Keir Starmer was right to invoke Thatcher – but he must take care not to copy the Iron Lady too closely

Editorial: Labour should not get too carried away in its apparent love affair with Lady Thatcher. While much of her harsh medicine was necessary, a Starmer government would need to show more compassion than she did

Starmer told the BBC that the Iron Lady had a ‘driving sense of purpose’ (PA)

Sir Keir Starmer has taken his overhaul of the Labour Party a step further by heaping praise on Margaret Thatcher. Writing in The Sunday Telegraph, he said she achieved “meaningful change” and “sought to drag Britain out of its stupor by setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism”. Later he told the BBC she had a “driving sense of purpose”, but stressed his comments did not mean he agreed with what she did.

If the Labour leader intended to rile the Conservatives, and left-wingers in his own party, he succeeded on both fronts. Victoria Atkins, the health secretary, accused him of “trying to ride on the coattails” of Baroness Thatcher’s success. Momentum, the left-wing pressure group, declared: “Margaret Thatcher laid waste to working-class communities, privatised our public services, and set in train the destruction of the post-war settlement founded by Labour. Starmer’s praise of her isn’t smart politics. It’s a shift to the right, and a failure of Labour values.”

We disagree. Some in Sir Keir’s party do not like to see him following Tony Blair’s playbook, and this is another example of it. When Lady Thatcher died in 2013, Sir Tony described her as “a towering political figure”, adding: “I always thought my job was to build on some of the things she had done, rather than reverse them.”