Committee (EEC) and Britain’s membership with it was still in its infancy when Thatcher took office, Britain having joined in 1973. Unlike Thatcher, May was not elected because she had promised certain policies during her campaign that the public found appealing enough to lead them to vote for her. May was elected because she was considered the best politician to lead the UK in the wake of Cameron’s shock departure, despite the fact that she had been cautiously neutral throughout the run-up to Brexit.
So what exactly are May’s policies? Undoubtedly the main one people are anxious to see is how she will execute Brexit. After a seemingly slow start, May recently issued a speech at Lancaster House detailing exactly how the process of Britain leaving the EU will unfold and provided answers to the many questions that the 52% have. The speech detailed Theresa May’s priorities for Brexit, including maintaining the common travel area between the UK and Republic of Ireland (Given that, after Brexit, Northern Ireland will be the only UK country to share a land border with an EU country) and maintaining control of migration between the UK and the EU. Rather formidably, May made it clear that she wanted “the freshest possible trade with EU countries” and delivered a warning to the EU when she affirmed that, “trying to punish the UK would be an act of calamitous self harm”. Such firm loyalty to the country she leads is admirable and shows her determination, although she has a while to go yet before she is given a nickname half as authoritarian as Thatcher’s ‘Iron Lady’.
Their dedication to the UK aside, the state of the Conservative Party under May’s government is markedly different to how it was under Thatcher’s. In the decades which separate their two governments, the perception of the Conservative party has undergone a massive change. When Thatcher took office, it was very much a party for white, upper-class men and she was the revolutionary grocer’s daughter. Yet despite her many years in government, after Thatcher’s departure from office and the end of her Thatcherism era (which was briefly followed by John Major), Tony Blair won a landslide vote and was hailed as the figurehead for New Labour at the dawn of a new age when he was elected in 1997. It seemed almost as if the Tory party had regressed since the end of Thatcher’s term; indeed in 2001, Theresa May famously dubbed her own Conservative Party, ‘The Nasty Party’. With Blair’s initial popularity and two terms in office, it seemed that the Conservatives had been well and truly squashed.
Yet within little more than a decade, they came back fighting, firstly with a coalition then a majority. And their image had been entirely shaken up. Far from the male middle-upper class party of Thatcher’s day, Cameron’s successful New Tories (which May has now taken over) focused on us all being in it together. The party that May now leads attracts male and female voters alike, from different socioeconomic groups and different ethnicities. May’s current Conservative party is more universally likeable and approachable than Thatcher’s was. And yet, Thatcher inherited a government from Labour and spent over ten years putting her own mark on the decade with her policies. As of yet, May has not had the chance to do that, in the short time she has spent as PM. This time last year she probably had no idea she would end up as Prime Minister than anyone else. Yet she has the same potential to do what Margaret Thatcher did; she has a head start, in the advantage of helming a more likeable party than Thatcher’s Conservative party was, and arguably than the current Labour party is.
Thatcher and May are women of different generations with different values. Thatcher was a believer of traditional Victorian family values and in 1988 included a controversial clause in a Local Government Act which forbade promoting homosexuality as acceptable in schools. By contrast, May’s current Conservative Party now has a number of gay male and female MPs and the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, Ruth Davidson, is openly in a lesbian relationship. Both female Prime Ministers are very much of their respective time, yet there is no escaping that similarities do exist between them. They are both from middle class backgrounds with clergymen fathers and both faced weak opposition in the bickering Labour party (from James Callaghan to the increasingly disliked Jeremy Corbyn). However the principle common bond that links them is their (female) leadership of the Conservative and Unionist Party.
Although the Conservative Party has undergone ideological changes over the years, the years with Thatcher as its head are remembered more so than the leadership of any other Tory leader. Margaret Thatcher entered Downing Street after a period of national uncertainty-the Winter of Discontent-but proved capable of the task of leading successfully leading the nation and winning two more consecutive elections. Given that May also entered office during national unpredictability after the unexpected Brexit vote on June 23rd last year, who is to say that she won’t carry out a similar feat? What is important when studying the success (of lack thereof) of any historical era, be it the reign of a monarch or the leadership of a government, is a retrospective distance to be able to fully analyse the impact of the time period. With Thatcher, we in 2017 have just that, but with May, we don’t. For all we know, in 100 years time, our great-grandchildren could be studying the successes of the Mayism era in school. It is equally possible that they could not. We’ll just have to wait and see.
