Mummy Returns: The ghost of Margaret Thatcher still haunts British politics

Rishi Sunak invoked the memory of his predecessor to defend his policy on climate change: of course he did, writes John Rentoul, such is her iron grip on certain kinds of Tory…

The ‘What Would Margaret Do?’ question has continued to hold large parts of the Tory party in its grip (Getty)

Rishi Sunak’s claim to be a “Thatcherite” was one of the first things we knew about him. When he first broke into the big time – after Boris Johnson chose him to stand in for him at the prime minister’s lectern in TV debates in the 2019 election – it was one of those biographical facts about him that came up in every profile of someone suddenly marked out as a future Conservative leader.

He was an admirer of Margaret Thatcher as a sixth-former at Winchester College. At the time, Thatcher was the lodestar around which politics revolved. A big part of the secret of Tony Blair’s success in the 1997 election was that he claimed to represent the Thatcherite spirit better than John Major did. Rupert Murdoch and many of his editors and columnists certainly thought so.

Young Sunak did not. At the age of 17, he wrote an article for the school newspaper warning that Blair would try to take Britain into the “European superstate”.