Badenoch is following the Thatcher playbook - but will it be enough?

To mark 50 years since the day Margaret Thatcher became Conservative leader, I look at how Kemi Badenoch's first months as leader have echoed the Iron Lady's and ask: will the playbook work again?

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Image: Kemi Badenoch chairing the Shadow Cabinet. Source: The Conservative Party.

Badenoch is following the Thatcher playbook - but will it be enough?

by Lee David Evans

It’s fifty years to the day since Conservative MPs made Margaret Thatcher their leader. She would sit at the top of the party for the next decade and a half - and dominate its thinking for a long time thereafter. Hers was a leadership that transformed both the Conservative Party and Britain. But in Thatcher’s early years at the helm, her objective was much more modest: get the Tories back into office.

Thatcher was the first of four women to lead the Conservatives, but one of just two to lead them in opposition. Theresa May and Liz Truss, albeit briefly in the latter case, only led the party in government. The task for Kemi Badenoch, like Thatcher before her, is to revive the Tories in what is often called the ‘worst job in British politics’: Leader of the Opposition.

Badenoch’s first months as leader have largely followed the Thatcher playbook. One of the Iron Lady’s first moves after winning the 1975 Conservative leadership contest was to invite Willie Whitelaw, the One Nation Tory whom she defeated in the second round, to serve as her deputy. Soon after she made Geoffrey Howe, another man she had also bested in battle, her Shadow Chancellor. It was a sign that Thatcher was building a broad coalition around her. As she would later boast of her Cabinet, her top team ‘include[d] every strand of Conservative opinion.’