Russell Jones's Week Moment: The Ghost of Margaret Thatcher Haunts Us All

“The problem with socialism,” Thatcher once said, “is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” The problem with Thatcherism is that it’s run out of ours, argues Russell Jones

Display of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s outfits at the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester, 6 October 2025. Photo: Milo Chandler/Alamy

Long-time readers will be taken aback to hear that last week, I had plans to attend the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester. Nobody was more surprised than me to hear of the plan to sell copies of my most recent, highly critical, laugh-or-you’d-cry book — from a stand inside the half-empty conference centre, presumably wedged between the ‘I ♥ Liz Truss’ merch stall and the recruitment drive to replace Semi GoodEnough. It’s a marketing plan Gerald Ratner would be proud of.

I did all I could to prepare myself: holy water, flame-retardant shoes, stab vest — all for nothing. My invitation was withdrawn at the last minute, when the Conservatives realised that such a prospect was too ridiculous even for them. Instead, they found space for something equally surreal: a glass case containing three of Margaret Thatcher’s outfits — hollow relics of a misremembered past, perfectly à la mode on today’s right.

It was of a piece with a party still clinging to the myth that society’s ills can be explained by the supposed permissiveness and anti-establishment culture of the 1960s — the very decade when taxation still funded a cohesive society. They didn’t see our nation’s problems as an inevitable consequence of the rabid individualism of the Thatcherite 1980s, when a pathological hatred of paying tax towards anything collective became so normalised that the very idea of society was denied.

Without irony, the shamelessly greedy claimed it was the morally concerned who’d destroyed society — by paying tax, respecting others, and working in public service.

A visiting alien would find it hard to comprehend why Thatcher is still held up as an exemplar, not just by the Conservatives and the National Front’s New Haircut, but by many on the supposed left. Labour — with honourable exceptions — still genuflects at the altar of Thatcherism. She herself once called Tony Blair her greatest achievement — and he seemed perfectly fine with that, saying he saw it as his job to build on the things she’d done rather than reverse them.

I don’t know what world he’s living in, largely because the rest of us aren’t invited in. It sounds lovely in there, with all those billionaires and their private islands, assuming you don’t mind the faint whiff of sulphur and the sound of approaching police sirens. But for the rest of us, the continuation of Thatcher’s policies has been a disaster.