Labour Party Channeling Thatcher Is a Risky Move
Rachel Reeves needs to reassure voters that her economic stewardship will be sound.
Margaret Thatcher still looms large in British politics.
Photographer: Colin Davey/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
The UK Labour Party once came to bury its most formidable foe, Margaret Thatcher, not to praise her. No longer. In December, Keir Starmer saluted the Iron Lady as “an agent of change,” and this week Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy went further, enthusing on a Politico podcast that she “was a visionary leader for the UK; no doubt about it.”
In an election year, the aim of this late-breaking appreciation of the late Tory prime minister is to reassure millions of wavering Conservative voters that Labour is a respectable social democratic party, fit for government and no longer under the sway of hard left, Thatcher-hating idealogues. There’s a precedent for this ploy; in 1997, on the verge of his landslide victory, Tony Blair had warm words for the Tories’ totemic figure, too.