Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron makes a statement in Downing Street after the death of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher in London April 8, 2013. REUTERS/Luke MacGregor
When Margaret Thatcher, the first female head of a major political party in the West and, to this day, the only woman to serve as prime minister of Britain, died on Monday, she left a gaping void on the British right, one that incumbent Prime Minister David Cameron may have an awkward time filling as he looks ahead to re-election in 2015.
Even if she had receded from public debates since she was forced out of power by her own Conservatives in 1990, her strident Euroskepticism out of sync with popular opinion (and global trends), her ability to reshape the party around staunch ideological conservatism — a set of beliefs about the power of the free market and the need for maximal individual liberty that remain to this day — was remarkable. Like U.S. President Ronald Reagan, the friend and ally to whom she is most often compared, Thatcher was a transformational leader, charting a new trajectory for British politics that subsequent opposition figures like Tony Blair have had to take into account when building their programs. Of course, Reagan’s legacy on this side of the Atlantic is essentially untouchable, his mantle invoked by everyone from Republican presidential candidates to then-candidate Barack Obama (in a 2007 newspaper interview). Thatcherism, on the other hand, while equally well-defined, has produced a more ambivalent response from modern Tories.
To be sure, the sweeping chorus of acclaim from across the ideological divides in Britain on Monday speaks to her preeminence as a master of politics, one whose raw determination and steely resolve shattered a few glass ceilings and won her three terms at the head of Conservative governments from 1979 to 1990. But her party’s new leader could — just like her — be undone by an internal divide over the question of how tightly to get wound up with the European Union. Conservative Euroskeptics, coupled with the emergence of the U.K. Independence Party, have placed enormous political pressure on the incumbent, who shored up his flank with bold words intimating a possible British exit from the 27-member body in January. That speech was the closest a British head of government has come since Thatcher to casting aside the economic stability of cooperation with the Continent in favor of nationalist considerations.
Thatcher’s presence in her final years, however shadowy, served as a link between the Conservative Party’s past and its present, a unifying voice that connected the elite party of tradition (one that, in the post-war period, anyway, was concerned chiefly with economic growth) with the populist one she built around around her own modest background as the daughter of a shopkeeper. She simultaneously steered the party away from the electoral fringe even as she helped build a structural-ideological contradiction that it still struggles to resolve.
Which means her final departure may be a blow to the man occupying her former position. It’s a prime opportunity for Cameron critics — including dissident Conservatives like Andrea Leadsom, Chris Heaton-Harris, and George Eustice, whose ‘Fresh Start’ project helped create pressure on the P.M. to give his monumental E.U. speech — to pile on. Without a Thatcherian presence to serve as an arbiter of internal debates, Cameron will have to chart his own course, and find a way to resolve the contradiction between a desire for economic prosperity and the aversion to foreign entanglements that Thatcher could never quite get a handle on. And given that it ultimately defeated the Iron Lady herself, a final victory over those opposed forces looks well beyond him.