How Margaret Thatcher’s legacy lives on 50 years after she became Tory leader

Even after half a century, she’s still adored and revered by Tories, grudgingly respected by present and former Labour prime ministers and yet despised and reviled on the left and in many working class communities.

It was 50 years ago this week that Margaret Thatcher became Conservative Party leader and began to change the course of political history, winning three general elections in the UK and becoming a major figure on the world stage.

She became leader aged 49, after defeating former prime minister Edward Heath in a shock result in the first ballot, on 4 February, by 130 votes to 119 and then beating William Whitelaw by 146 to 79 in the second ballot a week later.

In those days, Conservative MPs chose the leader and Mrs Thatcher’s biographer, Charles Moore, has revealed that when she told husband Denis she was standing, he muttered: “Heath will murder you.”

She had also declared in a TV interview in 1973, when she was Mr Heath’s education secretary and denounced as “Milk Snatcher” for scrapping free school milk: “I don’t think there will be a woman prime minister in my lifetime.”

But ironically, given that nickname, she was backed by a powerful group of Tory MPs known as the “Milk Street mafia”, led by the controversial businessman and 1922 Committee chairman Edward du Cann, who Private Eye called “du Cann of Worms”.

After her victory, Mrs Thatcher appointed Mr Whitelaw, a Scottish toff and veteran Tory fixer, as deputy leader.

He served her loyally until 1988, after he suffered a stroke. But her famous quote, “Every prime minister needs a Willie,” has become part of political folklore.

Labour’s prime minister when Mrs Thatcher became opposition leader on 11 February 1975 was Harold Wilson, who by then had won four general elections, but was to step down a year later, when he was succeeded by James Callaghan.

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Mrs Thatcher won decisive general election victories over Callaghan, Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock, but was eventually ousted from 10 Downing Street in 1990 not by the Labour Party but by her own mutinous cabinet ministers and Tory backbenchers.

Now, 50 years after she became leader, the Conservatives once again have a new female leader and Labour is led by a prime minister who won a spectacular general election victory but leads a government rapidly becoming unpopular.

But parallels between 1975 and 2025 end there. On the evidence so far, critics would say Kemi Badenoch is no Margaret Thatcher and Sir Keir Starmer is no Harold Wilson.

On becoming leader, Mrs Thatcher revolutionised Tory thinking, so that when she became PM in 1979 she brought in radical policies never seen before: council house sales, privatisation and a tough crackdown on trade unions.

Along with spending curbs and tax cuts, her policies became known as “Thatcherism”. She called her ideology “rolling back the frontiers of the state”.

And when the going got tough, as it did in 1980 when unemployment was rising sharply and she was urged to make a U-turn, she told her critics at the Tory conference: “You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning.”

But two even bigger episodes defined her premiership: victory in the Falklands War in 1982 and her handling of the bruising miners’ strike of 1984-85, which even to this day provokes fury and loathing in former mining communities.

Abroad, she found a soulmate in US president Ronald Reagan, making the so-called special relationship extra special as they fought communism. The Russians had already dubbed her the “Iron Lady”.

It was a nickname that stuck and she revelled in it. And her toughness suggests that Donald Trump would have had a healthy respect for her and bonded with her had she been PM today.

She was a workaholic who claimed she only needed four hours sleep a night and hated taking holidays. At an event to mark the 50th anniversary last week, her former secretary Alison Wakeham said: “She would long for a telephone call saying there was a world crisis.”

In 2020, Kemi Badenoch described Margaret Thatcher as “inspirational”, for taking a country in decline and transforming it through what she called “the politics of conviction”.

She had met her “political heroine” briefly when she was photographed with Lady Thatcher when she was Conservative candidate against Labour’s Tessa Jowell in Dulwich and West Norwood in 2010.

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Despite criticism that in her first 100 days she has made a slow start, some Tories have speculated whether Ms Badenoch could be the new Margaret Thatcher. Her robust views, anti-woke values and no-nonsense style have, after all, made her a darling of the Tory right and party activists.

But as Charles Moore points out, a major difference between the pair is that Mrs Thatcher faced no serious challenge from the right. Mrs Badenoch does, from Reform UK, whereas Mrs Thatcher’s whole task was to fight the left, says Mr Moore.

But her legacy lives on not just in the Conservative Party. In 2007, Labour PM Gordon Brown welcomed her to 10 Downing Street for a teatime chat and commissioned a portrait of her which was unveiled two years later when she visited No 10 again.

“I admire the fact that she is a conviction politician,” Mr Brown said before her 2007 visit. “I am a conviction politician like her.”

Last year Sir Keir Starmer was criticised by Tory MPs after moving her portrait from the study known as the Thatcher Room. That was despite praising her for bringing “meaningful change” to the UK, in an appeal to Tory voters in 2023.

Sir Keir also invoked Mrs Thatcher as recently as two weeks ago when he vowed to cut “the thickets of red tape” in the government’s pursuit of economic growth, claiming it was “our equivalent” of her government’s deregulation in the 1980s.

And Sir Keir and Mrs T have at least one thing in common: they’ve both employed a voice coach, which Sir Keir may have regretted last week in the row over Leonie Mellinger visiting him during lockdown.

In the 1970s Mrs Thatcher’s PR chief Gordon Reece hired a voice coach used by Laurence Olivier.

Unlike Mrs Thatcher, Harold Wilson – who Sir Keir has said is the Labour leader he most admires over the past 50 years – was no “conviction politician”.

He was a wily – critics would say devious – and scheming political genius and party manager. He was also paranoid about plots against him.

“I know what’s going on,” he once famously said. “I’m going on.” In his biography, “Harold Wilson: the winner”, Labour minister Nick Thomas-Symonds praises his government’s achievements – on the death penalty, homosexuality, abortion, censorship and the voting age – and describes him as “one of the 20th century’s great political personalities”.

Mr Wilson cultivated a man-of-the-people image, with a pipe, a dry wit, Private Eye’s Mrs Wilson’s Diary about his wife Mary, his dog Paddy, a fondness for brown sauce and a bungalow in the Scilly Isles, though in private he drank brandy and smoked cigars.

Is Sir Keir copying Harold Wilson? Last year the football fanatic PM gave high-profile public support for Gareth Southgate’s England in the final of the Euros.

In 1966, Mr Wilson famously declared after Alf Ramsey’s heroes triumphed: “Have you ever noticed how we only win the World Cup under a Labour government?”

But compared to the music hall style of Mr Wilson, Sir Keir is a wooden performer.

He’s also a political novice, an MP only since 2015, whereas Mr Wilson had been a minister under Clement Attlee and a leading Labour Party figure for nearly two decades when he became PM.

But that’s not all.

According to a new book by political journalists Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire, Sir Keir’s own chief of staff Morgan McSweeney complained he behaved “like an HR manager, not a leader” and his deputy Angela Rayner joked that he was so inept he couldn’t run a bath.

With last week’s Sky News-YouGov poll placing Nigel Farage’s Reform UK ahead of Labour, that’s hardly a vote of confidence in Sir Keir’s ability to win the next election, let alone the four Harold Wilson won.

For Kemi Badenoch, the future could be even more bleak.

YouGov put the Conservatives in third place and in the Sky News Electoral Dysfunction podcast with Beth Rigby last week, former Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson suggested she might get less than 18 months in the job.

So the bad news for Kemi and Keir is that 50 years after Margaret Thatcher became Tory leader, her election-winning record – and that of Harold Wilson, Labour PM back then – look unassailable.