Is Thatcher now the only leader Conservatives feel a real sense of pride in?

You would have to be at least 61 to have voted for Thatcher for the first time, which is pretty much the average age of a Tory activist, writes Andrew Woodcock

Prime minister Margaret Thatcher pictured with French president Francois Mitterrand in 1986 (PA)

Following the battle for the Tory leadership succession over the past few weeks has sometimes felt like living in a time warp.

A lot of the time, the focus has appeared on how each of the candidates compares to Margaret Thatcher, a premier who was first elected 43 years ago, left office 32 years ago and died almost a decade in the past.

While the country agonises over the impact of soaring energy and food bills, evidence of climate change in a sweltering heatwave and growing evidence that trade barriers with the EU are harming the economy, the contenders for the Tory crown seem to have other priorities.

They have talked about whether they’d open new grammar schools and whether they’d turn back the clock to allow into the open things that have become unsayable in recent decades.

While giving lip service to net-zero targets, they haven’t given the impression that climate change will be a priority. And on Brexit they’ve stuck rigorously to the position that the referendum result of six years ago is the final word on the matter, despite growing polling evidence that a majority of voters think it was a mistake.

But mostly they’ve talked about tax cuts, for all the world as if they were living in 1979, when Thatcher came to power in the UK with an 83 per cent top rate and 33 per cent basic rate of income tax, and corporation tax at 52 per cent.

As many commentators have pointed out, Thatcher initially increased the tax take to bring inflation under control, and her ability to slash headline rates on direct taxes was enabled in part by shifting the burden onto less easily noticed indirect levies.

And the same commentators point out that both income tax and corporation tax are at historic lows, and that cutting them is likely both to fuel inflation and to put more money into the pockets of the comfortably off than the poor, who are really feeling the pinch from higher prices.

Why do these arguments seem to cut little ice with the 160,000 Conservative members to whom Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss are now making their pitches?

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Well, you would have to be at least 61 to have voted for Thatcher in her first landslide victory in 1979 and 53 to have backed her in her third and final election triumph in 1987. And that is pretty much the age-range of the average Tory activist.

With David Cameron’s modernising pivot to the centre now an embarrassing memory, and the more recent enthusiasm for Boris Johnson’s Eurosceptic boosterism hastily forgotten, Thatcher is the only leader in living memory that most Conservative members feel a real sense of pride in.

And what they remember her for – along with standing up to Russia and bashing the unions – is cutting taxes.

Which is part of the reason why, with a tiny and unrepresentative slice of the British population choosing our next prime minister, the contenders for the Tory crown appear to be offering solutions to the problems of the late 1970s rather than the more urgent issues facing the country now.

Yours,

Andrew Woodcock

Political editor