Keir Starmer Is Facing His Margaret Thatcher Moment

The most useful template for how Labour leader Keir Starmer can become Prime Minister at the next General Election may come from someone with whom he has little in common politically, but once found themselves in strikingly similar circumstances: Margaret Thatcher.

At the end of the seventies, Thatcher – who had become leader of the opposition despite an initially lukewarm reception from her party – was facing off against a government that had run out of steam and been thoroughly defeated by events. The economy was ailing and the Winter of Discontent had intensified the crisis. Pumps ran out of fuel and rubbish piled high in the streets. 

A little over fifty years later, the bleak political atmosphere that has engulfed Westminster is reminiscent of the dying days of Jim Callaghan’s Labour government that Thatcher’s Conservatives would come to defeat in 1979. But now it is the Tories who are out of steam with public services collapsing around them, and Labour which polls universally predict is on course for its first election victory in nearly two decades. Starmer could be facing his Thatcher moment.

Much has been mythologised about Thatcher, but in the run-up to the 1979 election she was subtler, shrewder and less combative than she is often cast in hindsight. In trying to win a big election, the best lesson today’s Labour already seems to have learned is to seize on the breadth of malaise among voters. The best way to do that is to make unexpected friends, not unnecessary enemies. Thatcher harnessed this by putting herself on the side of the people versus the problem. It helped carry her to an important victory that brought together a large coalition. Starmer could well do the same.

Her ‘Winter of Discontent’