Hedgehogs vs. Foxes.

It’s not easy judging a prospective leader. In 1955, Anthony Eden was the most impressive prime minister-in-waiting that Britain had ever seen. Put to the test in the greatest conflagration in world history, Eden had emerged with his reputation not only intact, but enhanced. He was brave, smart, absurdly handsome and experienced. And yet, within two years of taking over from Winston Churchill, he resigned as a broken man, having overseen the worst foreign policy blunder in Britain’s postwar history — until Iraq.
Eden’s fate is a reminder of the challenge currently facing the Conservative Party. Policies, experience and ideology matter, but not as much as character and, above all, luck. William Hague was a formidable politician who had spent most of his life gliding effortlessly towards the premiership, only to become leader of the opposition at the wrong time, unable to do anything about the extraordinary popularity of Tony Blair.
The task today is even harder. The Conservative Party’s defeat earlier this year was not only worse than John Major’s in 1997, but the worst the Tory party has seen in its entire 190-year history. And yet, the scale of the Labour Party’s early difficulties in office has given the party’s leadership candidates hope that the situation might actually be salvageable. After all, if Keir Starmer can turn a calamitous defeat into a landslide victory in the space of five years, why can’t they?
What has struck me, in conversations with the current leadership candidates, MPs and aides, is how often they turn to Margaret Thatcher as their source of inspiration — a figure who won the premiership 45 years ago in entirely different circumstances to those that exist today. Yet Thatcher has gained an almost mythological status in British politics today, bearing little resemblance to the politician herself.
Her myth takes on a different aspect for each of the candidates. For James Cleverly, she was the leader who brought back aspiration; for Tom Tugendhat, she was the leader who brought back British power, at home and abroad. For Robert Jenrick, meanwhile, it is the provincial Toryism that she represented which most appeals, while for Kemi Bedenoch it is her status as a “global icon” of free markets.
All these accounts contain elements of truth, of course, but as the conservative commentator, T.E. Utley, frustratedly pointed out at the height of her power in the 1980s, almost all popular accounts of Thatcher underestimate the extent to which she was also, fundamentally, a far more pragmatic and skilful politician than she is usually given credit for, willing to dodge, weave and compromise to win power and then keep it. “It is inconceivable that her devotion to doctrine would ever persuade her to do anything which was plainly politically suicidal,” Utley observed.
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