Don’t stop with taking down Thatcher’s portrait

By David Osland

Peter Mandelson famously once proclaimed: “We are all Thatcherites now.” The former MP for Hartlepool was speaking for himself, of course.

That precise choice of words, annunciated in Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper The Times, was primarily designed to discomfit anyone foolishly harbouring vaguely pinko sentiments in the Labour Party of the early 2000s.

But the barb packed a punch. The Third Way, the label dreamed up by those who sought to dignify Labour’s political direction of the period by according it the standing of an ideology, very much did take the Thatcher revolution as its starting point.

Privatisation was extended rather than reversed. Economic policy remained within a free market framework. Bob-a-job businessmen were systematically glorified and even gifted with ministerial appointments. Council houses continued to be sold.

The need for nuclear weapons went unquestioned. There were one or two important concessions on employment rights, but the anti-union laws stayed on the statute books.

In short, New Labourism came to praise Caesar, not to bury her. Those of us who maintained that most of Britain’s long-running problems were deepened rather than resolved on her watch went unheeded.

As if to acknowledge the intellectual debt, prime minister Gordon Brown later commissioned a portrait of Margaret Thatcher, at a cost of £100,000 at the price levels then prevailing. The painting has graced 10 Downing Street ever since.

Well, until recently, anyway. Word that Keir Starmer has ordered its removal has been a major news story in Britain this week.

Uproar on the front page of the Daily Mail. Predictable condemnations followed from the usual suspects on the much-diminished front bench of the Conservative Party.

But who are they to deny the tenant of rented property the right to change disagreeable wall hangings?

I have been to countries in which it is obligatory for shops and offices – and highly advisable for private homes – to display a picture of the monarch or the president for life. They haven’t tended to be happy places.

Starmer came to political activism in the Thatcher era and some of the credible causes he stood for at the time make it inconceivable that he did not share the dislike of Thatcher not uncommon during that period.

That is the context for an article that appeared under his byline in a stridently rightwing publication as recently as last December, in which he praised Thatcher for bringing about “meaningful change” and even “setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism”.

It won’t have won over many Tories. But it put a lot of Labour backs up.

Some of Starmer’s critics have burdened him with accusations of insincerity, seeing in him a propensity to say whatever any given audience wants to hear. Bigging up Maggie in the Sunday Telegraph is the kind of thing that hands them ammunition.

The truth is that Margaret Thatcher is not a saint. She doesn’t intercede with the Almighty in Heaven on behalf of control of the M2 money supply. Touching the hem of her garments does not cure those suffering from the king’s evil. The veneration of her relics is not compulsory.

Yet somehow she has been elevated to the status of deity in the cult that was still in government until a couple of months ago, with Liz Truss even cladding herself in quaintly anachronistic pussybow blouses, as befits a true votary.

I’d put a decent wager on every one of the six people running for the Conservative leadership styling themselves a Thatcherite at some point in the coming campaign. The invocation of the sacred name still has the power to find the selectorate’s G-spot.

Britain has now rejected these people, and Starmer has pledged his administration to a decade of national renewal. God knows we need that.

Taking down Thatcher’s portrait is the perfect symbolic starting point; the question now is whether he will take down her political legacy.

David Osland is a long-time leftwing journalist and author. Follow him on Twitter at @David__Osland

Image: Margaret Thatcher. Source: Nationaal Archief: entry ad2e0288-d0b4-102d-bcf8-003048976d84. Photographer: Rob Bogaerts for Anefo, available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication