I was transfixed last year by the brilliant three-volume biography of Margaret Thatcher by Charles Moore.
Published: 26 March 2025
I still feel faintly guilty at having let down that giant in a world full of political pygmies by failing to vote for her in 1979, because I was terrified she would reintroduce capital punishment and give the Provisional IRA a propaganda gift.
I was a civil servant at the time working in the Department of Industry.
Part of my job involved promoting the Labour government’s industrial strategy.
In those far off days, civil servants thought they should carry out the wishes of their political masters rather than secretly impose their own so despite my growing belief that Whitehall did not know best, I loyally sang its praises to businessmen.
(I don’t remember meeting a single businesswoman, which reminds us that Thatcher got to the top on merit, not through positive discrimination.)
One of her distinguishing features was her clarity of thought, and her appreciation of the wisdom of her forebears.
When in 2017 I listened to the maiden speech of Kemi Badenoch — where she listed as her House of Commons heroes Winston Churchill, Airey Neave and Margaret Thatcher — her conservative sentiments annoyed the hell out of people who believed black people should think of themselves as victims.
Right on, Kemi, I thought. And still do.
I read the other day that Alex Burghart, the shadow Northern Ireland Secretary of State and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, who is part of her inner circle and described as “her policy brain”, is being spotted with ‘The Right Approach’, the policy statement the Conservatives issued after almost two years of Thatcher as leader.
I point that out for the benefit of all those people who are denouncing Mrs Badenoch for not having come up with a raft of major policies in less that six months in office.
One of the fallacies of our time is the mantra ‘the truth lies somewhere in the middle’. It often doesn’t. Weak compromises bedevil politics.
As ‘The Right Stuff’ pointed out. “There is no future in trying to find a middle road between folly and common sense.”
Thatcher was a scientist: Badenoch is an engineer. Both professions rely on hard evidence, robustly challenged. That takes time.
We should have learned from lockdown, when Boris Johnson, the whole political class, the media and society in general caved in to ‘experts’ like Professor Neil Ferguson who were exaggerating wildly.
Panic produced lockdown which wrecked the lives of countless of the young and the old.
We need experts, but experts with differing points of view to fearlessly scrutinise policy.
I’m delighted that Mrs Badenoch is holding her nerve and has announced a ‘policy renewal programme’ – putting each of her shadow cabinet in charge of a policy area.
She has given us a taste of things to come with her initial questioning of the crazy policies of the fanatical Ed Miliband (the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change) and his mad net zero by 2050 target which is impoverishing us with the highest electricity costs in the developed world, and offshore production that includes solar panels manufactured in China by forced labour.
We need scrutiny, diverse opinions, free speech and the slaughtering of sacred cows.
And an engineer rather than a lawyer as prime minister.
